Canada’s Most Popular New Year’s Resolutions in 2025

Christmas is a tough time. It’s not just about getting tons of presents and spending time with your loved ones. It’s also about eating and drinking too much, spinning some Christmas slot games, rotting in front of your favorite Netflix show, generally neglecting your health. Sounds fun, right? Luckily, the New Year is the perfect time to better yourself. 

We’re a good few days into 2025 now, and we’ve been wondering what types of New Year’s Resolutions people have been setting this year. According to marketing company Sago, about 43% of Canadians are planning to set a resolution this year - whether or not you manage to stick to it for more than a few days is another story altogether. Anyway, we decided to analyse search interest, so that we could determine the most popular New Year’s Resolutions for Canadians, going into 2025. 

Believe it or not, resolutions in each province are pretty different. As much as you might think everyone from Alberta to The Yukon might be interested in losing weight and earning more money this year, that isn’t necessarily the case. 

So, firstly, let’s talk about the overall trends for the whole country, and then we’ll get into the differences between the provinces.

What Are Canadians' Resolutions for 2025?

As you may expect, the highest-ranking New Year’s Resolution in the whole of Canada is “weight loss”, which saw a total 876 search score. The simple re-phrasing of “lose weight” had a 822 score, so when you add both of those up, losing weight outranked any of the other resolutions by miles. 

Second on the list was “stop drinking”, which got a total of 706. According to statista.com, alcohol consumption in Canada is dropping, which suggests that people might actually stick with this resolution, at least for a while. 

The theme of health continued at number four, with a 664 search score for “better sleep”. We feel like these results might be slightly skewed because there’s an app called BetterSleep, but seeing it does exactly what it says on the tin, the idea is pretty much the same. 

Rounding out the top five, with 650 is one that might surprise you a little: “win money”. Well, we know one way you can at least try to tick that third one off your list - you could play at one of the online casinos that we recommend here. Sorry, we had to get at least on plus in here. 

On the other end of the spectrum, not that many people were interested in “cooking tips” this year, as it only got 134 on the search score index. Increasing productivity also ranked pretty low on the scale with 185 - and if you can’t be bothered to search for productivity at this point in the year, you can probably safely assume you won’t get to it later.

Canada's New Years Resolutions Province by Province

Onto the provinces! We managed to locate all of those highly productive people in Alberta. For some inexplicable reason, “increase productivity” had the highest amount of searches in the province. Second up was “new hobbies”, and in third place was “win money”. 

As for BC, people here were a lot more interested in wellness. Ranked right at the top was “better sleep”, followed by “stop drinking” and “improve fitness”. We’d love to know how many of those British Columbian’s are persevering with those resolutions so far (a week) into the new year.

Those in Ontario have what we’d consider to be a pretty good split of resolutions. Ranking at number one was “win money” (maybe unsurprising given Ontario casinos have now been legal for some time), number two was “read more”, and in third place was “improve fitness”. 

Yukon was the only area where a certain resolution ranked number one: get a new job. Does that suggest that Yukoners are the least happy in their current jobs? Perhaps. But with almost 70% of Americans expected to set a financial goal this New Year, we’re surprised to see that more Canadians aren’t focused on career and finance goals too. 

In fact, there were only two other mentions of financial goals that didn’t involve winning money. “Get a raise” came up once, in Nova Scotia, and “save money” only ranked in the top three once, and that was in Manitoba. 

Newfoundland and Labrador had some very interesting results. While weight loss topped the list, just like in a few other provinces, second place was “stop smoking” and in third was “cooking tips”. Cooking tips didn’t rank in the top three in any other province, so there must be something going on in Newfoundland and Labrador - perhaps it’s the chilly weather.

Whatever your resolution is, you can take comfort in the fact that there are probably other Canadians out there who’ve had the same idea. But will you manage to stick to them all year? With one survey by Forbes saying that only 1% of people stick out their New Year’s Resolution for the full 12 months, you’ll be a rare sort indeed if you do so. 

Methodology:

We used Google Trends to measure the level of interest in the most popular New Year's resolutions. We examined a number of queries and then determined each province or territory's most searched resolution.

• Data was collected over a 7-day period from Dec 27, 2024 - Jan 4, 2025

In the case where an area had equal levels of interest for multiple resolutions, search volumes for each item using semrush were measured in that area to determine a favorite.

Disclaimer - we can't say for sure whether specific search queries related to people taking up that as a New Year's resolution. We've made that assumption, given the time of year. 

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