On 21 November 2024, the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions announced that it would no longer prescribe the minimum qualifying rate — the formal name for what the industry calls the stress test — for borrowers switching an existing uninsured mortgage to a new institution at renewal. OSFI's own language describes this as an exemption for the uninsured straight switch: transferring an existing stand-alone uninsured mortgage between federally regulated institutions without increasing the remaining amortization period or the loan amount.
The change closed what OSFI itself called an imbalance. Insured and insurable borrowers doing a genuine straight switch at renewal were already not being required to requalify at the stress-test rate before this announcement; uninsured borrowers, despite presenting an economically similar transaction — same balance, same amortization, just a different lender — were the one group still facing full requalification at the higher qualifying rate. November 2024 brought uninsured switches in line with how insured switches were already being treated.
This exemption is narrow by design, and every word of its definition matters. It applies only when all of the following are true at once.
This exemption removes the prescribed qualifying rate; it does not remove underwriting. The new institution still runs the borrower through its normal income, credit and property assessment, and OSFI's Guideline B-20 still expects sound underwriting judgment applied to the file. What changes is the interest rate used to test affordability: instead of the higher minimum qualifying rate — historically the greater of the contract rate plus two percentage points or a benchmark rate — the new lender can qualify the switch at the client's actual contract rate on the new deal.
That distinction is worth explaining to clients plainly, because “no stress test” gets heard as “no qualifying,” and that isn't accurate. A borrower whose income or credit profile has genuinely deteriorated since their last renewal can still be declined by a new lender on a straight switch — the file is simply being tested against a more forgiving rate than it would have been before.
Several scenarios that look like an ordinary switch from the client's point of view still fall outside this exemption, and treating them as covered is the most common way this rule gets misapplied in practice.
Before telling a client their switch will be stress-test free, confirm three things in order: that the loan amount is not increasing, that the amortization is not being extended, and that the transaction is happening at renewal rather than mid-term. If the new lender is a provincially regulated credit union, ask directly what qualifying rate it applies, rather than assuming OSFI's exemption automatically carries over. Getting this wrong in either direction costs a client's trust — either they're declined on a file you promised would sail through, or they miss out on a switch you talked them out of by assuming a stress test applied when it didn't.
A client with an uninsured mortgage wants to switch lenders at renewal and extend their amortization back up to 25 years to lower the monthly payment, with no other changes. Does the November 2024 exemption from the minimum qualifying rate apply?
The straight-switch exemption requires both the loan amount and the remaining amortization to stay unchanged — extending the amortization, even to lower a payment with no new money involved, is exactly the kind of change that removes the exemption. This is the detail brokers most often get wrong, because a payment-lowering amortization stretch feels like a minor tweak rather than a structural change to the transaction, but OSFI's definition doesn't leave room for that reading.
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