CMHC, Sagen, Canada Guaranty: same premium grid, different fine print.

No — for a standard high-ratio purchase with a 25-year amortization, all three insurers charge the same rate grid, published by CMHC and matched by Sagen and Canada Guaranty.

A blended or extended amortization adds a surcharge on top of the base rate, and some provinces (Ontario, Quebec, Saskatchewan) apply provincial sales tax to the premium itself — none of that changes by insurer. A borrower can pay the premium upfront out of pocket, but in practice most add it to the mortgage balance, which means it's amortized and paid interest on for the life of the loan, and that treatment is identical across all three insurers as well.

CMHC is a federal Crown corporation, and its obligations to lenders carry a full, 100% federal guarantee. Sagen and Canada Guaranty are privately owned, and their obligations carry a 90% government guarantee — if a private insurer were ever unable to pay a claim, the lender absorbs a 10% deductible on the original loan amount rather than being made fully whole by the government.

That deductible structure was deliberately built into the framework: private insurers pay into a guarantee fund under the National Housing Act and the Protection of Residential Mortgage or Hypothecary Insurance Act, which adds a capital cost private insurers carry that CMHC, as the Crown corporation, doesn't face in the same way. It's part of why the market has room for private competitors alongside a Crown insurer at all — the risk-sharing framework is what lets Sagen and Canada Guaranty operate profitably while keeping government exposure capped below 100%.

In practice this is a wholesale-market risk question, not something a borrower or broker experiences directly — it doesn't change the client's rate, payment, or recourse on a funded file. A borrower whose mortgage is insured by Sagen has exactly the same protections and obligations as one insured by CMHC; the 90-versus-100 distinction lives entirely in how the lender and the insurer are backstopped between themselves. It's the same standardization at work as the 5% versus 20% down payment line discussed in 5% down vs. 20% down — the rules are set at the program level, not the individual insurer level.

The lender selects the insurer, not the broker or the borrower directly. A broker's real influence is upstream of that decision: which lenders a file gets shopped to, and therefore which insurer's guidelines and niche programs are in play for a harder file.

Some lenders default to CMHC for most of their high-ratio volume and reserve Sagen or Canada Guaranty for files that need a specific overlay one of the private insurers offers; other lenders route more evenly across all three depending on file type. That relationship sits on the lender side and shifts over time as underwriting appetite changes, which is one more reason a broker's lender relationships — not just rate sheets — matter on a file that doesn't fit the standard mould.

The differences that matter for placing a file show up in niche products, not standard premiums. Sagen's Business for Self (Alt. A) program insures self-employed borrowers who can't provide traditional income verification but have a two-year history of managing credit responsibly. Canada Guaranty offers Purchase Plus Improvements for buyers financing renovations into the purchase, and a Lifestyle Advantage program for second homes.

• →Sagen — Business for Self (Alt. A) for self-employed borrowers without traditional income proof
• →Canada Guaranty — Purchase Plus Improvements, and a second-home program with as little as 5% down
• →CMHC — Home Start, extending 30-year amortization to first-time buyers and new-build purchasers on high-ratio files

Each of these programs sits on top of the standard insured-mortgage rules, not instead of them — a Sagen Business for Self file still has to clear the OSFI stress test, and a Canada Guaranty second-home purchase still falls under the same $1.5 million insured price cap as any other high-ratio file. What the overlay changes is which documentation and which loan-to-value ceiling apply going in, not the underlying qualifying framework.

Knowing which insurer's overlay actually solves a given client's problem is part of what makes experienced fulfillment support valuable on files that don't fit the standard box — matching a self-employed client to a lender that routes to Sagen for its Business for Self program, rather than submitting a standard file that gets declined on paper income alone, is the kind of upfront placement decision that saves a file from bouncing between lenders.