Mass timber developers in Canada are paying course-of-construction and occupancy insurance premiums that run six to ten times those for equivalent concrete and steel buildings, with larger projects routinely syndicated across six to ten separate underwriters to assemble cover, even as Natural Resources Canada records more than 850 mass timber projects nationwide and provincial codes lift building heights to 18 storeys.
That is according to a recent policy brief released by the Insurance Bureau of Canada (IBC), with the parallel Climate Smart Buildings Alliance (CSBA) and Canadian Wood Council (CWC) Mass Timber Insurance Action Plan, launched in May 2024 alongside 40 insurance and building executives at a Toronto solutions lab, running four workstreams to widen capacity as the building stock grows.
Wood Central understands the IBC brief flags three data gaps that lie behind insurer caution: long-term structural performance over decades, the effects of moisture and water-related incidents, and typical repair and replacement costs after fire or other damage. Encapsulated mass timber has spread fastest across British Columbia, Ontario, Quebec and Alberta, the four provinces that lead both build volume and manufacturing capacity.
John McKee, policy adviser at the IBC, said insurer questions had centred on how the structures withstand water and fire damage over decades of occupancy. The IBC brief said reinsurance capacity for mid- to high-rise mass timber had been constrained, with primary cover availability and terms following the reinsurance market down.
The 2020 National Building Code of Canada raised the limit for encapsulated mass timber construction to 12 storeys; British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec have since amended their codes to 18 storeys. Code has run ahead of loss history, the data underwriters lean on to model risk in taller, more complex builds.
Insurance broker Aon told the IBC that limited long-term loss history makes it harder for underwriters to model mass timber risk with the same confidence applied to concrete and steel, even as Aon’s own Global Mass Timber Working Group leader, Alicia Clendenan, has called the material’s trajectory unmistakable.
“The overall level of investment in increased manufacturing capabilities, combined with building code and developmental policy shifts toward lower carbon construction, signal that mass timber will continue to be an important construction material in many regions of the world,” Clendenan said in the broker’s June 2025 Unlocking Mass Timber report.
The CSBA-CWC Action Plan emerged from the Toronto lab and has worked across four streams since, each targeting one of the gaps insurers had identified. “The insurers are facing a challenge in the form of mass timber and they need to get a better grasp of this new product and how these new buildings perform over time,” CSBA director David Messer told SustainableBiz Canada in a December 2024 interview on the launch.
Phase 1 reports closed across the Research, Capacity Solutions and Data Trust streams between October 2025 and March 2026, with the alliance citing developer estimates that mass timber premiums run six to ten times concrete and steel, a gap drawing fresh scrutiny as big tech scales mass timber data centre and warehouse construction across North America.
The Canadian reinsurance market for mass timber, dominated by Fairfax Financial, Hannover Re, Munich Re and Arch Reinsurance, has remained cautious for lack of quantifiable data, with the CSBA, a joint initiative of EllisDon, RBC-Royal Bank, Mattamy Homes and AtkinsRéalis, driving the Action Plan alongside the CWC.
The federal government topped up the Action Plan work in December 2025, announcing CAD $272,000 to fund a feasibility and prototype-level assessment of insurance solutions for the mass timber industry. The grant comes as Ottawa continues to push mass timber, prefabrication, and panelisation as core levers to address Canada’s housing shortage.
The IBC’s three-gap audit, the May 2024 CSBA-CWC Action Plan and the federal government’s $272,000 prototype grant give Canada a three-track answer to the capacity problem, with McKee’s brief calling for the next decade of aggregated loss and repair data to feed underwriter risk models tuned to a building stock already 850 projects deep — and a premium gap running six to ten times above concrete and steel.
