Long-term care insurance in Canada

Long-term care covers help with everyday living — bathing, dressing, meals, mobility — whether at home, in a retirement residence, or in a long-term-care home. It is not the same as hospital or acute medical care; it is the slow, ongoing support people need as they age or live with a chronic condition. Most of us will need some of it eventually, and a meaningful number of Canadians will need a great deal of it for years.

It’s a real and growing cost: a private long-term-care or retirement-home stay can run into thousands of dollars a month, for years. The insurance that used to cover it, though, has mostly disappeared, so the planning question has shifted from “which policy?” to “how will I fund this myself, and what does the government cover?” The rest of this guide answers both — first the public floor, then the alternatives you can actually build a plan around.

The withdrawal was not a single decision so much as a slow unwind. Insurers had priced these policies decades earlier, then watched several assumptions move against them at once. People lived — and needed care — longer than the original tables predicted. Persistently low interest rates made the long-dated promises far harder to fund, because the money set aside to pay future claims grew more slowly than expected. And relatively few Canadians ever bought the product, so the risk pool stayed small and hard to price.

The decisive blow came in 2017, when the last reinsurer (Munich Re) backing these risks in Canada exited. Reinsurance is the backstop that lets an insurer take on long, uncertain liabilities; without it, the economics no longer worked. Over roughly 2012–2021 the major insurers stepped away: Manulife stopped accepting new applications for its LivingCare product in 2017, and Sun Life discontinued its main long-term care product in 2021. The practical takeaway for a Canadian shopping today is simple — there is, for most people, nothing left to buy.

Provinces fund the medical and nursing care inside approved long-term-care homes and subsidize some home care, often income-tested. But the system is a floor, not a full solution: residents pay a substantial accommodation co-payment, wait lists are long, and a private room, extra home-care hours, or retirement-residence living are paid out of pocket. Assume you’ll cover a meaningful share yourself.

Two details matter most when you plan around the public system. First, what is publicly funded is the care, not the comfort — the nursing and medical support are covered, but the cost of the room and board you live in is largely yours. Second, access is rationed by wait lists, so the gap between needing care and receiving the publicly funded version of it can stretch on. Either gap is something your own savings have to fill, which is exactly why the alternatives below exist.

With a dedicated policy off the table, funding care becomes an exercise in assembling pieces you already understand. None of these is a perfect substitute for LTC insurance, but together they form a workable plan — and the right mix depends on how much you’ve saved, what you own, and how much risk you’re comfortable carrying yourself.

Educational only, not insurance, tax or care advice. The withdrawal of major individual LTC products (Manulife 2017, Sun Life 2021) and the 2017 reinsurer exit are widely reported; provincial care coverage and costs vary by province and change — confirm current programs with your province and a licensed advisor. See our methodology.