2-5-10 warranty

The 2-5-10 warranty is British Columbia’s mandatory new-home warranty insurance: two years of coverage on labour and materials, five years on the building envelope including unintended water penetration, and ten years on structure. Under the Homeowner Protection Act, a residential builder must be licensed and must arrange this coverage with a third-party warranty insurer before construction — buyers don’t purchase it, and the protection attaches to the home itself, passing to later owners for the balance of each term.

The tiers, unpacked

The headline numbers hide a tiered first phase. Within the two-year labour-and-materials term, defects in the home generally must be claimed inside the first 12 months (15 months for the common property of a strata building), while coverage for the systems that make the house run — plumbing, electrical, heating distribution and the like — extends to the full 24 months. The five-year term is BC’s signature: the building envelope, including water getting in where it shouldn’t, written by a province that paid dearly to learn what leaky buildings cost. The ten-year term covers major structural defects — failures in load-bearing parts of the home. Each tier runs on its own clock from the coverage start date, and claims filed after a tier closes are simply out.

How BC differs from Ontario

Ontario centralizes its warranty in a single administering corporation; BC distributes it. Here, private warranty insurers issue the policies, the builder’s licence and the coverage are checked before building begins, and disputes run through the insurer’s claims process. The tiers differ too — the Tarion structure is one, two and seven years, with different envelope treatment — so an agent moving between provinces should assume the details don’t transfer, only the concept.

What agents actually check

On a presale or any resale of a newer home, the questions are concrete: who is the warranty insurer, what is the coverage start date, and how much of each tier remains? Start dates generally run from first occupancy or possession — not from the current buyer’s purchase — so a three-year-old home has burned its labour-and-materials term but still carries envelope and structural coverage. That remaining term is a real, sellable feature, and agents who work BC’s new-construction market learn to surface it in listings the way Ontario agents surface a remaining Tarion term.