Coach house, carriage house and laneway house all describe a detached secondary home in a rear yard. The differences are regional terminology and the specific bylaw that governs each. Coach house is the live planning term in Surrey and Ottawa; laneway house in Vancouver, Burnaby and Coquitlam; laneway suite in Toronto — where it means something narrower, because a lane is required.
- Same building type — the word tracks the city, not the design
- Coach house: Surrey, Ottawa. Laneway house: Vancouver, Burnaby, Coquitlam
- Toronto splits the category: laneway suite (lane required) vs garden suite (no lane)
- The real differences that survive: lane access, size caps, and whether you can strata it
- Carriage house is historical and descriptive — almost no Canadian bylaw uses it
This is a terminology question with a practical edge. If you search the wrong word you land on the wrong city’s bylaw, and the numbers you take away won’t apply to your lot.
This guide is the comparison only. For what each building actually is, see our guides on the coach house, the carriage house and the laneway house.
The terms side by side
| Term | What it means | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Coach house | Detached rear-yard dwelling | Live planning term — Surrey, Ottawa |
| Laneway house | Detached rear-yard dwelling, typically lane-accessed | Live planning term — Vancouver, Burnaby, Coquitlam |
| Laneway suite | Rear-yard dwelling on a lot abutting a public lane | Live planning term — Toronto |
| Garden suite | Rear-yard dwelling not on a public lane | Live planning term — Toronto, Mississauga, Brampton |
| Garage suite | Dwelling above or attached to a garage | Edmonton — now under “Backyard Housing” |
| Carriage house | The historical original | Descriptive; almost no live bylaw use |
All six describe a self-contained home in the rear yard with its own kitchen, bathroom, sleeping area and entrance. What changes is which document governs it.
Where each word is official
Coach house — Surrey and Ottawa run their rear-yard suite programmes under this name. Surrey is a HouseLyft market; if you’re there, this is your search term.
Laneway house — Vancouver has permitted these since 2009 and has more built than anywhere in Canada. Burnaby and Coquitlam use the same term.
Laneway suite and garden suite — Toronto uses both, and they are genuinely different categories rather than synonyms. See below.
Garage suite / Backyard Housing — Edmonton. Note the change: Zoning Bylaw 20001 now regulates rear-yard units under the single heading Backyard Housing, replacing the former garage suite and garden suite terms. Older Edmonton content uses the retired words.
Carriage house — historically the same building as a coach house, and the two words survive in different regions out of habit. Today it’s descriptive language rather than a regulatory category.
The real differences
Strip away the vocabulary and three genuine differences remain.
1. Lane access
Toronto is the one place where this is a category boundary, not a detail. The City defines a garden suite as accommodation in an ancillary building ”usually located in the rear yard, but not on a public lane,“ while a laneway suite is ”typically located in the back yard next to a public laneway.”
Two categories, two rulebooks, one physical idea. If your Toronto lot has no lane, you’re not disqualified — you’re in the garden suite rules, which cover most of the city. A great many homeowners conclude the opposite and stop investigating.
Elsewhere, lane access is usually practical rather than definitional: a lane provides ready-made servicing and construction access, which helps, but its absence doesn’t put you in a different category.
2. Size caps
These differ meaningfully, and they’re the numbers worth getting right:
- Toronto garden suite — total floor area 60 m², with a 45-degree angular plane applying from 4.0 m in height, measured from the required rear and side yard setbacks
- Toronto laneway suite — footprint capped at 8 m × 10 m, with separation from the main house of at least 4.0 m where the ancillary building is no taller than 4.0 m, rising to 7.5 m where it’s taller. No parking spaces required
- Vancouver laneway house — up to 0.25 FSR, roughly 186 m² (2,000 sq ft), increased in 2023 so laneway houses could accommodate families. R1-1 infill height limited to two storeys up to 8.5 m
- Edmonton backyard housing — 20% site coverage, 6.8 m height (4.3 m where the rear lot line abuts a lower-height residential site), and 60 m² second storey per dwelling — 70 m² with Inclusive Design
Note that Toronto’s 60 m² is a total and Edmonton’s 60 m² caps the second storey only. Same number, different meaning — a good illustration of why the source matters.
3. Whether you can strata it
The most consequential difference, and the least discussed.
In most Canadian municipalities a rear-yard unit cannot be sold separately. Edmonton’s bylaw states it outright: backyard housing must not be subdivided from the principal dwellings on the site, or form part of a bare land condominium. Toronto laneway suites are not normally severable.
Vancouver is the exception worth knowing about. Its R1-1 zone permits a multiplex option of three to six ownership (strata) units, or up to eight secured rental units, on a single lot. That’s a different product from a laneway house — but if separate ownership matters to you, that’s the route to investigate rather than trying to strata a laneway house.
Which applies to you
Straightforward: the one your municipality uses.
- Surrey or Ottawa → search coach house
- Vancouver, Burnaby, Coquitlam → search laneway house
- Toronto → check whether your lot backs onto a public lane. Lane → laneway suite. No lane → garden suite
- Mississauga, Brampton → search garden suite
- Edmonton → search backyard housing (and garage suite for older material)
What not to search: ADU, which is an American planning term appearing in almost no Canadian bylaw, and granny flat, which is Australian and British.
Where to check
Go to your municipality’s own website and use its internal search rather than a general search engine. Municipal pages carry a date modified stamp, and that stamp is the single most useful thing on the page — a lot of third-party content about Canadian rear-yard suites is two years stale, and Edmonton’s terminology change and Vancouver’s 2023 size increase are both recent enough to have caught it out.
Once you’ve found the right page, the things to write down are: your zone, the maximum size, the height limit, the setbacks, whether parking is required, and whether the unit can ever be separately titled.
Our zoning and bylaws guide covers what a municipality assesses, and our service areas page lists the markets we work in.
Find out which category your lot falls into
The word tells you which rulebook to read. What that rulebook permits on your lot depends on your dimensions, setbacks and servicing.
HouseLyft’s free property assessment resolves it for your specific address across the markets we cover. Request your free report.
This guide explains municipal terminology and provisions in general terms and is not legal advice. Bylaw definitions and size limits differ between municipalities and are amended periodically — confirm the current provisions with your own municipality.
Checked by Lee Yousaf, Founder