By A.J. Keilty, President, KEILTY Realty Management
No. Nothing in Ontario law requires a landlord to install air conditioning in a rental unit. What has changed is the other half of the question. Since 2026-07-01, section 36.1 of the Residential Tenancies Act, 2006 gives most tenants the right to install their own window or portable air conditioner, and that right holds even when the lease says no air conditioners.
So the practical answer for an owner in 2026 is this. You do not have to add cooling. You do have to handle cooling correctly once it exists, whether you installed it or your tenant did. And in four Ontario cities, if you already supply cooling, a bylaw now tells you what temperature to hold.
The RTA treats heat and cooling very differently, and the reason is one definition.
Under s. 2(1), a vital service is "hot or cold water, fuel, electricity, gas or, during the part of each year prescribed by the regulations, heat." Cooling is not on that list, so s. 21, which bars a landlord from withholding or deliberately interfering with a vital service, does not reach air conditioning. The hook for cooling is s. 20(1), the obligation to keep the complex "in a good state of repair and fit for habitation" and compliant with health, safety, housing and maintenance standards.
For heat, O. Reg. 516/06 s. 4(1) makes heat a vital service from September 1 to June 15, and s. 4(2) sets the standard at 20 degrees Celsius. Section 4(3) carves out a unit where the tenant can regulate the temperature and 20 degrees can still be maintained by the primary heat source.
There is no provincial maximum temperature. A unit can sit at 34 degrees through a July heat wave without breaching a single provincial standard. That gap is why the province added s. 36.1 rather than a cooling mandate: instead of forcing owners to install cooling, Ontario gave tenants a protected route to cool their own unit.
The provincial heat figure is a floor, and where a municipal property standards bylaw sets a higher one you have to meet both. Kingston's By-law 2005-100 s. 5.44 requires 21.1 degrees from September 15 to June 1 where the unit is normally heated at the landlord's expense. Toronto Municipal Code Chapter 497 s. 497-2.1A requires 21 degrees from October 1 to May 15 on the same condition. A Kingston owner holding a steady 20 degrees is onside provincially and short municipally.
Section 36.1 came into force on 2026-07-01, three years after it passed as part of the Helping Homebuyers, Protecting Tenants Act, 2023. Subsection (1) lets a tenant install and use a window or portable air conditioner in a unit for which the landlord does not supply air conditioning, subject to the conditions in s. 36.1(3):
Two things owners often assume are in that list are not. The tenant does not have to tell you which months they intend to run it, beyond the anticipated usage information in condition two, and only where a s. 36.1(5) increase may apply. And there is no condition requiring the tenant to notify you when the unit comes out. Removal and seasonal cessation trigger your duty to decrease the rent under s. 36.1(8) and (9), with no tenant notice as a precondition. If you treat a missing notice as a tenant breach and keep charging, you are collecting an illegal rent.
For an air conditioner installed before 2026-07-01, s. 36.1(12) applies the same conditions except the first two, so no retroactive written notice and no efficiency disclosure. Critically, s. 36.1(12) imports only subsection (3). It does not extend the charging power, and s. 36.1(5) is expressly limited to units installed on or after 2026-07-01. A tenant who has run a window unit for three years cannot be charged for it. The section does not apply at all to mobile home parks or land lease communities, per s. 36.1(13).
No. This is the part owners most often get wrong. If the tenant meets the conditions, the right to install exists whether or not your lease permits it and whether or not you object. A no air conditioners clause does not survive s. 36.1.
Section 36.1(2) lets an owner prohibit installation "in the prescribed circumstances," but those circumstances have to be set out in regulation. As of 2026-08-11, none have been prescribed, and no additional conditions have been prescribed under s. 36.1(3). Until a regulation is filed, refusing a compliant installation because you would rather not see units in the windows is not a position the Act supports. A tenant who is refused can file an Application About Tenant Rights, Form T2, under s. 22.
What you can enforce is the safety side. Section 36.1(4) confirms that a reasonable inspection to check compliance with the damage, safe installation and applicable law conditions is a permitted reason to enter under s. 27(1) paragraph 4. That means at least 24 hours written notice under s. 27(1), and under s. 27(3) the notice must specify a time of entry between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. Our guide on entering a rental unit without the tenant's permission covers the rest.
Only where all three of these hold. The tenancy agreement obliges you to supply electricity, the tenant installed the unit on or after 2026-07-01, and the agreement does not expressly say the tenant may install one without a rent increase. That last exception is s. 36.1(6), and it is absolute.
If the tenant pays their own hydro, there is nothing to recover. They are already paying for the electricity.
Where the power does apply, this increase works differently from every other rent increase in Ontario. Section 36.1(11) switches off ss. 110, 116, 119 and 120 for it:
That last point is where the money risk sits. Rent collected after the duty to decrease arises is money collected in contravention of the Act, and a tenant recovers it under s. 135 with a Form T1. A seasonal increase left running through a winter of non use is not a rounding error, it is an overcharge.
Put the arithmetic in writing the same week the tenant's notice arrives: the dates the increase applies, the amount, the basis for it, and the date it comes back off. Then diarize the reversal. If you are self managing, that is one more small deadline in a year already full of them, which is part of the calculation we lay out in property management versus self management.
Here the answer stops being provincial. Five municipalities are worth knowing, and they do not agree with each other. None of them requires you to install cooling where none exists.
Toronto has directed staff to bring a full maximum indoor temperature bylaw, covering units with no existing cooling, back to council by June 2027. Other councils tend to follow Toronto. If you own across several municipalities, this is worth tracking now rather than reacting to later. Our locations page lists the cities we manage in, and as the list above shows, the rules are not the same in all of them.
Then you are in a tighter spot than the owner who never provided it. Because cooling is not a vital service, s. 21 does not apply, but s. 20(1) does. Cooling that forms part of the tenancy is a service you are obliged to maintain in a good state of repair.
A tenant has two routes when you do not. Under s. 130 they can apply for a rent reduction for a reduced or discontinued service, using Form T3. Where letting the system sit dead through August substantially interferes with reasonable enjoyment, s. 22 supports a Form T2 application, which can carry an abatement.
Removing cooling from a tenancy is worse again. It withdraws a service the tenant agreed to pay for, and it invites both. If the equipment is at end of life, budget the replacement rather than quietly discontinuing it. The July service call on a rooftop unit is not discretionary spending, it is the cheapest version of the problem.
There is no legal answer here, only a leasing one. Asking rents across much of Ontario have softened while vacancy has risen, which we covered in our look at what rising vacancy and falling asking rents mean for landlords. When tenants have choice, cooling is one of the few features that moves a unit from the shortlist to a signed lease.
Do the arithmetic explicitly rather than by rule of thumb. On a unit renting at $2,000 a month, annual rent divided by 365 is about $66 a day, so a week of extra vacancy costs roughly $460. A room-sized window unit runs about $140 to $600 at Home Depot Canada, with larger units past $700. Best Buy Canada's 2026 pricing guide, published 2026-06-23, puts window units at $150 to $900 and portables at $200 to $1,200, and estimates $30 to $60 a month to run one eight hours a day. Run those figures against your own rent and your own days on market. We built the vacancy loss calculator for exactly this.
Local stock also sets the expectation. In Ottawa and Kingston purpose built buildings, central air is common enough that its absence gets noticed. In older Belleville, Brockville and Cornwall houses, a well installed window unit is usually the norm and is enough. And if you are not adding cooling at all, you can still make tenant installed units work: supply the right brackets, specify which windows will take a unit safely, and set a written process for the notice s. 36.1(3) requires.
None of this is complicated. It is one more seasonal cycle with its own notices, deadlines and reversals, and it is exactly what slips when an owner has a job and one rental property. KEILTY handles it as part of standard management, on a flat monthly rate per unit rather than a percentage of rent, so the cost of getting the paperwork right does not climb every time the rent does. Pricing for houses and small portfolios sits on our single family rental page, and buildings and communities have their own on apartment communities.
Not sure whether adding cooling would change what your unit rents for, or whether your lease language still holds up? Ask us for a free rental evaluation. We will price the unit against real comparables in your city and flag anything in your lease that the 2026 rules have overtaken.
This post is general information about Ontario residential tenancy and human rights law as of 2026-08-11, not legal advice. Legislation, regulations and tribunal practice change. For advice on a specific applicant, property or situation, speak with a lawyer or licensed paralegal.
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