When Does Canada Post End Home Delivery in Your Toronto Neighbourhood?

On November 16, about 18,000 homes in north Etobicoke will stop getting mail at the front door. Letters and most parcels will go to a community mailbox down the street instead.

It’s the first Toronto stop in a national rollout that Canada Post expects to take about five years. According to Canada Post’s latest conversion update, roughly 686,000 addresses in 55 communities are already scheduled to switch in late 2026 or 2027. For most Toronto homeowners, the question isn’t whether your street makes the change. It’s when.

Here’s what we know so far, including approximate dates for the neighbourhoods we work in every day.

What’s Happening in Etobicoke on November 16

Homes with postal codes starting with M9V and M9W are first in line. That covers about 18,000 addresses in north Etobicoke, including Rexdale, Thistletown, Mount Olive and Humberwood. Canada Post announced the first wave in April, alongside 12 other communities across the country.

Why start here? Most of the addresses in that first phase sit next to areas that already use community mailboxes, so the change is less of a leap. Canada Post has also said that dense urban cores are harder to convert and will come in later stages.

Day to day, the change is simple. Residents pick up their mail from an assigned compartment in a nearby community mailbox, with a key, at any time of day.

Why Canada Post Is Making the Switch

This has been coming for a while. In September 2025, the federal government authorized Canada Post to end door-to-door delivery and lifted a moratorium on community mailbox conversions that had been in place since 2015. Ottawa estimated that lifting the moratorium alone would save Canada Post about $400 million a year.

The pressure is financial. Canada Post has lost more than $5 billion since 2018, and mail volumes keep falling. About four million addresses still get door-to-door delivery, while nearly three in four Canadian addresses already receive mail through some form of centralized delivery, such as community mailboxes, condo and apartment lobby boxes or post office boxes.

The GTA Timeline at a Glance

After Etobicoke, the next GTA conversions are in Durham and Peel in the fall of 2027. The full GTA is scheduled to finish in September 2031, with most of downtown Toronto and much of North York among the last to switch. That’s according to a Canada Post schedule shared with CP24, which lists every postal code in the region.

The pattern follows the logic of the first wave. Suburban areas that already border community mailboxes go first, while older, denser neighbourhoods with narrow sidewalks and little room for new mailbox sites come later. Here’s a condensed version of the expected schedule (things can change), by the first three characters of your postal code.

Area	Postal codes starting with	Scheduled switch
North Etobicoke	M9V, M9W	November 2026
Pickering and Ajax	L1S, L1T, L1V–L1X	September 2027
Brampton and parts of Mississauga	L4T, L4V, L5M, L5N, L5S, L5T, L6S–L7A	October–November 2027
Burlington	L7L–L7T	September 2028
Most of Scarborough	M1B–M1H, M1P–M1X, M2J	October 2028
Central and south Mississauga	L4W–L4Z, L5A–L5C, L5E–L5L, L5R	October–November 2028
South and central Etobicoke	M8V–M9C	September 2029
Southwest Scarborough	M1J–M1N	October 2029
Midtown, Leaside and North Toronto	M4G, M4H, M4N, M4P, M4R, M4S, M4T, M4V, M5M, M5N, M5P	November 2029
Don Mills and East York	M2L, M2P, M3A–M3C, M4A–M4C	November 2029
Vaughan, Thornhill, Richmond Hill, Aurora and Newmarket	L3Y, L4C, L4G, L4J–L4L	August–November 2030
Annex, Rosedale, Riverdale, the west end and northwest Toronto	M4K, M4W, M4Y, M5R, M5S, M6A–M6S, M9N–M9R	October 2030
North York, the east end and downtown	M2H, M2K, M2M, M2N, M2R, M3H–M3N, M4E, M4J, M4L, M4M, M4X, M5A–M5C, M5E, M5G, M5H, M5J, M5T, M5V, M9L, M9M	September 2031

Area names are approximate, since postal codes don’t follow neighbourhood lines. Canada Post’s dates are also a plan, not a promise, so it’s worth checking the official conversion lookup for your exact address.

What It Means for the Neighbourhoods We Cover

If you own a house in midtown or the west end, you likely have three to four years of front-door delivery left. Based on Canada Post’s schedule, the central neighbourhoods we work in fall into two waves.

First comes November 2029. That’s when the postal codes covering Yonge-Eglinton, Yonge-St. Clair, Forest Hill South and most of Casa Loma (M4P, M4S, M4T, M4V, M5N and M5P) are scheduled to switch.

A year later, in October 2030, it’s the turn of the Annex (M5R, M5S) and the west-central pocket that runs through Humewood-Cedarvale, Wychwood, Oakwood-Vaughan, Corso Italia-Davenport, Briar Hill-Belgravia and Caledonia-Fairbank (M6C, M6E, M6G, M6H).

What if you live in a condo? If your building already has mailboxes in the lobby, you’re on centralized delivery today, so this change shouldn’t affect how you get your mail.

Curious what else is changing on your street? Browse our Toronto neighbourhood guides for what’s selling, what homes cost and what sets each area apart.

How the Switch Works

Nobody wakes up to an empty mail slot without warning. Canada Post first works with the city to choose mailbox sites, then sends residents a letter confirming where their new community mailbox will be.

A second notice follows with the date your delivery changes, along with your mailbox keys. A final reminder arrives shortly before the switch. Canada Post says the whole conversion typically takes months from start to finish.

Then there’s the obvious question: what about parcels? Canada Post says more than 80% of the parcels it delivers fit in a community mailbox compartment or a dedicated parcel locker. Anything too large, or anything that needs a signature, is delivered to your door or held at a nearby post office.

If Getting to a Community Mailbox Is a Challenge

A walk down the block isn’t easy for everyone, especially in a Toronto winter. Canada Post’s free Delivery Accommodation Program is designed for residents whose health or mobility makes a community mailbox hard to use.

The options range from small fixes to continued home delivery. They include a sliding tray or a lower compartment, a key turner, braille labels, a reassigned mailbox closer to home, and temporary, seasonal or permanent delivery to the door. Home delivery and reassigned mailboxes require supporting documentation.

You can apply once you’ve received the letter confirming your new mailbox location, either online or by calling Canada Post at 1-844-454-3009. If a parent or relative may need help, it’s worth flagging the program to them early.

What’s Next?

Five years is a long runway, and plenty can change along the way. Will the 2031 finish line hold, or will dense downtown streets push it further out? A change in government stopped the last conversion effort in 2015, so it’s fair to keep an eye on it. For now, the north Etobicoke switch on November 16 is the first real test of how smoothly this goes in Toronto.

If you’re thinking about selling before your street makes the switch, a community mailbox won’t make or break a sale, but timing and pricing will. Book a strategy call and we’ll walk you through what your home could sell for today.