Rat Control in York Region

Rats are far less common across York Region than mice, but when they do turn up, clearing them means working the outside of the property, not just the inside. Norway rats live in burrows in the ground, come up under decks and along foundations, and move between lots, so a treatment that stops at the kitchen never holds. A real job finds the burrows, seals the openings a rat can push through, and only then puts down bait in locked stations. Most York Region rat jobs run $300 to $600 or more, take a first visit plus follow-ups, and carry our two-month guarantee. Droppings the size of a raisin, holes in the yard, or grease-blackened runs along the fence mean rats, and they rarely show up one at a time.

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The signs it is rats, not mice

Rat droppings are about three times the size of mouse droppings, roughly the length of a raisin, with blunt rounded ends rather than the small pointed grains a mouse leaves. That single difference tells you which animal you are dealing with and which plan you need.

• Droppings the size of a raisin, dark, capsule-shaped with blunt ends, usually clustered near a food source, along a wall, or by a burrow entrance.
• Burrows in the yard: smooth holes two to four inches across, often against the foundation, under a deck or shed, beside a garbage bin, or into a compost pile, with a fan of loose dirt at the opening.
• Runs and grease marks along fences, foundations, and the base of walls, darker and wider than a mouse leaves because a rat's body is bigger and follows the same path nightly.
• Gnawing on wood, plastic bins, weep holes, and door corners, with shavings underneath. A rat can widen a small gap into an entry in a night.
• Sound in walls, ceilings, or under the deck at dusk, heavier than the light scurrying of a mouse.

If the droppings are small and pointed, read the mouse control page instead, because the treatment is different. Mice are an indoor entry problem. Rats are a yard-and-neighbourhood problem that happens to come inside.

Norway rats are the rat you will see here

When there is a rat in York Region, it is almost always a Norway rat, also called the brown or sewer rat. It burrows rather than climbs, prefers the ground floor and the basement, and nests outdoors through the warm months before pushing inside as the weather turns. That behaviour is why the burrow, not the snap trap, is the centre of the job. A Norway rat will dig a burrow system three feet long with a main entrance and a bolt-hole escape, and it will keep using it as long as there is food and cover nearby.

Kill the rats inside and leave the burrows in the yard, and you have cleared a shift, not a colony. The next set moves in through the same holes within weeks.

Why rats are less of a York Region problem, and where they still show up

York Region is not the dense, older city core where rats thrive. Most of it is newer subdivisions on newer servicing, lower density, and fewer of the old brick-and-block basements and laneways that give rats year-round harbourage. That is why the region sees far more mouse work than rat work. Where rats do turn up, it tends to be in the older pockets, the established parts of Thornhill, Unionville, and downtown Richmond Hill and Newmarket, and around active construction, which turns over soil and pushes any existing colony out into the surrounding streets. Garbage and green-bin organics, backyard compost, dropped fruit, and the cover under decks and sheds feed and shelter them once they arrive.

That is why we start outside. We walk the property line, the foundation, the deck, the shed, and the garbage area, and we find where the rats are living before we decide where anything goes. Bait in the kitchen does nothing about a burrow under the back deck.

Why bait alone fails

Bait has a place, but on its own it is the slowest and least reliable way to clear rats, and around a home it carries real risk. Health Canada requires rodenticides near homes to be used inside tamper-resistant stations, locked boxes a rat can enter but a pet or child cannot, precisely because loose bait poisons the wrong animals. See the PMRA guidance on rodenticide safety.

Three problems with a bait-only approach:

1. It does not close the door. New rats keep arriving through the same burrows and gaps, so the station empties forever and the problem never ends.
2. It can kill a rat in your wall. A poisoned rat dies wherever it happens to be, and a decomposing rat in a wall cavity smells for a week or more with no way to reach it.
3. It moves up the food chain. A poisoned rat that staggers into the open can be eaten by a cat, a dog, an owl, or a hawk, which is part of why the industry is moving toward reduced-rodenticide, integrated methods.

The bait supports the work. It does not replace it.

Exclusion is the part that lasts

Exclusion means sealing the openings a rat uses so the ones you remove cannot be replaced. A rat can squeeze through a gap about the size of a quarter, roughly 20 millimetres, and will gnaw a smaller one wider. So the sealing has to be done in materials a rat cannot chew: galvanized hardware cloth, sheet metal, mortar, and concrete, not foam or steel wool alone, which a determined rat defeats.

The usual entry points we close on a York Region property: gaps where pipes and utilities enter the foundation, deteriorated mortar and foundation cracks, uncapped drain and vent openings, gaps under garage doors, and holes gnawed at door and frame corners. Outside, we collapse and backfill active burrows once the colony is controlled, so the harbourage is gone for good.

The neighbourhood dimension

Rats do not respect a property line. A colony living in a neighbour's woodpile, an unmanaged compost two doors down, or a construction site at the end of the street will keep sending rats onto your lot no matter how clean your own yard is. That is the frustrating part of a rat problem and the reason it is partly a shared, civic problem rather than a private one.

You can control your own property, which you are required to do, and you can report the wider source so your municipality can act on it. We cover what to control and what to report, including who to contact and when, on the York Region rat problem page. On the ground, the practical move is to remove the food and cover on your side while the whole block does the same, because a single sealed yard beside ten open ones is a much harder win.

Your legal duty to keep the property rodent-free

In York Region you are not just allowed to deal with rats, you are required to. Each local municipality, Markham, Vaughan, Richmond Hill, Newmarket, Aurora and the rest, runs a property-standards bylaw that puts the responsibility on the owner to keep the property free of rodents and to clear the conditions that harbour them, and York Region Public Health backs that up on the health side. An owner who ignores a rat problem can face an order and enforcement, not just an infestation.

Common questions

Reviewed August 2026.

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