By A.J. Keilty, President, KEILTY Realty Management
Yes, on a question of law, within 30 days, and to a court rather than back to the Board. Section 210 (1) of the Residential Tenancies Act, 2006 gives any person affected by an order of the Landlord and Tenant Board a right of appeal to the Divisional Court. It is not a second hearing, it will not fix a finding of fact you disagree with, and it is a different thing from the review the Board can do itself. The two run on different clocks from different triggers, and on a single order there can be three deadlines running at once.
The short version.
We set out the review route in full in what you can do if you disagree with an LTB order. This page is the other half: what happens once you leave the Board and go to court. Here is the machinery, the arithmetic, and the two places the Board's own published wording does not match the Act.
Only if what went wrong is a legal error, and that is a narrower category than a bad outcome.
Section 209 (1) sets the starting position: "Except where this Act provides otherwise, and subject to section 21.2 of the Statutory Powers Procedure Act, an order of the Board is final and binding." Keep both opening qualifiers, because they are what make anything else on this page possible. The Act provides otherwise in section 210, and section 21.2 of the other Act is where the Board's power to review its own order comes from.
Interpretation Guideline 8, Review of an Order, dated 2026-07-01, draws the line between the two in one sentence: "A review is not an appeal or an opportunity to change the way a case was presented. It is a discretionary process to allow parties to challenge a final LTB order in specific circumstances". Read that from the other side and you have the shape of an appeal. It is not discretionary, it is not confined to prescribed circumstances, and it is not decided by the Board. What it is confined to is a question of law.
So the first question is diagnostic rather than tactical. If the Member misread a section of the Act, applied the wrong test, or decided something they had no jurisdiction to decide, that is a question of law. If the Member believed the tenant's evidence rather than yours, that is a finding of fact, and section 210 (1) does not reach it. Getting that wrong costs you the window on the route that would have worked.
A wider group than you might expect, on a narrower ground than you might hope.
Section 210 (1) reads, in full: "Any person affected by an order of the Board may appeal the order to the Divisional Court within 30 days after being given the order, but only on a question of law."
Note the opening words. It is any person affected by the order, not any party to the application. Somebody who was never named but whose position the order changes is within the wording. Note also the closing words, which are the whole limit: "but only on a question of law". There is no leave requirement, so an appeal on that ground is available as of right, and there is no threshold amount.
The Act does not define a question of law. The Board's brochure Amendments, Reviews and Appeals, last updated July 2026, offers a working description: "An error in law can include when the LTB Member incorrectly interprets or applies the Residential Tenancies Act or some other legal test that is important to the decision." Read the word "include", because that is an open list rather than a definition, and read "important to the decision", because an error that made no difference to the result is a poor foundation for an appeal.
One provision sits behind arguments about defects in the paperwork, and it is worth knowing before you build one. Section 212 (1) says "Substantial compliance with this Act respecting the contents of forms, notices or documents is sufficient", and section 212 (2), added in 2024 and in force 2024-12-04, adds that an error in contents "still constitutes substantial compliance with this Act, as long as the error does not significantly prejudice a party's ability to participate in a proceeding under this Act". A paperwork imperfection is not by itself a question of law, and section 212 is the reason.
On the Act, the day you are given the order. On the Board's brochure, the day the Board makes it. Those are not the same day, and the difference is yours to carry.
Section 210 (1) says "within 30 days after being given the order". The brochure says: "The deadline to appeal an LTB order to the Divisional Court is 30 days after the LTB makes the order." An order made on a Wednesday and received the following Tuesday produces two different deadlines depending on which of those you follow, and the later one is the one the statute gives you.
We are not going to tell you to rely on the statute and ignore the publisher, because the consequence of being wrong is that you have no appeal. What we will say is which is which. Section 210 (1) is the law and the brochure is a plain-language summary of it, and where a summary and a statute diverge the statute governs. The safe course is to work the earlier date, which is the brochure's, and treat the statutory date as the margin you hope not to need. If you are close to either, that is the point to get advice rather than to reason it out from a webpage.
The brochure does add the escape, and it is worth having: "If the 30-day deadline has passed, you can bring a motion to the Divisional Court requesting an extension of time." That motion is to the court and not to the Board, and there is nobody at the Board who can extend a deadline the Act gives you for going somewhere else. Be careful with the authority for it, though, because the obvious rule does not quite reach. Rule 3.02 (3) of the Rules of Civil Procedure provides that an order extending or abridging "a time prescribed by these rules and relating to an appeal to an appellate court may be made only by a judge of the appellate court". The 30 days here is prescribed by section 210 (1) of the Act rather than by the Rules, so Rule 3.02 (3) tells you where an extension motion of that kind is heard without itself being the power to extend a statutory period. This is a point to take advice on rather than to work out from a webpage, and the shorter answer is not to need it.
Fifteen days, thirty days and thirty days, running from three different events. Work them on a Cornwall file. The Board issues an order on Wednesday 2026-10-07 and you are given it on Tuesday 2026-10-13.
Three routes, two of them thirty days, and the judicial review deadline falls six days before the appeal deadline because the clocks start on different events. That is the point of the whole exercise. The number of days tells you nothing until you know what it counts from.
One honest caveat on the third of those. "Made or occurred" is not the same phrase as either "issuance" or "being given", and neither the Act nor the regulation tells you which event it picks up on a Board order. We have read it as the date the order was made because that is the ordinary sense of the words and it produces the earlier date. That is our reading rather than something the statute settles, and the direction of the risk is why we take the earlier one.
Section 209 (3) carries its own relief, and it is the Board's to give: the 15 days applies "unless the Board considers it just and appropriate in the circumstances to extend the time to request the review". Section 5 (2) of the Judicial Review Procedure Act carries the equivalent for judicial review, and it is conditional on two things, that the court "is satisfied that there are apparent grounds for relief and that no substantial prejudice or hardship will result to any person affected by reason of the delay".
Under the court's rules, and not under the Board's. This is the trap on the arithmetic above.
The Board's Rules of Procedure set a counting convention at Rules 1.12 to 1.15, and Rule 1.16 says those may not be waived or varied. They govern the Board's own time limits, which is why they reach the 15 day review request and stop there. An appeal is a court filing and it is counted under Rule 3.01 (1) of the Rules of Civil Procedure, which opens "In the computation of time under these rules or an order, except where a contrary intention appears".
Two things in that rule change the answer from what a reader used to the Board would expect.
So on a court deadline you count every day and check only the last one. Both of the dates in the section above, Thursday 2026-11-12 and Friday 2026-11-06, are ordinary weekdays and neither moves.
One further point about which 30 days is which. Rule 61.04 (1) of the Rules of Civil Procedure sets a general 30 days for serving a notice of appeal, running "after the making of the order appealed from", but it does so expressly "unless a statute or these rules provide otherwise". Section 210 (1) is such a statute. The two periods happen to be the same length and they are not the same period, because the Rule runs from the making of the order and the Act runs from your being given it.
Yes by default, and the provision that does it is not in the Act at all.
Section 210 contains no stay. We searched the whole of sections 209 to 212 for the words stay and suspend and neither appears anywhere in them. The stay comes from section 25 (1) of the Statutory Powers Procedure Act: "An appeal from a decision of a tribunal to a court or other appellate body operates as a stay in the matter unless, (a) another Act or a regulation that applies to the proceeding expressly provides to the contrary; or (b) the tribunal or the court or other appellate body orders otherwise."
Carry both exceptions, because the Board's brochure does not. Its wording is "An appeal to the Divisional Court automatically stays the LTB's order until the court makes a decision on the appeal. In some cases, the court may order the stay lifted before making a final decision." That picks up half of exception (b) and drops the rest. On the statute, the tribunal can order otherwise as well as the court, and a contrary provision in another Act or regulation displaces the stay entirely, provided it does so expressly. The stay is the default rather than an absolute, and it is worth knowing which of those you are relying on before you tell a tenant an eviction is off.
The Board reads the stay as reaching its own hands. The instructions to the Request to Review an Order, last updated July 2026, say: "If the order you want reviewed has been appealed to the Divisional Court, the order is automatically stayed and the LTB cannot consider your Request to Review an Order unless it first decides to lift the stay of the appeal." So an appeal does not merely pause enforcement. On the Board's own reading it pauses the Board.
A separate application to the same court on a different footing, and the absence of the stay is stated expressly rather than left to be inferred.
Section 25 (2) of the Statutory Powers Procedure Act reads: "An application for judicial review under the Judicial Review Procedure Act, or the bringing of proceedings specified in subsection 2 (1) of that Act is not an appeal within the meaning of subsection (1)." Subsection (1) is the automatic stay. So judicial review is carved out of it by name.
Nor does the Judicial Review Procedure Act supply one of its own. We searched the whole Act for the word stay on 2026-09-07 and it does not appear once. What it does give you is section 4: "On an application for judicial review, the court may make such interim order as it considers proper pending the final determination of the application." That is a discretionary order you have to go and ask for, on notice, and it is the practical difference between the two routes. An appeal buys you time on filing. Judicial review buys you a motion.
The route itself is section 2 (1), and its opening words matter: "On an application by way of originating notice, which may be styled “Notice of Application for Judicial Review”, the court may, despite any right of appeal, by order grant any relief that the applicant would be entitled to" in proceedings for mandamus, prohibition or certiorari, or for a declaration or injunction about a statutory power. So the existence of the section 210 appeal does not shut judicial review out. Two other subsections are worth knowing before you choose it: section 2 (5) provides, without any condition attached, that "The court may refuse to grant any relief on an application for judicial review", and section 3 lets the court refuse relief where the sole ground is "a defect in form or a technical irregularity" and no substantial wrong or miscarriage of justice has occurred.
And the limitation period is the trap on this route, because it was only added in 2020 and anything written before then says the opposite. Section 5 (1) requires the application to be made "no later than 30 days after the date the decision or matter for which judicial review is being sought was made or occurred", opening with "Unless another Act provides otherwise" and closing "subject to subsection (2)", which is the extension power. That subsection was added by the Smarter and Stronger Justice Act, 2020 and came into force 2020-07-08. Material written before that date says there is no limitation period on judicial review in Ontario, and on this point it is out of date. Section 5 (3) is worth reading alongside it, because it extends the court's extension power to "any limitation of time for the bringing of an application for judicial review under any other Act, unless that Act expressly provides otherwise."
The Divisional Court, which is not a separate court, and three judges unless something unusual happens.
Section 18 (1) of the Courts of Justice Act continues the Divisional Court as "The branch of the Superior Court of Justice known as the Divisional Court", and section 18 (3) makes every judge of the Superior Court also a judge of it. Section 21 (1) is the default: "A proceeding in the Divisional Court shall be heard and determined by three judges sitting together." Section 21 (2) sets out the exceptions, and the one that might occur to an owner in a hurry is not a choice you get to make: clause (c) requires the Chief Justice or a designated judge to be satisfied, from the nature of the issues or "the necessity for expedition", that one judge can and ought to hear it. Section 21 (2) was itself amended effective 2025-12-11, so older summaries of it should be checked rather than trusted.
Where the hearing happens is set by section 20 (1): an appeal to the Divisional Court "shall be heard in the region where the hearing or other process that led to the decision appealed from took place", unless the parties agree otherwise or the Chief Justice orders otherwise in the interests of justice.
One thing to get right if you are drafting the notice yourself. It is section 210 (1) of the Residential Tenancies Act, 2006 that sends a Board order to the Divisional Court, and not section 19 of the Courts of Justice Act. Section 19 lists appeals from Superior Court judges, Family Court judges and associate judges, and it says nothing about tribunals. Rule 61.04 (3) (c) now requires a notice of appeal to state the basis for the court's jurisdiction, including the statutory provision establishing it, so citing the wrong one is a live problem rather than a pedantic one.
On judicial review the destination is the same court by a different provision. Section 6 (1) of the Judicial Review Procedure Act sends the application to the Divisional Court, and section 6 (2) allows it to be made "to the Superior Court of Justice with leave of a judge thereof", but only "where it is made to appear to the judge that the case is one of urgency and that the delay required for an application to the Divisional Court is likely to involve a failure of justice". Two conditions, both required, and leave on top of them.
More than the Board, and none of it appears on the Board's fee page.
The Board's forms, filing and fees page lists a Request to Review an Order at $58. It lists no appeal fee, no appeal form, and the word Divisional does not appear on that page at all. That is not an omission. An appeal is a court proceeding and the fee is a court fee.
The court fees are set by section 1 (1) of O. Reg. 293/92 under the Administration of Justice Act, on a consolidation period running from 2025-12-19. Note its opening words, "The following fees are payable, except in respect of proceedings to which section 1.2 applies", which carves out family law proceedings and does not touch either route on this page. Subparagraph 3 xii sets $243 for filing "A notice of appeal or cross-appeal to an appellate court of a final order of any court or tribunal, other than the Small Claims Court or the Consent and Capacity Board". Subparagraph 1 i sets $243 for issuing a notice of application, which is how a judicial review starts. Paragraph 5 then sets $645 "For perfecting an appeal or judicial review application". So either route is $243 to start and $645 to carry through, before anyone's time is billed.
Those figures move when that regulation moves, so read the formula rather than memorizing the number: the fee is whatever O. Reg. 293/92 says on the day you file. The $58 review fee, by contrast, sits on the Board's page, which also states that "LTB fees are non-refundable."
You can start both, and starting the second one suspends the first.
Nothing in section 209 or section 210 makes them mutually exclusive, and the Board's Rules contemplate the overlap directly. Rule 26.8 lists what a request to review must contain, and two of its ten items are about an appeal: subparagraph (i) requires you to "provide information about any appeal of the order", and subparagraph (j) requires you, "where there is an appeal of the order, indicate the requestor's position on whether the LTB should lift any stay resulting from the appeal". Rule 26.8.1 lets the Board refuse a request that does not comply with all of Rule 26, so those are not optional fields.
Guideline 8 then describes what the Board does with it: "Where an appeal or judicial review has been filed at the Divisional Court and there is a stay in place, the reviewing adjudicator will decide whether to lift any stay that may be in place in order to proceed with the review hearing."
The practical order therefore matters. The review deadline is the shorter of the two and it runs from the earlier event, so on the Cornwall example above it closes on 2026-10-22 while the appeal is open until 2026-11-12. If the review is the route you want, it has to be decided on first. Filing the appeal to protect the longer deadline is what then stops the Board proceeding on the review without deciding to lift the stay, so doing both is not free: it converts a review the Board could simply have heard into one it has to clear a stay to reach.
Four things on an appeal, plus whatever else it considers proper.
Section 210 (4) provides that if an appeal is brought, "the Divisional Court shall hear and determine the appeal and may, (a) affirm, rescind, amend or replace the decision or order; or (b) remit the matter to the Board with the opinion of the Divisional Court." Section 210 (5) adds that the Court "may also make any other order in relation to the matter that it considers proper and may make any order with respect to costs that it considers proper."
Read clause (b), because it is the outcome that is easiest to overlook. Remitting the matter sends it back to the Board with the Court's opinion on the law, and what happens next is another Board hearing. Winning an appeal on a point of law is not the same as winning the case, and on a remittal the facts are decided again by the tribunal that decided them the first time.
The plainer version of that is worth saying once. An order is not money, and neither is a successful appeal. If the order you are appealing was for arrears, the appeal decides whether the order stands; it does not put anything in your account, and the enforcement you paused by filing is the enforcement you will have to restart.
Costs are at large in the court's discretion, and yes, the Board can appear against you.
Section 210 (5) gives the Court the costs power on an appeal, and section 131 (1) of the Courts of Justice Act is the general rule: "Subject to the provisions of an Act or rules of court, the costs of and incidental to a proceeding or a step in a proceeding are in the discretion of the court, and the court may determine by whom and to what extent the costs shall be paid." Keep the opening words. The discretion is not at large in the sense of unconstrained; it is constrained by any Act or rule that speaks to it.
That is a materially different exposure from the Board, where section 204 (2) lets the Board order a party to pay another party's costs and section 204 (4) requires the amount to be "determined in accordance with the Rules". A court costs award on a lost appeal is not bounded the same way.
Two provisions put the Board in the room. Section 210 (2) requires a person appealing to "give to the Board any documents relating to the appeal", and section 210 (3) entitles the Board "to be heard by counsel or otherwise upon the argument on any issue in an appeal". Section 211 goes further still: "The Board is entitled to appeal a decision of the Divisional Court on an appeal of a Board order as if the Board were a party to the appeal." That is a deeming provision rather than a grant of party status, and its practical effect is that beating the Board once does not necessarily end it.
Section 207 (7) is the last piece of the money picture and it is easy to miss: interest on money the Board orders accrues "only after" the date the Board sets, at the post-judgment rate under section 127 of the Courts of Justice Act. A stayed order is not accruing interest on some other basis while you appeal.
Then it is a different request, it goes back to the Board, and reaching for the appeal spends the window on the route that would have worked.
The Board's brochure is called Amendments, Reviews and Appeals for a reason, and the amendment is the first of the three. Where an order contains a clerical mistake, a wrong unit number or a figure that does not match the reasons, the instrument is a request to amend, and Interpretation Guideline 15 is Amending an Order. Rule 16.2 of the Board's Rules treats a request to amend an order as a separate thing from a request to review a decision or order, so they are not two names for one process.
The matching exercise is worth doing deliberately before you file anything, because each route has its own window and they do not wait for each other. A slip in the order is an amendment. An error in how the case was decided, within the closed grounds in O. Reg. 178/26, is a review at the Board, 15 days, $58, and one bite. An error of law is an appeal to the Divisional Court, 30 days, and it carries the section 25 (1) stay that a review does not.
Almost nothing, and it says so itself, which is more useful than an absence would be.
We looked on 2026-09-07. There is no Interpretation Guideline on appeals: the published set runs 1 to 19 plus 21, with no Guideline 20, and none of them is about appealing. The Rules of Procedure never use the words Divisional Court at all, and mention an appeal in only three places, Rule 22.4 on reasons for an order under appeal and Rule 26.8 (i) and (j) on disclosing one. The forms page carries no appeal form and no appeal fee.
What does exist is one section of the Amendments, Reviews and Appeals brochure, and it closes with this: "The LTB does not provide information regarding the Divisional Court appeal process. If you are planning to file an appeal, read the Guide to Appeals in Divisional Court and contact the Divisional Court or seek legal advice."
Take that at face value and plan around it. From the moment you decide to appeal, the Board is not your source, its counting rules do not apply to your deadline, its fee page does not have your fee on it, and its forms are not the forms you need. The notice of appeal is Form 61A.3 under Rule 61 of the Rules of Civil Procedure, and a judicial review application is a notice of application in Form 68A under Rule 68. The appeal form number is the newer of the two: Rule 61.04 (1) was amended by O. Reg. 3/26, which is where Form 61A.3 comes from, while Rule 68.01 (1) carries no amendment later than 1999 and Form 68A is unchanged. So check the appeal form against the current Rules rather than reusing a precedent.
No, and that is unusual enough on this Act to be worth saying.
Sections 209, 210 and 211 sit in Part XII and they speak about "an order of the Board" rather than about a tenancy, a rental unit or a landlord. So they reach whatever the Board has ordered.
Three checks bear that out. Section 7 (1) disapplies a long list of provisions from social housing, and sections 209 to 211 are not on it. Part X, the mobile home park and land lease community rules we set out in what rules apply to a mobile home park or land lease community in Ontario, runs from section 152 to section 167, and not one of those sections touches the appeal route. And on a non-profit housing co-operative under Part V.1, section 94.16 maps a list of provisions across with necessary modifications precisely because those provisions are drafted around tenants and landlords; sections 209 to 211 need no such mapping, because an order of the Board is an order of the Board.
One neighbouring order is worth naming because it looks different and is not. A work order review under section 226 ends in an order of the Board like any other, so it is appealable on the same 30 days and the same question of law. We go through that route in what to do if you get a work order on an Ontario rental property. The municipal property standards order sitting behind it is a different instrument entirely and none of this page reaches it.
None of this is in the Act. It is process, and on a 15 day window it is what decides whether you had a choice.
One thing an owner should hear plainly. On the figures and the machinery above, the appeal is the costliest of the three routes at $243 and $645 against the Board's $58, the slowest, since it goes to a panel of three judges rather than a paper review, and the narrowest, because it is confined to a question of law. It is also the only one that takes the question away from the body that decided it. Those are the trade-offs, and they are worth weighing against the amount actually in dispute before anybody files anything.
The diary you can run yourself. The appeal you should not.
Recording two dates off the face of an order, working three deadlines from three triggers and getting advice inside the shortest of them is administration, and an owner with one or two units can do it. This page is the substance of that step.
What follows is not administration. A notice of appeal now has to plead the basis for the court's jurisdiction, the ground is confined to a question of law, the Board is entitled to appear against you, and costs in a court are not bounded the way the Board's are. That is a proceeding, and the honest advice is that it is one to take to a lawyer or a licensed paralegal rather than to run off a template.
Where KEILTY earns its keep on a file like this is upstream. An appeal is confined to a question of law, so it cannot repair a hearing that went badly on the evidence, and the fix for that is a file assembled while the events were happening rather than the week before the hearing. Dated ledgers, served notices with proof of service, and a maintenance record that exists before anybody asks for it are what make an order go your way in the first place, which is cheaper than any of the three routes above. If you own a building and it is being run off the side of a desk, our small multi-family page sets out how we run it.
Holding an order you think is wrong and not sure which of the three routes fits it? Get in touch and we will work through the dates with you.
This post is general information about Ontario residential tenancy law as of 2026-09-07, not legal advice. Legislation, regulations and tribunal practice change. For advice on a specific property or situation, speak with a lawyer or licensed paralegal.
Ontario property management with published pricing, same-day answers, and no surprises. Since 2003.
300-80 Queen Street