Ontario mortgage intelligence, built for real buyers.

What We Built

ClearKey gives Ontario homebuyers 10 free mortgage tools in one place — from stress testing a target home price to planning a down payment across every account type to calculating a break penalty before refinancing.

Every calculator is built around how Canadian lenders actually qualify borrowers — Canadian semi-annual compounding, OSFI stress test rules, CMHC premium tiers, and Ontario-specific closing costs including the Toronto Municipal Land Transfer Tax.

Why ClearKey Exists

If you've ever sat across from a mortgage specialist and walked out unsure what just happened, ClearKey was built for you.

The mortgage industry runs on numbers most people only see once or twice in their lives — qualifying ratios, stress test thresholds, CMHC premium tiers, land transfer tax brackets, semi-annual compounding, IRD penalties. The professionals who deal with these every day understand them implicitly. The buyers signing the papers usually don't, and the gap is where bad decisions get made: putting down too little when 20% would save thousands in CMHC premiums, agreeing to a 5-year fixed term when life is about to change in three years, breaking a mortgage early without realizing the IRD penalty would erase the savings of a refinance.

The standard advice is "talk to a broker." That's good advice — and ClearKey actively recommends licensed brokers via the FSRA registry on our Rate Tracker tab. But brokers are paid to close a deal. Their job isn't to teach you what GDS means or to walk you through whether a 5% down payment makes sense at your price point. That's an educational gap, and ClearKey was built to fill it.

Every calculator on this site is the answer to a question we kept seeing buyers ask in plain language: How much do I actually need to make to qualify? What does the stress test do to my budget? If I break this mortgage, how much will the penalty really be? What's the difference between RRSP and FHSA for my down payment? We answer those questions with real math, real numbers, and the same regulations lenders use — not generic Wikipedia explanations.

Editorial Standards

ClearKey's content — both the calculators and the educational articles — is built on three rules:

Every claim has a source. When we say the OSFI stress test floor is 5.25%, we link to OSFI's B-20 guideline. When we say the CMHC insured ceiling rose to $1.5 million in December 2024, we link to the federal Department of Finance announcement. The full list of sources is on our Methodology page. If a claim doesn't have a source we can verify, it doesn't go on the site.

Calculations match how lenders actually qualify borrowers. Our mortgage payment math uses the semi-annual compounding required by the federal Interest Act, not the monthly compounding used by American calculators. Our GDS/TDS uses the qualifying rate (greater of 5.25% or contract + 2%), not the contract rate. Our CMHC premiums match the published tier schedules. Our Ontario land transfer tax uses the current tiered formula plus the Toronto MLTT layer when applicable.

What we don't know, we say. We don't pretend to know what specific rate any lender will offer you (so we don't publish a lender rate table). We don't pretend our calculator outputs are mortgage advice (they're not — they're educational starting points). We don't pretend penalty estimates are exact (each lender's IRD formula varies in ways our calculator doesn't capture). The "What ClearKey does not calculate" section of our Methodology page is an honest list of edges where you need a real broker conversation.

How We Make Money — and What We Don't Do

Transparency about how a free site stays free matters. ClearKey is supported by display advertising. We are not a licensed mortgage brokerage, we do not earn commission on mortgages, we do not sell user data, and we do not have paid relationships with any of the Big 6 banks or other lenders linked from the Rate Tracker tab.

This independence shapes the site in concrete ways:

• The lender links on our Rate Tracker tab are direct outbound links to each bank's public rate page. No tracking codes, no affiliate kickbacks, no preferential placement based on partnership.
• The broker referral on the same tab points to the FSRA public registry — the official Ontario regulator's list of every licensed broker — not a paid lead-generation network.
• We don't ask for your email, phone number, or any contact information to use the calculators. Every calculation runs in your browser. Nothing is stored on our servers.
• We don't use chat or comment systems that quietly collect data. Our AI mortgage assistant runs through Anthropic's API and exchanges only the messages you type.

If we ever add sponsorships or commercial partnerships in the future — for example, sponsored placements clearly labeled as such — we'll be explicit about them and they will not affect our calculator math, our methodology, or our editorial recommendations.

What We Believe

A short list of principles that drive how this site is built:

• Buyers deserve the math, not just the answer. Showing how a number was calculated is more useful than showing the number alone.
• Educational content is not financial advice. ClearKey explains rules, formulas, and tradeoffs. We don't tell you what to do with your money — that's your decision, ideally informed by a licensed professional who knows your specific situation.
• Stale data is worse than no data. When we can automate freshness (Bank of Canada rates), we do. When we can't, we label things as illustrative defaults and tell you to verify.
• Honesty about limits builds trust. Our calculators don't model every edge case in Canadian mortgage finance. The ones we don't cover, we name explicitly.
• Privacy by default. No tracking pixels beyond Google Analytics for anonymous traffic measurement, no email capture as a price of entry, no calculator inputs sent to any server.

The AI Mortgage Assistant

Every tab on ClearKey includes an AI mortgage assistant powered by Claude, built by Anthropic. You can ask it anything about your specific numbers — from how lenders calculate self-employed income to whether breaking your mortgage to refinance makes financial sense.

The AI assistant is trained on Canadian mortgage rules, OSFI stress test guidelines, and Ontario market context. It gives straight answers in plain language, 24 hours a day, without an appointment.

The AI assistant provides general educational information only and does not constitute mortgage advice. Always consult a licensed mortgage professional before making financial decisions.

Who We Are

ClearKey is operated by a privately held Ontario corporation. The site is built and maintained by a small independent team focused on financial education and product design — not a brokerage, not a media company, not a venture-backed startup chasing a flip. We built ClearKey because we wanted the site we wished existed when we were buying our own first homes.

We don't claim to be licensed mortgage professionals or financial advisors. What we are: people who care enough about getting the math right to publish a 2,500-word Methodology page documenting every formula and source, who chose to remove a stale lender rate table rather than keep it for traffic, and who would rather be honestly small than dishonestly large.

For licensed mortgage advice tailored to your specific situation, work with a broker registered through FSRA's public registry. ClearKey is the educational layer that helps you walk into that conversation prepared.

Our Commitment to Accuracy

All calculations on ClearKey are built around current Canadian mortgage regulations including the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI) Guideline B-20, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) insured mortgage rules as updated December 2024, the federal Interest Act's semi-annual compounding requirement, and Ontario's tiered land transfer tax including the Toronto Municipal Land Transfer Tax for properties inside city limits.

Bank of Canada data — the overnight rate, prime rate calculation, and next-announcement context shown on the Rate Tracker tab — is refreshed automatically every day from the BoC's Valet API. Lender-specific fixed and variable mortgage rates are not published or refreshed by ClearKey; the Rate Tracker tab links directly to each Big 6 bank's official rate page for those. Calculator default rates and city/neighbourhood benchmark prices are manually updated when they drift meaningfully from market. The full update cadence for every kind of data on the site is published on our Methodology page.

Mortgage rules and market conditions change, and we update the site quickly when they do — but we are not infallible. Always verify any number that affects a financial decision against your own lender or broker. If you spot something that looks wrong, please email us at hello@clearkey.ca. Corrections are taken seriously and acted on quickly.