By A.J. Keilty, President, KEILTY Realty Management
Before a lease is signed, yes. After it is signed, no. An Ontario landlord can decline an applicant who discloses a pet, but the moment a tenancy agreement exists, any clause in it that bans animals is void by law, and the pet can move in regardless of what the lease says. Section 14 of the Residential Tenancies Act, 2006 makes that unambiguous, and no wording you add to the lease changes it.
That one sentence catches a lot of Ontario owners off guard. People sign a lease with "no pets" written into it, feel protected, and find out a year later that the clause was never worth anything. Here is how the rule works, what you can still do about a problem animal, and why a pet policy that fits the law usually rents faster anyway.
Section 14 is one sentence long. A provision in a tenancy agreement prohibiting the presence of animals in or about the residential complex is void. Not unenforceable in some situations, not subject to a reasonableness test. Void, meaning it has no legal effect from the start.
Ontario is the only province in Canada with that provision written directly into its residential tenancy statute. Landlords in Alberta, British Columbia, and Nova Scotia can write enforceable pet restrictions into a lease. Ontario landlords cannot. If you are managing rentals across provinces, or you moved here from a market where pet clauses stick, this is the rule that trips you up.
A few practical consequences follow from that one sentence:
The government's own standard form of lease (Form 2229E) spells this out in its guide, and since 2018 that form has been mandatory for most residential tenancies in Ontario. If you are still using an old template with a pet prohibition in it, you are putting an invalid term in front of a tenant on a form that tells them it is invalid.
This is the one real exception, and it is narrower than owners hope. If the unit sits in a condominium and the condo corporation's declaration, by-laws, or rules restrict animals, the tenant has to follow those rules. The restriction is not coming from your lease, it is coming from the corporation, so section 14 does not void it.
Two cautions. First, the restriction has to exist in the condo documents themselves, not in a property manager's email or an informal building custom. Pull the declaration and the rules and read them. Second, a blanket ban in the declaration is not treated the same way as a rule limiting the size or number of animals, and the enforcement path runs through the corporation rather than your lease. If you own a condo unit and pets matter to you, get the documents reviewed before you list. You are relying on someone else's paperwork.
Yes. The Act protects tenants, and an applicant is not yet a tenant. Until a tenancy agreement exists, you are free to choose a different applicant, and having a dog is not a protected ground under the Ontario Human Rights Code.
Do not overread that, though. Two things narrow it in practice.
The first is service animals and support animals, covered further down. An applicant who needs an animal because of a disability is in a completely different legal position than an applicant who wants a cat.
The second is that the screening decision has to stand on its own, and it has to be documented like every other screening decision. If your file shows you passed on the applicant with the strongest income and rental history and picked a weaker one, and the only visible difference is the dog, you have created a record you may not want. It is also worth being honest about what you are trading away. In a softening rental market, refusing every applicant with a pet in a city like Peterborough or Cornwall can add weeks of vacancy, and vacancy costs real money while the pet costs a hypothetical amount. Our vacancy loss calculator puts a number on that trade.
For a fuller picture of where the screening line sits, see what a landlord can legally ask for when screening a tenant in Ontario.
No. Ontario allows exactly two deposits, and neither of them is a pet deposit. Section 105 of the Act prohibits security deposits outright, and section 106 caps the rent deposit at one rent period, which is where "last month's rent" comes from. A key deposit is permitted, limited to the actual replacement cost of the key.
A pet deposit, a pet fee, a cleaning deposit, a damage deposit, or an extra monthly charge described as pet rent are all illegal in Ontario. A tenant who paid one can file a T1 application with the Landlord and Tenant Board, and the Board can order it repaid. We covered the deposit rules in more depth in can you charge a damage deposit in Ontario.
You still have recourse on damage. It just comes after the fact rather than up front. A tenant is responsible for damage they or their guests cause, animal or otherwise, and you recover it through an application to the Board, not through money you held in advance.
Section 76 of the Act is the answer, and it sets a specific bar. The Board cannot order eviction over an animal unless it is satisfied that the tenant is keeping the animal and that one of three things is true:
Read the wording closely. It is about behaviour, allergy, or danger. It is never about the animal simply existing, and it is never about your lease.
In practice this is usually noise or damage, and barking is the single most common pet complaint that reaches the Board. Substantial is the operative word. One neighbour who finds a dog irritating is not enough. A pattern of late-night barking, documented by multiple residents over weeks, with dates and times, is a different file.
What decides these hearings is almost always the quality of the record. Written complaints from other residents with dates, your written notices to the tenant, photographs of damage, and a clear timeline. Verbal complaints relayed second-hand rarely survive a hearing.
The Act says serious allergic reaction, and the Board expects medical evidence to back it up. A note stating that someone is allergic to cats will not carry an eviction application. A physician's documentation describing the severity of the reaction and its connection to the animal's presence is what the section contemplates. This is a real ground, but it is an evidentiary one.
The inherently dangerous branch of section 76 is narrow and rarely the winning argument on its own. Ontario's separate Dog Owners' Liability Act restricts pit bulls province-wide, and some municipalities layer their own animal control by-laws on top, including licensing and limits on the number of animals per household. Those are worth knowing, because they are the rules that actually apply in your building even though they are not in your lease.
Getting this wrong is one of the most common ways a legitimate pet complaint dies at the Board.
An N5 covers damage and disturbance, and it is the right form for the ordinary version of a pet problem: barking, a scratched floor, waste left in common areas. A first N5 in a six-month window is voidable, meaning the tenant has seven days to correct the problem and the notice dies. That seven-day window is not a weakness in the process, it is usually the point. Most pet complaints resolve there, with the tenant addressing the barking or repairing the damage, and you never see a hearing.
An N7 covers serious problems: wilful damage, serious impairment of someone's safety, illegal acts. It is a ten-day notice with no void period. It is the right form for a genuinely dangerous animal and the wrong form for a noisy one. Reaching for an N7 because it feels stronger is how applications get dismissed and how you end up starting over three months later.
Either way, the notice has to describe specific conduct on specific dates. "Tenant has a dog that bothers people" is not a notice. It is a dismissal waiting to happen.
A service animal is not a pet, and the analysis is not the RTA, it is the Ontario Human Rights Code. Where a tenant or applicant needs an animal because of a disability, you have a duty to accommodate that need up to the point of undue hardship, and the Ontario Human Rights Commission treats undue hardship as a high bar. Preferring a pet-free building is nowhere close to meeting it.
Practically, that means a guide dog or other service animal comes in even in a building with a condo pet restriction, and you cannot charge extra rent or a deposit for it. Support animals sit in a more contested space, and the strength of the request depends on the documentation connecting the animal to a disability-related need. The safe operating rule: consider the request in good faith, ask only for the information you need to assess it, and get advice before refusing. Human rights applications are slower and more expensive than any pet problem you were trying to avoid.
Owners assume pets mean damage. The arithmetic is usually less clear than that.
Roughly half to two-thirds of Canadian households have a pet, depending on which survey you read. Whatever the exact figure, screening out every pet owner removes a large share of your applicant pool. In Ontario's 2026 market, where asking rents have softened and vacancy has widened in several cities, that pool matters. We wrote about the current conditions in what rising vacancy and falling asking rents mean for landlords.
Meanwhile the thing you were trying to prevent is not prevented. The clause is void, so a tenant who wants a dog can get one after move-in. What a restrictive posture actually accomplishes is a smaller pool of applicants and a tenant who does not tell you about the animal, which is worse than one who does.
The pet owners we see stay longer, too, which is the part that rarely makes it into the spreadsheet. Finding a rental that takes a large dog is hard enough that people who find one do not move casually. Longer tenancies mean fewer turnovers, and a turnover costs more than most pet damage claims.
You cannot ban animals, but you can set expectations that are enforceable because they restate obligations the tenant already has. Useful additions to the standard lease include:
Then do the thing that actually protects you, which is documentation. A thorough move-in inspection with dated photographs of floors, trim, and doors is worth more than any clause. When a damage claim happens two years later, the photographs are the case.
Handled well, a pet issue is a short paper trail and a phone call. A neighbour complains about barking, the complaint gets logged with a date, the tenant gets a written note describing the specific conduct, and the problem stops. If it does not stop, the second complaint lands on a file that already has a record, and the N5 that follows is specific enough to survive.
Handled poorly, the same issue becomes a landlord insisting the lease says no pets, a tenant who knows the clause is void, months of escalating friction, and eventually an application that fails on the evidence. The law was never really the problem in that version. The process was.
KEILTY manages residential and commercial rentals across Ontario, from Kingston and Belleville through Peterborough, Oshawa, Cornwall, and Ottawa. Owners come to us with exactly this kind of question, and the answer is almost never a clever lease clause. It is knowing which notice applies, keeping a record that stands up, and pricing the unit so it does not sit empty while you hold out for a pet-free applicant. Our pricing is a flat monthly rate per unit rather than a percentage of rent, so it does not climb as your rent does. The current numbers are on the single-family rental page, and if you are weighing whether to keep doing this yourself, management versus self-management lays out the comparison.
If you own a rental in Ontario and you are not sure whether your lease, your pet policy, or your rent is where it should be, request a free rental evaluation. We will tell you what the unit should rent for, what needs fixing before it goes to market, and where your current paperwork leaves you exposed. Or just get in touch and ask.
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