By A.J. Keilty, President, KEILTY Realty Management
Short answer: yes, but only if you are an individual owner and someone specific is actually moving in. Ontario lets you end a tenancy for your own use with a Form N12 if you, your spouse, a child or parent of either of you, or a caregiver will live in the unit for at least a year. You need to give at least 60 days' notice ending on the last day of a rental period, and you have to pay the tenant one month's rent before that termination date. Corporations cannot use an N12 at all.
That is the whole rule in a paragraph. The trouble is that almost every N12 that fails at the Landlord and Tenant Board fails on a detail rather than the concept. Wrong termination date. Compensation paid late. No affidavit filed with the application. A rental listing that went up four months later and turned into a bad faith claim. Here is what has to line up, and what changed at the LTB on 2026-07-01.
Section 48 of the Residential Tenancies Act, 2006 limits the intended occupant to a short list:
Siblings are not on that list. Neither are nieces, nephews, in-laws, cousins, or a friend who needs a place for a few months. The LTB has dismissed applications on exactly that basis, and the notice cannot be fixed after it has been served. A defective N12 is dead, and you start again from zero.
The other limit catches a lot of owners by surprise. Since 2017-09-01, section 48 applies only to units owned in whole or in part by an individual. If title sits in a numbered company or a corporation you set up for liability reasons, you cannot serve an N12, and no amount of good intention changes that. The LTB's Interpretation Guideline 12 is blunt about it: earlier decisions that let some corporations use this section are no longer valid.
That is section 49, and it is narrower than most sellers expect. You can serve an N12 on a purchaser's behalf only if there is a firm agreement of purchase and sale, and only if the property is a condominium unit or a residential complex with no more than three units. A four-plex does not qualify. The LTB will also look past the paperwork to the real nature of the deal, so a transfer to a family member at well below market value invites scrutiny under section 202.
One detail that trips up sellers: the obligation to pay the compensation belongs to you, the landlord who served the notice, not to the buyer. Sort that out in the agreement before closing, not after.
At least 60 days, and the termination date has to fall on the last day of a rental period, or the last day of a fixed term if there is one. Both conditions, not either one.
A worked example. Month-to-month tenancy, rent due the first of the month, you serve the notice on 2026-08-20. Sixty days later is 2026-10-19, which is not the last day of a rental period, so the earliest valid termination date is 2026-10-31. Get that wrong by a single day and the notice is defective.
The tenant can leave sooner. Once they have the N12, they can end the tenancy early with ten days' written notice on Form N9. Plan for that, because it can pull your vacancy forward by weeks.
You owe one month's rent in compensation, or you offer the tenant another unit they find acceptable. The payment has to be made by the termination date on the notice, not after the hearing and not when they hand back the keys. If it is not paid by then, the LTB must refuse the eviction. There is no discretion on this point.
Most owners handle it by waiving the last month, so the rent deposit covers the final period and the tenant pays nothing for their last month in the unit. That works, but document it in writing so there is no argument later about whether compensation was actually provided.
Once the notice is served you can file Form L2, and it has to reach the LTB no later than 30 days after the termination date in the notice. File late and it gets dismissed outright.
Three things must go in with it:
That last item exists precisely to catch serial N12s, and members do read it.
Narrower than most people assume, and in a way that helps honest owners. The test is genuine intention, not whether your plan is sensible. In Salter v. Beljinac, 2001 CanLII 40231, the Divisional Court held that once the landlord genuinely intends to occupy the unit, that is enough, even if the choice of that particular unit is driven by economics. Fava v. Harrison, 2014 ONSC 3352, went further: motive is largely irrelevant, the only question is genuine intent.
What the member will weigh is conduct. Have you served N12s before, and did those people actually move in and stay a year? Is there a history of conflict with this tenant that makes the timing look convenient? Occasional use also fails. Keeping the unit as a pied-a-terre, using it as a business office, or leaving it empty have all been found not to be residential occupation.
This is the part worth reading twice, because the exposure lands on you a year later when the unit is long gone.
A former tenant can file a T5 under section 57 within one year of moving out. They have to prove the notice was given in bad faith, that they left because of it, and that nobody named on the notice occupied the unit within a reasonable time. If they succeed, the LTB can order you to pay:
And bad faith is presumed, unless you disprove it, if during the window from the date you gave notice to one year after the tenant left you advertise the unit for rent, sign a lease with someone else, advertise the unit or the building for sale, demolish it, or convert it to non-residential use. The presumption is rebuttable, but you are now the one explaining yourself.
Plans change. People take jobs in other cities and parents decide against the move. If the person named on your N12 backs out before the tenant vacates, withdraw the notice in writing and let the tenancy continue. That conversation is uncomfortable for ten minutes. A section 57 order is expensive for a year.
Tribunals Ontario confirmed several amendments in its operational update of 2026-06-30. Two matter for anyone considering an N12.
First, the deadline to request a review of an LTB order dropped from 30 days to 15. If an order goes against you, or contains an error you need corrected, the window is now half what it was. Diarize it the day the order arrives.
Second, maximum fines for offences under section 236 doubled. Individuals now face up to $100,000, up from $50,000, and corporations up to $500,000, up from $250,000. Those are prosecutions brought by the Rental Housing Enforcement Unit at the Ontario Court of Justice, separate from anything the LTB orders in a T5. Bad faith own-use evictions are exactly the sort of file the RHEU takes on.
The same update also brought in new rules for tenant-installed window and portable air conditioners, a mandatory Payment Agreement form for repayment plans under section 206, and tighter service deadlines on above-guideline increase orders.
Possibly, and this is worth watching rather than acting on. Schedule 12 of Bill 60, the Fighting Delays, Building Faster Act, 2025, would add a provision removing the compensation requirement where a landlord gives a longer notice period. Tribunals Ontario has said some Bill 60 and Bill 97 amendments take effect in September 2026, with details to follow.
As of 2026-07-31 the one month of compensation is still required on every N12. Do not serve a notice today on the assumption that a future rule will excuse the payment. If the change lands and it fits your timeline, use it then.
Sixty days of notice is the floor, not the estimate. Add the wait for a hearing date, which has improved from the worst of the backlog but still runs months in most regions, then the order, then eleven days before the Sheriff can enforce if the tenant does not leave voluntarily. Five to eight months from notice to vacant possession is a realistic planning range, and it can run longer if the tenant disputes the good faith of the notice. We walked through the arithmetic in how long it takes to evict a tenant in Ontario in 2026.
Most tenants who receive a valid N12 leave without a hearing. The ones who do not are usually the ones who suspect the notice is a rent reset in disguise, which is another reason to keep your paperwork clean from day one.
An N12 is a legitimate tool and owners use it for entirely ordinary reasons. A parent needs to be closer. A kid is starting at Queen's or Trent. You are moving back into the house you rented out during a posting. None of that is a problem. What creates the problem is treating a statutory process as paperwork, and discovering in the hearing room that a date was off by one day.
If you are weighing an own-use termination against keeping the unit tenanted, the numbers usually decide it. Our management versus self-management comparison lays out where the real costs sit, and the pricing section on the KEILTY single-family rental page explains how our flat monthly rate per unit works. It is a flat rate, not a percentage, so it does not climb every time the rent does.
Not sure whether an N12 is the right move for your property, or what the unit would rent for today if you turned it over? Book a free rental evaluation and we will give you real numbers for your city, or get in touch and talk it through with someone who files these applications for a living.
Ontario property management with published pricing, same-day answers, and no surprises. Since 2003.
300-80 Queen Street
Proudly Canadian Owned