Calgary Retail — Q1 2026

The Quarter in Brief

Calgary's retail market enters 2026 as one of the tightest in North America. JLL — the only brokerage reporting Calgary retail fundamentals in this quarter's data set — puts total vacancy at 2.4 percent, a level it describes as among the lowest on the continent, with average asking rents that have climbed to nearly 30 dollars per square foot. Those two figures, vacancy and rent, are the market's standing levels heading into Q1 2026.

The rest of JLL's headline numbers describe full-year 2025 activity rather than the opening quarter: net absorption of 358,210 square feet, net completions of 421,519 square feet, leasing volume up 10 percent to 1,370,000 square feet, and an under-construction pipeline that surged 67 percent to more than 2 million square feet. Read together, the picture is a market that absorbed space and held its low vacancy through 2025 even as a large development pipeline took shape, and carried that tight occupancy into the first weeks of 2026.

Because only one brokerage reports Calgary retail fundamentals here, there is no cross-broker vacancy or rent comparison to draw. The cross-market reference points in this report come from the national cap-rate surveys, where Calgary appears alongside twelve other Canadian markets.