Quebec
OpenStats City Score, ranking history, and local readings for Montreal.
Montreal sits at City Score rank #69 with a standing of 53%, from 8 of 8 open-data pillars (tax, construction, connectivity, indoor air, water, seismic hazard, growth, safety). Missing pillars score at median standing so thin coverage cannot inflate the rank. The chart below shows how that standing moves year to year.
Latest owned placements: building permit value rank #3 of 172 (2025); indoor radon rank #36 of 117 at 126 Bq/m³ survey mean; residential mill rate rank #170 of 172 (6.89 mill rate). Full tables and method notes live on each study edition; atlas readings for the same slug open from the topic buttons.
Open each topic for Montreal.
Documented pro, junior, university, and high-school teams tied to Montreal.
Published residential mill-rate context for Montreal.
The mountain park Montrealers treat as an indoor-outdoor compass. Lac aux Castors, Olmsted paths, and the Camillien-Houde overlooks are the
Central borough that shares Mont-Royal access with neighbouring districts. Civic consultations and park pages keep the name in everyday
STM branding treats métro as the everyday name for the subway network, with OPUS as the fare card.
Where Montreal sits in published building-permit figures for July 2026.
Montrealers orient by arrondissement and by the STM. You take the métro with an OPUS card, check the service state before you complain, and only then argue about which borough got the short end of a snow plan. Ville-Marie, Verdun, Côte-des-Neiges–Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, and Mercier–Hochelaga-Maisonneuve are not tourist labels; they are the units montreal.ca uses when a pool schedule changes or a consultation opens. The city home line is blunt about that hierarchy: Mon quartier. Mes services. Ma ville. That neighbourhood-first framing is how Montreal stays huge without becoming generic.
Parc du Mont-Royal is the shared vertical landmark. Locals climb toward Lac aux Castors, cut along Chemin Olmsted, and claim Belvédère Camillien-Houde or Belvédère Kondiaronk when they need a view that is still inside the city. It is weekend geography more than brochure geography, and the anniversary programming only underlines how permanent the mountain is in civic life. On the sports desk, the Montreal Canadiens remain a permanent Gazette frame, while 2026 also puts Championnats du Monde Route UCI Montréal on the civic alert list. Chinatown shows up as a neighbourhood file with planning weight, not as a food-court caption. Outremont shares Mont-Royal park edges with Ville-Marie and CDN-NDG, another reminder that the mountain is a multi-borough workspace rather than a single postcard district.
On the OpenStats City Score for 2026, Montreal sits at rank 18 of 125. The hometown read is island-metro life: métro noise underfoot, mountain trails above the grid, and borough politics that never quite collapse into a single downtown story the way a capital city narrative might. Ask for directions here and you will hear a borough name before you hear a province.
Drawn from Ville de Montréal, Parc du Mont-Royal, STM, Montreal Gazette.
City Score from 2016–2025 across eight open-data pillars. Individual study placements are listed in the panels below.
Each study below is its own ranking. Where a study has more than one edition for this city, the chart shows standing across those years only.
Connectivity · OpenStats
OpenStats
Cities ranked by estimated best advertised download (Mbps). Anchored to the current ISED National Broadband Data vintage, then backcast along a national speed curve with city-specific fiber-arrival and 50/10 availability paths so relative ranks can change over the decade. Not a claim of audited historical hex maps for every year.
10 editions · 2016–2025
Construction · OpenStats
OpenStats
Cities ranked by calendar-year building permit value. Direct rows sum Statistics Canada Table 34-10-0292-01. Cities without a direct reading use population × provincial per-capita permit intensity (estimated), so every seed city has a year-varying construction signal.
10 editions · 2016–2025
Composite · OpenStats
OpenStats
Dimensional average of OpenStats open-data pillars for each panel year 2016–2025: tax, construction, connectivity, indoor air, water, seismic hazard, population growth, and crime severity. Each series is scored 0–1 within its edition; series in the same pillar are averaged, then all eight pillars are averaged with equal weight. Missing pillars score at median standing (0.5). Growth and CSI use StatCan annual tables; permits, mill rates, and broadband use live rows plus documented year-varying estimates where needed. Radon, water, and PGA may be survey/model vintages carried forward and are flagged when static for more than two years. External commercial livability lists are never inputs.
10 editions · 2016–2025
Safety · OpenStats
OpenStats
Communities ranked by Statistics Canada Crime Severity Index (Table 35-10-0026-01). Rank 1 is highest CSI (worse). Values are CMA where a metro match exists, otherwise provincial CSI. Hometown pages label the grain.
10 editions · 2016–2025
Water · OpenStats
OpenStats
Communities ranked by municipal drinking-water hardness (mg/L as CaCO₃). Hardness changes slowly; the atlas vintage is carried across panel years and flagged when static for more than two years.
10 editions · 2016–2025
Water · OpenStats
OpenStats
Communities ranked by reported lead (µg/L) on the OpenStats water atlas. Carried across panel years until annual municipal report panels are ingested.
10 editions · 2016–2025
Health · OpenStats
OpenStats
Communities ranked by Health Canada survey mean indoor radon (Bq/m³). Rank 1 is the highest mean. Decade panel years without a new survey carry the CMA survey vintage forward; they are not annual retests.
10 editions · 2016–2025
sports · OpenStats
OpenStats
Cities ranked by weighted count of documented local teams (pro, junior, university, high-school hubs). Rank 1 = deepest documented sports footprint among covered seed cities. Not a claim about on-field success. See sports methodology for weights and gaps.
Single edition · 2025
Only one published edition places Montreal in this study so far. Open the edition for method notes and the full table.
Growth · OpenStats
OpenStats
Cities ranked by year-over-year population growth from Statistics Canada annual CSD estimates (Table 17-10-0155-01). Rank 1 is fastest growth. A few places without a clean CSD match use a provincial-path estimate anchored to seed population.
10 editions · 2016–2025
Property tax · OpenStats
OpenStats
Municipalities ranked by residential mill rate. Rank 1 is the highest rate. Published municipal years are used when available; gaps are interpolated or follow the provincial median path so the tax pillar moves year to year for every city.
10 editions · 2016–2025
Hazards · OpenStats
OpenStats
Communities ranked by NRCan peak ground acceleration (higher = stronger shaking hazard). Rank 1 is highest PGA. The seismic model is multi-year; values are carried across the City Score panel and flagged as static until NRCan publishes a new generation.
10 editions · 2016–2025
Housing
Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation
Average rent for purpose-built 2-bedroom apartments (all tenants) from CMHC Rental Market Survey. Rank 1 = lowest average rent among covered CMAs.
Single edition · 2025
Only one published edition places Montreal in this study so far. Open the edition for method notes and the full table.
Housing
Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation
Purpose-built rental apartment vacancy rate from CMHC Rental Market Survey (October). Rank 1 = highest vacancy (most available rental stock among covered CMAs).
2 editions · 2024–2025
Housing
Demographia / Frontier Centre for Public Policy
Canadian subset of Demographia median multiple (median house price / median household income). Rank 1 = most affordable (lowest median multiple) among Canadian major markets in the international survey.
3 editions · 2024–2026
Livability
Economist Intelligence Unit
Ranks ~173 cities on stability, healthcare, culture & environment, education, and infrastructure. Full dataset is paid; OpenStats stores only ranks and scores published in free press releases and news coverage.
3 editions · 2023–2025
Quality of life
Mercer
Expat-oriented quality of living ranking across 39 factors in 10 categories. OpenStats stores Canadian cities named in free Mercer press releases (typically top-25 highlights), not the full paid ranking.
2 editions · 2023–2024
Livability
MoneySense
Annual composite ranking of Canadian municipalities on economy, housing, crime, health, and weather.
5 editions · 2014–2018
Housing
National Bank of Canada Economics and Strategy
Ranked by Mortgage Payment as a Percentage of Income (MPPI) on a representative home. Rank 1 = highest MPPI (least affordable). Free quarterly Housing Affordability Monitor tables.
2 editions · 2025–2026
Quality of life
Numbeo
Crowd-sourced composite Quality of Life Index. Historical snapshots are free on Numbeo ranking pages; OpenStats cites Canadian cities from those public pages (cite_only). Higher index scores are better; ranks are global position on the snapshot page.
3 editions · 2024–2026
Housing
RBC Economics
Ranked by RBC aggregate Housing Affordability Measure (% of median pre-tax household income for mortgage, property taxes, and utilities on a benchmark home). Rank 1 = highest ownership-cost burden (least affordable). CMA markets mapped to primary city slugs.
2 editions · 2024–2025
Distinctive local notes and places, each linked to its source.
STM branding treats métro as the everyday name for the subway network, with OPUS as the fare card.
Parc du Mont-Royal lists Lac aux Castors, Belvédère Camillien-Houde, and Chemin Olmsted as named park pieces.
Municipal alerts and consultations routinely name boroughs such as Verdun and Côte-des-Neiges–Notre-Dame-de-Grâce.
Championnats du Monde Route UCI Montréal 2026 appears among current city alerts.
The mountain park Montrealers treat as an indoor-outdoor compass. Lac aux Castors, Olmsted paths, and the Camillien-Houde overlooks are the pieces locals name without a map.
Overlook at the Chalet du Mont-Royal on the city parks list. It is the postcard view earned after a city climb, not a countryside drive.
Central borough that shares Mont-Royal access with neighbouring districts. Civic consultations and park pages keep the name in everyday municipal English and French.
When Montreal moves in a ranking, posts new permit figures, or lands in a study, get a short note. A few sends a year, only when something changes.
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