Your Mortgage Broker Website Is a Regulated Advertisement. Here Is What Alberta, Ontario and BC Require in 2026

Yes, and the rules are stricter than most brokers realise. In Ontario and Alberta, a mortgage website is advertising, so it has to carry the brokerage’s licensed name, the licensee’s name as licensed, and in Ontario the brokerage licence number, on the material itself. British Columbia is about to change entirely: the Mortgage Services Act comes into force on 13 October 2026, replacing an Act from 1972.

By Cody Wise, founder, Wise Media. Last updated 29 September 2026. This article explains how Canadian mortgage regulation and federal advertising law apply to website design. It is not legal advice and it is not compliance advice. Confirm your own obligations with your regulator, your principal broker and, where the stakes warrant it, counsel.

Summary

• Your website is advertising. Provincial mortgage regulation covers public relations and advertising materials, and a website is squarely inside that. So are your landing pages, your social profiles and your paid ad creative.
• Ontario requires four things on the material. FSRA states that public relations materials must carry the licensed name of the agent or broker, their approved title, the sponsoring brokerage’s authorized name, and the brokerage’s licence number.
• Alberta requires the brokerage name exactly as licensed. RECA requires industry professionals to show the brokerage name as it appears on the brokerage’s licence, and their own name as it appears on their licence.
• British Columbia’s framework changes on 13 October 2026. The Mortgage Services Act replaces the Mortgage Brokers Act of 1972. Team provisions follow on 1 April 2027.
• A team name is not a brand you can advertise under. Ontario’s position is that advertising must be in the name of a licensed brokerage. BCFSA requires an approved team name to appear exactly as approved and prohibits advertising as a team before approval.
• A domain name does not have to match your licensed name. FSRA says so explicitly. What has to appear is the authorized name and licence number, clearly and prominently, on the material itself.
• Federal law applies on top. The Competition Act’s false or misleading representation provisions reach every rate claim on every page, regardless of which provincial regulator licenses you.

Table of contents

1. Is my website really “advertising”?
2. What has to appear: the three-province comparison
3. Ontario in detail
4. Alberta in detail
5. British Columbia: what changes on 13 October 2026
6. The federal layer that applies everywhere
7. Where the disclosure actually has to live
8. The mistakes we see most on broker sites
9. A twelve-point audit you can run in twenty minutes
10. Frequently asked questions

Is my website really “advertising”?

Yes. Mortgage regulation in Canada does not carve out websites, and it does not treat a website as a brochure that happens to be online. The operative concept in Ontario is “public relations materials”, which is deliberately broad, and the requirements attach to the material rather than to a particular medium.

The practical implication is the one most web builds get wrong. If the requirement attaches to the material, then it attaches to each piece of material a consumer actually encounters. A standalone landing page reached from a Google ad is a piece of material. A Facebook profile is a piece of material. A downloadable rate sheet is a piece of material. The fact that your main site’s footer is compliant does not travel with any of them.

This is why compliance on a broker site is a design problem rather than a legal-page problem. It has to be built into the template, not bolted on as a terms page.

What has to appear: the three-province comparison

	Ontario (FSRA)	Alberta (RECA)	British Columbia (BCFSA)
Governing framework	Mortgage Brokerages, Lenders and Administrators Act, 2006 and its regulations	Real Estate Act and Real Estate Act Rules	Mortgage Brokers Act until 12 October 2026, then the Mortgage Services Act
Brokerage name required	Yes, the authorized name	Yes, as it appears on the brokerage’s licence	Confirm against the MSA Rules before relying on any summary
Licence number required	Yes, the brokerage’s licence number, clearly and prominently	Not specified in the 2016 advertising guidance	Confirm against the MSA Rules
Individual’s name	Licensed name plus approved title (Mortgage Broker, Broker, Mortgage Agent or Agent)	Name as it appears on the licence; nicknames need an approved AKA	Confirm against the MSA Rules
Team names	Advertising must be in the name of a licensed brokerage. Proposed guidance permits a team name alongside the required elements	Permitted, but must supplement the brokerage name and must not imply the team is itself a brokerage	Must appear exactly as approved by the Superintendent. Cannot advertise as a team before approval. Provisions commence 1 April 2027
Domain name must match licensed name	No, provided the material discloses the authorized name and licence number	Not addressed in the 2016 guidance	Confirm against the MSA Rules

Three notes on reading that table honestly. The Alberta column reflects RECA’s published advertising guidelines, which carry a January 2016 date, so check the current Real Estate Act Rules before you treat it as the last word. The British Columbia column is deliberately incomplete: the detailed marketing requirements sit in the Mortgage Services Act Rules, and this article does not restate a requirement it has not read in the rule text. And the Ontario team-name row rests on proposed guidance rather than a final instrument. Where a row says “confirm”, confirm.

Ontario in detail

FSRA publishes its expectations on a dedicated page covering mortgage industry public relations and advertising requirements. It is short, it is free, and in our experience most broker websites have never been checked against it.

The four elements

FSRA’s position is that every public relations material produced by or for an agent or broker must include:

1. The licensed name of the agent or broker
2. Their approved title: Mortgage Broker, Broker, Mortgage Agent or Agent
3. The sponsoring brokerage’s authorized name
4. The sponsoring brokerage’s licence number

FSRA adds that materials must “clearly and prominently display the brokerage’s authorized name and licence number”, and that a brokerage must carry on business using only its licensed name. The word doing the most work there is “prominently”. A licence number set in nine-point grey at the bottom of a long page is technically present and is not obviously prominent, and prominence is exactly the kind of thing a regulator assesses after the fact rather than in advance.

Your domain does not have to be your licensed name

This is the single most useful thing on FSRA’s page for anyone building a site, and it resolves a question brokers ask constantly. FSRA states that domain names and email addresses need not match the licensed name, provided the materials clearly and prominently disclose the administrator’s or brokerage’s authorized name and licence number.

So you can run a memorable, marketable domain. What you cannot do is let the memorable domain be the only name a consumer sees. Buy the brand, disclose the licence.

Team names, and the prominence test

FSRA’s headline position is that you cannot advertise under a team name, because advertising must be in the name of a licensed brokerage. Its proposed guidance on team names, Interpretation MB0055INT, sets out when a team name is nonetheless acceptable: used alongside the brokerage’s authorized name and licence number and the licensee’s name with their authorized title, with all mortgage documentation completed using only the brokerage’s authorized name.

The proposed guidance also states that the authorized name and licence number of the brokerage should not be less prominent than the team name, and that a team name must not appear or present as if it is an independent licensed brokerage. That is a design specification wearing regulatory clothes. If your team name is a 48-pixel logo in the header and the brokerage name is 11-pixel text in the footer, you have failed a test that is measured in pixels.

Treat MB0055INT as what it is. As of its last update on 11 February 2025 it carries a TBD effective date and remains proposed. It tells you where FSRA’s thinking sits, which is useful, and it is not yet a final instrument.

And the rule underneath all of it

FSRA states the general rule plainly: false, misleading or deceptive information, meaning any information that misrepresents or is so incomplete that it misrepresents the product, is prohibited. “So incomplete that it misrepresents” is the phrase to sit with. A true rate, shown without the conditions that make it attainable, can fail that test on its own.

Alberta in detail

Alberta regulates mortgage brokerages through the Real Estate Council of Alberta under the Real Estate Act and the Real Estate Act Rules, which is unusual in Canada and catches out brokers who move here from another province expecting a standalone mortgage statute.

Names, exactly as licensed

RECA’s advertising guidelines require an industry professional to clearly indicate the name of their brokerage, as it appears on the brokerage’s licence, in all of their own advertising, and to use their own name as it appears on their licence. Nicknames are permitted only where RECA has approved an also-known-as designation. Where a brokerage has registered a trade name with Alberta Registries and RECA has approved it, the full and complete trade name must be used, with no abbreviations.

“No abbreviations” is worth a second look if you are designing a header. A licensed name that runs to forty characters does not get shortened because it looks better in the navigation bar. That is a layout constraint you have to design around rather than trim your way out of.

The guidelines document carries a January 2016 date. Treat it as guidance on RECA’s expectations rather than as the current rule text, and check the Real Estate Act Rules themselves before you rely on any specific wording.

The two rules underneath

• Rule 51(1)(c) requires brokers to ensure the name of the brokerage is clearly indicated in the course of trading, including in any related advertisements.
• Rule 42(a) prohibits licensees from making representations or carrying on conduct that is reckless or intentional and that misleads or deceives any person, or is likely to do so.

Rule 42(a) is Alberta’s version of the same principle FSRA states, and it reaches further than a rate table. An ambiguous headline, a testimonial implying a result that is not typical, or a calculator that produces a number the consumer could not actually obtain are all inside “likely to mislead”, even when every individual figure is accurate.

Teams in Alberta

Team identifiers are permitted, but they supplement the brokerage name rather than replacing it, and a team must not create the impression that it is itself a licensed brokerage. Same design test as Ontario. If a visitor landing cold on your page would name your team as the company they are dealing with, the hierarchy is wrong.

British Columbia: what changes on 13 October 2026

This is the part of the article with a date on it, and the date is close. BCFSA states that the Mortgage Services Act comes into force on 13 October 2026, replacing the Mortgage Brokers Act, which dates from 1972. The BC government approved the accompanying rules and regulations on 14 July 2025, beginning a 15-month transition period.

Put that in perspective. The framework that has governed mortgage services in British Columbia was written before the web existed, before email existed, and before anything resembling a modern consumer protection standard existed. Everything a BC broker does online has been governed by a statute that could not have contemplated any of it. That is why the replacement matters more here than a routine amendment would.

What BCFSA has published so far

• Registrations become licences. Current registrants must complete mandatory transition education by 13 October 2026 for their registrations to convert automatically under the new framework.
• Teams are recognised, from 1 April 2027. BCFSA’s Regulatory Statement 25-018, dated 18 December 2025, sets out the team regime under MSA Rules sections 57 to 59.
• Team names have to be approved, and used exactly. BCFSA states that if a team or any of its members advertises mortgage services, the advertisement must show the team’s name exactly as approved by the Superintendent, and that teams cannot advertise as a team until registration approval is obtained.
• Team names have to read as teams. A team name must convey that a group of individuals from the same brokerage is working together. BCFSA recommends words such as Group, Team, Network or Associates, and states that names suggesting incorporation, of the “Jane Doe and Company” form, will be rejected.

What this article deliberately does not tell you

We are not going to list BC’s marketing disclosure requirements, because the detailed rules sit in the Mortgage Services Act Rules and we could not open the rule text directly while writing this. Rather than repeat a secondary summary of a statute that has not commenced yet, we are telling you where to look: the MSA Rules and Regulation are published on BC Laws, linked from BCFSA’s rules and regulation page, and BCFSA is publishing regulatory statements as the transition proceeds.

If you are commissioning a website build in British Columbia in the next six months, the practical instruction is simple. Do not sign off a design system that hard-codes your current disclosure block. Build the disclosure as a template component you can change in one place across every page, then revisit it against the MSA Rules before 13 October. A site that needs a developer to update a footer is a site that will still be non-compliant in November.

The federal layer that applies everywhere

Provincial mortgage regulation is not the only thing pointed at your website, and brokers routinely miss the federal layer because it is not administered by the body that issues their licence.

• Competition Act, section 74.01(1)(a). The general prohibition on materially false or misleading representations made to the public to promote a product or a business interest. It applies to your rate claims, your “we shop 50 lenders” line and your comparison tables, in every province, regardless of who licenses you.
• Price and fee presentation. If your site quotes anything a consumer pays, the same rules about attainable pricing apply. We covered the mechanics in our guide to drip pricing rules for Canadian websites.
• The due diligence saving. The Competition Act contains a defence where a respondent establishes due diligence. In practice that means a documented review process is worth more than a careful one nobody wrote down. Keep the dated compliance checklist you used, and keep the version of the page it was run against.
• Privacy law on your lead forms. A mortgage enquiry form collects some of the most sensitive personal information a consumer will ever type into a website. Our guide to whether you need a privacy policy in Canada covers the baseline.
• Accessibility. Federally regulated businesses and several provinces carry accessibility obligations that bind websites directly. See our guide to Canadian web accessibility law.

None of these replace your provincial obligations. They sit on top of them, and a page can satisfy FSRA and still fail the Competition Act.

Where the disclosure actually has to live

This is the section that turns a compliance article into a build spec. The requirement attaches to the material, so the disclosure has to appear on every material a consumer can reach, not only on the page your compliance review happened to open.

Surface	What has to be there	How it usually fails
Global site footer	Brokerage authorized name, licence number, licensee name and title	Set too small or too low-contrast to count as prominent
Standalone landing pages	The same block. Every time	Built outside the main theme template, so the footer never renders
Google Business Profile	Business name matching the licensed name	Listed under a team or personal brand name
Social profiles and bios	Brokerage name and licence number in the bio or the pinned information	Only the team logo and a link
Paid ad creative	Disclosure in the creative itself, not only on the destination	Character limits treated as an exemption
Downloadable PDFs and rate sheets	The block, inside the document	Exported from a template that predates the brokerage move
Email signatures and automated replies	The block	Never updated after a licence change
Calculators and rate widgets	Assumptions and conditions beside the output	A clean number with no qualifying text

The prominence test is a CSS problem

“Clearly and prominently”, and “not less prominent than the team name”, are assessed by looking at the page. Three practical rules that keep you out of the argument entirely:

1. Do not set the disclosure smaller than your body copy. If the page reads at 16 pixels, the licence block should not be at 11.
2. Do not set it below the contrast you use for body text. Grey-on-grey legal text is the exact pattern regulators point at.
3. Check it on a phone. A footer that sits four screens below a rate claim is not near the claim. If the claim is above the fold, the qualifier should be reachable without a scroll marathon.

There is a conversion argument here too, and it runs the same direction rather than against it. Visible licensing is a trust signal on a financial page. Consumers who are about to hand over income and credit information respond well to evidence that the person on the other side is accountable to somebody. We made the broader case for this in our piece on what actually converts visitors into loan applications. Compliance and conversion point the same way more often than brokers expect.

The mistakes we see most on broker sites

• The team name is the brand and the brokerage is a footnote. The most common structural failure, and the one both FSRA’s proposed guidance and RECA’s guidelines speak to directly.
• Landing pages built outside the theme. A page builder template, a funnel tool or a campaign microsite that never inherits the site footer. The main site passes review, the page taking the traffic does not.
• A rate shown without its conditions. Insured versus uninsured, term, amortisation, qualifying criteria, whether the rate is still available. “So incomplete that it misrepresents” is FSRA’s own standard.
• Superlatives that cannot be substantiated. Best rates in Canada. Lowest rates guaranteed. Number one broker. If you cannot produce the evidence on request, do not publish the claim.
• A stale licence number after a brokerage move. Agents change sponsoring brokerages and the website keeps the previous brokerage’s name and number for months. This is a fast, unambiguous finding for any regulator who looks.
• Testimonials that imply a typical result. A real quote describing an unusual outcome, presented without context, is capable of misleading even though nobody lied.
• Social bios with no disclosure at all. A profile that markets mortgage services is material. A link in the bio is not a disclosure.
• Nobody owns the review. The disclosure was correct at launch, and there is no calendar entry to check it again. Put one in.

A twelve-point audit you can run in twenty minutes

Open your own site on a phone and work through this list. Write down what you find, and date the page you find it on, because that dated record is the thing a due diligence argument is built from.

• Does the homepage show the brokerage’s authorized name exactly as licensed, with no abbreviation?
• In Ontario, is the brokerage licence number on the page, and is it legible without zooming?
• Is your own name shown as it appears on your licence, with your approved title?
• If you use a team name, is the brokerage name at least as prominent as the team name?
• Open three interior pages at random. Is the block on all three?
• Open every standalone landing page you have running behind an ad. Is the block on those?
• Check your Google Business Profile name against your licensed name.
• Check each social profile bio.
• Open any downloadable PDF on the site. Is the block inside the document?
• Find every rate figure on the site. Is the date, the term and the qualifying condition beside each one?
• Search the site for superlatives. Can you evidence each one today?
• If you are in British Columbia, is your transition education booked before 13 October 2026, and is your disclosure block a single editable template component rather than hard-coded on each page?

Any item you cannot clear in one pass is a fifteen-minute fix today and a much longer conversation if a regulator finds it first.

Frequently asked questions

Does my mortgage broker website have to show my licence number?

In Ontario, yes. FSRA states that public relations materials must clearly and prominently display the brokerage’s authorized name and licence number, alongside the licensed name of the agent or broker and their approved title. Alberta’s published advertising guidance requires the brokerage name as it appears on the licence and the individual’s name as licensed, and does not specify a licence number. In British Columbia, confirm against the Mortgage Services Act Rules, which replace the Mortgage Brokers Act on 13 October 2026.

Can my website domain be different from my brokerage’s name?

In Ontario, yes. FSRA states that domain names and email addresses do not have to match the licensed name, provided the materials clearly and prominently disclose the brokerage’s authorized name and licence number. You can run a memorable domain. You cannot let it be the only name a consumer sees.

Can I advertise under my team name?

Not on its own. FSRA’s position is that advertising must be in the name of a licensed brokerage, and its proposed team-name guidance permits a team name only alongside the brokerage’s authorized name and licence number and the licensee’s name and title, with the brokerage details no less prominent than the team name. RECA permits team identifiers that supplement rather than replace the brokerage name. BCFSA requires an approved team name to be shown exactly as approved and prohibits advertising as a team before approval, with team provisions commencing 1 April 2027.

When does BC’s Mortgage Services Act come into force?

BCFSA states that the Mortgage Services Act comes into force on 13 October 2026, replacing the Mortgage Brokers Act of 1972. The BC government approved the rules and regulations on 14 July 2025, starting a 15-month transition. Existing registrants must complete mandatory transition education by 13 October 2026 for their registrations to convert automatically. The team provisions commence 1 April 2027.

Do these rules apply to my Facebook and Instagram pages?

Treat them as advertising, because that is what they are. The Ontario requirements attach to public relations materials rather than to a medium, and a profile that markets mortgage services is material. Put the brokerage’s authorized name and licence number in the bio or in the profile’s information section, and put them in the ad creative itself rather than relying on the destination page.

What happens if my website is not compliant?

Provincial regulators can take a range of actions, and the specific consequences depend on the province, the conduct and its history, so this article will not guess at them. Two things are worth knowing regardless. Advertising breaches are unusually easy for a regulator to establish, because the evidence is a public web page and needs no investigation. And a documented, dated compliance review is materially more useful than an undocumented careful one if a question ever arises.

Is my rate table a compliance risk?

It can be, and the risk is rarely that a number is wrong. FSRA’s standard reaches information that is “so incomplete that it misrepresents” the product. A rate shown without its term, amortisation, insured or uninsured status, qualifying conditions and the date it was accurate can mislead while remaining literally true. Date every rate and publish the conditions beside it.

Who is responsible, me or my web designer?

You and your brokerage. The obligation attaches to the licensee and the brokerage, not to the vendor who built the page. That is exactly why the disclosure belongs in the template rather than in a vendor’s memory, and why a compliance review should be a named line item in the build rather than an assumption.

The short version

A mortgage broker’s website is a regulated advertisement, and the regulators have already published what has to be on it. Ontario is the most specific and the easiest to check yourself. Alberta is name-exactness and an anti-misleading rule with a wide reach. British Columbia is about to replace a statute written in 1972, on 13 October 2026, and anybody commissioning a BC build this quarter should be planning for it now rather than after.

The fix is almost always architectural rather than legal. Build the disclosure as one template component, make sure every landing page inherits it, size it like content rather than like fine print, and put a recurring calendar entry on reviewing it. That is a morning of work and it removes an entire category of risk.

Have your broker site reviewed before the rules change

We build and rebuild websites for mortgage brokers, realtors and property businesses across Canada, and a compliance pass is part of how we scope every one of them. If you are in British Columbia, the window before 13 October 2026 is the right time to look at this. If you are in Ontario or Alberta, the twelve-point audit above will tell you in twenty minutes whether you have a problem worth fixing.

See our website packages for what a rebuild includes, or our website growth packages if the site is sound and the traffic is the problem. When you are ready, tell us about your site through our intake form and we will come back with a scoped recommendation. If you work with realtors as well as lenders, our guide to CREA DDF display compliance for realtor websites covers the equivalent trap on the real estate side.