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Mortality and overdose data for people experiencing homelessness in Toronto

People experiencing homelessness in Toronto die at several times the rate of the general population, at much younger ages, and Toronto Public Health's own count of deaths has been revised sharply upward since 2025 after integrating Office of the Chief Coroner data the city's earlier counts had missed.

The finding

Toronto Public Health's current standing figure for 2021 deaths among people experiencing homelessness is 223 — an upward revision from an earlier, since-superseded figure of 216 — of whom 132 were shelter residents at the time of death, a number that fell to 110 in 2022 CSRL2-015. In February 2025, after integrating Office of the Chief Coroner data the earlier counts had not captured, Toronto Public Health revised its 2022 death count from 189 to 331 (a 75% increase) and its 2023 count from 150 to 300 (a 100% increase) CSRL2-792. For the first half of 2024, Toronto Public Health recorded 135 deaths, with a median age at death of 50 for men and 36 for women — compared with a general-population median age at death in Toronto of 78 and 85 respectively — and found that 54% of deaths involved drug toxicity CSRL2-791. A 2026 peer-reviewed study (BMC Public Health) independently found a median age of death of 36 for women experiencing homelessness specifically, against 85 for women in Toronto's general population CSRL2-783.

Two Toronto studies, a generation apart, put a number on the excess mortality risk directly: a 2009 BMJ study followed a shelter cohort for 11 years and found overall mortality 3.5 times the rate of Canada's lowest income quintile, not the general population as a whole CSRL2-029; an earlier 2000 JAMA study, stratified by age, found the excess risk was steepest for the youngest adults — 8.3 times for ages 18-24, compared with 3.7 times for ages 25-44 and 2.3 times for ages 45-64 CSRL2-424.

On overdoses specifically: the City's own shelter-system data recorded 567 non-fatal and 13 fatal overdoses in 2025, with 287 overdose-related calls in the first quarter of 2026 alone — a figure that excludes encampment and other outdoor populations entirely, making it an undercount of the true toll even on its own terms CSRL2-300. More recent monthly data shows a sharp 2026 increase: 96 suspected shelter overdoses per month so far in 2026, up from 47 per month in 2025 CSRL2-474. A fresh S1 discovery this pass (T-0065 batch 6) adds a fatal-overdose trend the existing figures don't show: the City's 13 fatal overdoses in 2025 was itself a 52% decrease from 2024, and preliminary Q1 2026 data shows fewer than 5 fatal overdoses — a real decline in deaths running alongside the sharp rise in non-fatal overdose calls described above, not the same trend line [CL-90683]. At two individual shelter operators, suspected non-fatal opioid overdoses peaked in 2021 at 426 for Homes First and 160 for Dixon Hall — the City's own open-data source for this specific breakdown has since been retired and could not be independently re-confirmed at time of writing, so this figure is not held to this page's usual verified-citation bar CSRL2-698.

Why it matters

These are not marginal statistics: a near-doubling of Toronto's own official 2022-2023 death count once better data was integrated is a major revision to how large this crisis has actually been counted as being, and the age-stratified mortality data shows the excess risk is not evenly distributed — it is worst for the youngest adults and, on the more recent gendered study, dramatically worse for women's age at death specifically. The overdose figures point in the same direction as the death-count revision: recorded monthly overdose calls roughly doubled from 2025 to 2026, and the City's own shelter-system count is an explicit undercount by its own admission, since it excludes people outside the shelter system entirely. That non-fatal rise sits alongside a real decline in fatal overdoses specifically (down 52% from 2024 to 2025, continuing into Q1 2026) — two genuinely different trend lines, not a single number moving in one direction.

What this page does not cover

This page does not reconcile the Homes First/Dixon Hall operator-level figures against city-wide totals, or attempt to estimate what the true (as opposed to officially recorded) overdose or mortality toll is — several of the sources here explicitly flag their own figures as undercounts without offering a corrected total. It does not cover overdose or mortality data for any municipality outside Toronto (a comparable 2026 data point exists for North Bay, Ontario, but belongs on that municipality's own page, not here). It does not carry a "case against" this data's accuracy, since the sources reviewed are Toronto Public Health's own public health surveillance releases and peer-reviewed academic studies, not a live methodological dispute with a documented opposing position.

Sources

Related pages

Jurisdiction: Toronto · Topics: mortality, overdose, public-health, shelter-deaths · status: working draft · review: pending (the library’s own tags, kept visible) · published 2026-08-17 · corrections welcome.