Canada’s ETF industry flourished in 2025, with a “whopping” $125 billion in inflows and 364 fund launches recorded over the course of the year, National Bank Capital Markets (NBCM) said in a research report released Monday, expanding on a previous report.
Net inflows for the year far surpassed the previous record of $76 billion gathered in 2024, amounting to a 64% increase, as “all major asset classes broke records,” the report noted.
Total ETF assets under management (AUM) stood at $713 billion by the end of the year, it said, which represented a compound annual growth rate of 23% over the past decade and a year-over-year asset increase of 37.5%. By comparison, at the end of 2015, total ETF AUM amounted to $90 billion.
As market volatility spiked and abated, a significant volume of ETF units changed hands in 2025.
“In a year of trade war, tech frenzy, and geopolitical tumult, ETF traded value also skyrocketed to $1.2 trillion ($4.6 billion daily) surpassing the previous record set in 2024 by 47%,” the report noted.
And, for the fourth year in a row, ETFs outsold mutual funds. Alongside this achievement, the Canadian ETF market share of the country’s entire investment fund industry increased to 22%.
Major asset classes set new records
On a geographic regional basis, investors favoured international equity funds, which accounted for $33.3 billion of the 2025 inflows. Meanwhile, U.S. and Canadian equity funds took in $19.7 billion and $13.5 billion, respectively.
“A tariff war and trade shock from early in the year caused a slight pause in equity inflows, but investors didn’t de-risk entirely despite the market turbulence; instead, we saw Canadian ETF investors start to explore opportunities elsewhere,” NBCM reported.
“ETFs focused on broad developed markets, the global region and emerging markets all enjoyed percentage flows much higher than those of both the U.S. and Canada.”
The most popular equity ETFs by focus were cap-weighted and divided/income equity funds, while the utilities sector was the most popular equity fund sector. The report also noted that low–volatility–factor funds posted inflows for the first time in five years and equity asset-allocation funds experienced a “gangbuster year at $10.5 billion created” as demand for these funds accelerated on a monthly basis.
Fixed-income ETFs recorded inflows of $37.3 billion, up 55% from the previous record $24.1 billion gathered in 2024.
By fixed-income fund type, Canadian aggregate bond, Canadian corporate bond and money-market ETFs received the most investor dollars. By maturity, investors were mostly drawn to broad/mixed-maturity funds.
“Several institutional activities impacted the flows pattern this year, with large block trades appearing to rotate from broad or federal exposures to ETFs focusing on corporate credit,” NBCM noted.
Inverse/leveraged ETFs set a record too, with $6 billion in creations in 2025, up from $1.7 billion a year prior. “Lightly levered ETFs,” which employ about 25–33% leverage, accounted for $5.8 billion of the total inflows recorded last year.
Commodity ETFs also recorded an all-time high with $2.3 billion in inflows, up from $995 million in 2024. Gold ETFs accounted for the bulk — 70% — of the inflows. However, inflows “broadened out from gold bullion to silver bullion as well as multi-commodity ETFs as various commodity prices took turns to reach all-time highs against a background of persistent inflation fears and geopolitical turmoil,” the report explained.
Multi-asset ETFs recorded $12.5 billion in creations, up from $6 billion a year prior.
Crypto-asset ETFs were in positive territory in 2025, with $933 million in creations, compared to the $1.1 billion in outflows recorded the previous year. Bitcoin, Solana and XRP ETFs were in positive flow territory for the year, while Ethereum and multi-crypto ETFs suffered outflows.
Meanwhile, ESG ETFs gathered $1.6 billion in net inflows, reversing last year’s $1.6 billion in outflows. Still, there was relatively weaker investor demand for these funds than observed from 2020 to 2023. As well, there was just one ESG ETF listed and 21 de–listed in 2025, marking a “more tentative stance” from ETF providers.
Moreover, the report noted that active ETFs “continued to drive new inflows, thanks to unstoppable innovation in available product strategies.” By the end of 2025, they held $242 billion or 34% of Canadian ETF assets, NBCM said.
Record new launches, plus new providers
As appetite for ETFs grew across asset classes, asset managers took note.
They launched a record 364 new ETFs in 2025 alone, bringing the total number of ETFs to 1,792 in Canada. That compares with 414 ETFs in 2015.
“In a single year, more ETFs launched than existed in the entire market just 12 years ago at the end of 2013, when there were 299,” the report said.
“This is an astonishing number considering that the first ETF … launched in 1990; this means that it took 24 years for there to be around 300 ETFs, but now the Canadian market launches more ETFs in one year than what took roughly 24 years to accumulate at first.”
Investment Executive’s full breakdown of fund launches in 2025 is available here.
Notably, nearly two-thirds — 239 — of the fund launches were actively managed.
There were also 68 fund de-listings in 68, which NBCM said was on par with 2024.
Additionally, four new providers joined the fray last year — Capstone Asset Management Inc., Rocklinc Investment Partners Inc., SLGI Asset Management Inc. and True Exposure Investments, Inc. — bringing the total number of ETF providers to 48. By comparison, there were only nine ETF providers a decade prior.
Investment Executive’s full breakdown of fund launches in 2025 is available here.
Canada’s top five ETF providers
RBC iShares remained the top ETF provider by market share (27%) in 2025, followed by BMO Global Asset Management (21%) and Vanguard Investments Canada Inc. (15%), which held their spots as second and third providers by market share, respectively.
Global X Investments Canada Inc. (6%) ranked fourth for another year, while TD Asset Management (4%) jumped up a spot to rank fifth. TDAM took the spot from CI Global Asset Management, which fell to eighth place in 2025 (3%) from fifth a year earlier.
ETF series fuelled 2025’s fund launches, flows
The report also highlights the growing presence of ETF series, which allow asset managers to be vehicle agnostic and “take advantage of the track record and scale of their existing mutual fund.”
In 2025, a record number of ETF series (81) were launched by 19 ETF providers. Actively managed fund strategies were most popular among these launches.
ETF series also set a new record for annual inflows last year, gathering $13 billion. This brought total ETF series AUM to $46 billion across 360 products by year-end.
Fees, fees, fees
NBCM’s research delved into ETF fees too.
It found that fees have generally been falling over the last decade, excluding more complex products such as inverse/leveraged ETFs, crypto ETFs and ETFs that charge performance fees, noting that “fee compression is real in the ETF world; investors vote with their dollars and continue to flock to lower cost ETFs, which is what causes the asset-weighted MERs [management expense ratios] to come down.”
In particular, ETFs charging 0.3% or less in MER make up about two-thirds of all ETF assets in Canada and 2025 flows, the report noted. When MERs exceed 0.3%, “both assets and flows fall sharply.”
The one exception is funds charging between 0.4% and 0.5% in MERs, which NBCM said “saw noticeable inflow[s] led by Fidelity’s asset allocation ETF suite.”
December 2025 takeaways
Canadian ETFs raked in $16.9 billion in net inflows in December, setting a new monthly inflow record.
Equity ETFs led inflows at $9.9 million, while fixed-income ETFs registered inflows of $4.5 billion.
Multi-asset fund inflows amounted to $1.3 billion in the month, followed by inverse/leveraged funds at $620 million, commodity funds at $378 million and crypto-asset funds at $121 million, the report noted.