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What foreclosure actually costs you in Alberta
Not what it costs the bank. Your lender's legal fees and disbursements are charged against the property and paid out of the sale proceeds — which means they come out of your equity before you see a dollar. Alberta's Court of King's Bench publishes the guideline those costs are assessed against. Here it is.
The short answer
Alberta's Foreclosure Fee and Disbursement Guideline allows the lender's lawyer $1,300–$1,500 for each of the three main stages of a foreclosure, $650–$750 to arrange a judicial sale listing, and $900–$1,000 to convey after a confirmed sale — roughly $5,450 on the minimum path.
Disbursements are charged on top: $450–$500 for an appraisal in a municipality, $50–$60 per property inspection, and $1,000–$1,250 for clean-up on a vacant home. All of it is assessed against your equity, and all of it stops the day the mortgage is paid out.
How the guideline works
Rather than bill by the hour, Alberta assigns a lump-sum range to each standard stage of a foreclosure. Assessment officers add the applicable steps together. The guideline itself explains the reasoning: a time-based approach "rewards the inefficient lawyer, and punishes the efficient lawyer." The amounts are adjusted annually for CPI, so the figures below — effective 1 September 2017 — are floors, not current numbers.
Read the table as a menu of things you are paying for. Every line is a step someone takes on a file that is still, until a final order, your file.
Legal fees, by stage
| Stage | What it covers | Guideline fee |
|---|---|---|
| Step A | Everything up to and including noting in default — instructions, title and tax searches, demand letter, Statement of Claim, registering the CLP, service | $1,300 – $1,500 |
| Step B | Noting in default through the first substantive application — Affidavit of Default, appraisal, Affidavit of Value, court attendance, the Redemption Order | $1,300 – $1,500 |
| Step C | First order through a second substantive application — final Affidavit of Default, updated searches, order for foreclosure or order confirming sale | $1,300 – $1,500 |
| Step D | Each court appearance adjourned at someone else's request (more if contested, or for sealed tenders on multiple bids) | $150 – $200 |
| Step E | A standard ex parte order — substitutional service, preservation order | $350 – $450 |
| Step F | Orders on notice not covered above — extending a listing, reducing a listing price, rejecting tenders | $800 – $1,000 |
| Step G | Responding to an application you bring | $600 – $800 |
| Step H | Facilitating the judicial listing — hiring the realtor, market analysis, reviewing offers (+$150 if more than three offers) | $650 – $750 |
| Step H2 | Each second, third or further judicial listing | $325 |
| Step I | Court house bulletin board or Kijiji posting and tender search | $400 – $500 |
| Step J | Newspaper advertisement and tender search | $500 – $600 |
| Step K | Conveyance to a third party after an order confirming sale | $900 – $1,000 |
| Step L | Processing each payment from you under a payment order | $125 per payment |
| Step M / N | Preparing and assessing the bill of costs | $150 / $400 – $500 |
| Step O / P | Writ of enforcement / obtaining possession via a civil enforcement agency | $300 / $500 |
| Step Q | Disposing of chattels left at the property | $500 – $750 |
| Step S | Each payout statement or arrears letter after the first | $250 each |
| Step T | Wrapping up when you do redeem — discontinuance, discharging the CLP, accounting | $500 – $700 |
Foreclosure Fee and Disbursement Guideline – Alberta, effective 1 September 2017, adjusted annually by CPI. Fees are cumulative: a file that reaches an order confirming sale has typically incurred Steps A, B, C, H and K at minimum.
Do the arithmetic on the minimum path.
Steps A + B + C at the low end is $3,900 in legal fees alone. Add Step H ($650) to arrange the judicial listing and Step K ($900) to convey to a buyer and you are at $5,450 — before a single appraisal, service attempt, inspection or court adjournment, before CPI adjustment since 2017, and before interest, which is running the whole time. A contested file with a re-listing, a price-reduction application and a vacant property is a materially larger number.
Disbursements charged on top
These require documentary support and are allowed within published ranges. The middle and right columns matter if your property is outside Edmonton proper.
| Disbursement | In municipalities | Smaller cities / towns | Remote areas |
|---|---|---|---|
| Appraisal | $450 – $500 | $600 – $700 | $700 – $900 |
| Serving the Statement of Claim (per defendant) | $70 – $90 | $125 – $150 | $200 – $400 |
| Each attempted service | $30 – $40 | $50 – $75 | $200 – $350 |
| Posting an Order for Possession to the door | $50 – $60 | $60 – $75 | $150 – $250 |
| Property inspections (weekly Oct–Mar, biweekly Apr–Sep) | $50 – $60 | $60 – $75 | $75 – $100 |
| Snow removal / lawn mowing | $50 – $60 | $400 – $500 | $500 – $750 |
| Securing the property, including lock change | $300 – $400 | $400 – $500 | $500 – $750 |
| Clean-up, garbage removal, or “scrub & shine” | $1,000 – $1,250 | $1,250 – $1,500 | $1,500 – $2,000 |
Appendix Y, Foreclosure Fee and Disbursement Guideline. Mileage is allowed at $0.75/km outside municipalities. NSF fees from the date of default to the issuance of the Statement of Claim are capped at $50 per occasion to a maximum of $250.
Three costs that surprise people
1. Vacancy is expensive
Look again at the disbursement table. A vacant Edmonton property can carry weekly winter inspections, snow removal to comply with municipal bylaws, a lock change, and a $1,000–$1,250 clean-up. The guideline is explicit that these are allowed to preserve the property and "preserve the mortgagor's equity" — that is, they are spent on your behalf, with your money, whether or not you agree they were necessary.
2. Deemed disbursements need no invoice at all
Appendix Z allows a set of charges without documentation: $125 per application for delivery and courier, $240 in photocopies on the first application and $120 on the second, court runner and long distance charges. Small individually. They recur per application.
3. Even redeeming has a price
Step T prices the work of unwinding a foreclosure when you do pay — discontinuing the action, discharging the CLP, accountings and registrations — at $500 to $700. Fixing the problem is cheaper than not fixing it, but it is not free.
The one line that should decide your timing
Every figure on this page stops accruing the moment the mortgage is paid out. A sale you arrange at stage 3 stops the meter roughly $5,000–$15,000 earlier than a sale the court arranges at stage 6 — and that is before the difference in sale price between a normally marketed listing and a court-supervised as-is, where-is sale. That gap is the entire argument for acting early, and it is an arithmetic argument, not a sales one.
This is information, not legal advice.
Ryan McCann is a licensed REALTOR® with MaxWell Polaris, not a lawyer. Everything on this page is a plain-language summary of publicly available Alberta law and court practice, with the sources listed so you can check them. Your mortgage, your order and your circumstances are specific to you. Before you make a decision with legal consequences, speak to an Alberta real estate lawyer. If cost is the barrier, Legal Aid Alberta and the Centre for Public Legal Education Alberta are free starting points.
Sources for this page
- Foreclosure Fee and Disbursement Guideline – Alberta, Court of King's Bench — https://albertacourts.ca/docs/default-source/qb/foreclosure_fee_and_disbursement_guidline_alberta_21082018.pdf
- Law of Property Act, RSA 2000, c L-7, ss. 39–45 (Alberta King's Printer) — https://kings-printer.alberta.ca/documents/Acts/l07.pdf
- J.F. Reich & D.M. Hendrix, “The Foreclosure Sale Process”, Legal Education Society of Alberta — https://www.lesaonline.org/samples/61836_07_p1.pdf
Reviewed and updated September 2026. Alberta legislation and court fee guidelines change — the sources above are the authoritative text.
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