Move over Mississauga: Brampton is now the third largest city in Ontario, according to Statistics Canada

Brampton’s population surpasses 791,000, becoming the third largest among Ontario cities only trailing Toronto and Ottawa.

Brampton’s population has surpassed Mississauga’s, marking it the third-largest city in Ontario.

Newly released census data published by Statistics Canada last week shows that Brampton’s population now stands at 791,486 after growing by approximately 100,000 people since 2020.

Mississauga’s population was pegged at 780,747.

“Brampton is growing faster than ever before. In fact, it’s the fastest growing big city in the entire country and that’s why we need to build,” Premier Doug Ford said at news conference in Brampton on Friday morning, discussing the province’s plans for the underground tunnel between Mississauga and Brampton to pave way for transit.

In 2020, Brampton’s population stood at 688,154 people but its grown by approximately 15 per cent in just four years.

The Peel Region city trails only behind Ottawa (1.15 million) and Toronto (3.27 million) in population now when it comes to Ontario cities. Statistics Canada previously named Brampton the fastest-growing city across the country’s 25 most populous municipalities when the city saw a 10.6 per cent increase in its population from 2016 to 2021.

In that same period, Toronto only saw a 2.3 per cent increase in its population, while Mississauga, saw a 0.5 per cent decline.

Mississauga’s population continued its declined between 2020 and 2022, dropping from 758,665 to 745,491 before jumping to 780,747 last year.

“We’re certainly a destination of choice and that certainly brings with it challenges, to keep up with health care demands, public safety demands, recreation, transit services,” Brampton Mayor Patrick Brown told CTV News Toronto on Friday.

“We get inundated with pressures from growth, but obviously, there’s something about Brampton that residents love.”

Brampton’s new population figures caught city council’s attention during their special meeting on Monday, as councillors argued that they are not getting their fair share of per capita funding on major projects from health care to infrastructure to transit projects.

“For so long, Brampton has been chronically underfunded,” Coun. Rowena Santos said during the meeting. “We know that we’re higher than Hamilton, higher than Vaughan, and now we know that we’re higher than Mississauga, and, in fact, across the country we have a higher population than Vancouver.”

Brampton had roughly 35,000 more people than the Vancouver, based on StatCan’s data.

That city had a population of 756,008 in 2024, though the population of Vancouver and its surrounding suburbs was much higher (2.6 million).

Santos also put forward a motion to seek additional representation for Brampton on Peel Region Council. Currently Brampton has nine seats while Mississauga has 12, despite the fact that the regional council is to reflect the cities' respective population sizes—a point Coun. Gurpartap Singh Toor also brought up.

“We’re still getting funded based on a 650,000 population. These are still official numbers that say we’re 791,000, we know in our city we still have more people than that are actually captured here in the census,” Toor said.

As for whether the city’s population will continue to boom, Brown tells CTV News Toronto that due to the federal government’s immigration cap, the city may see a hit.

“I think the economic development growth will probably not diminish but the immigration growth is certainly going to diminish based on the new targets, where we’ve seen significant reductions,” Brown said.