By A.J. Keilty, President, KEILTY Realty Management
If you pay rent by the month in Ontario, you owe your landlord 60 days of written notice, and the move-out date you put on that notice has to be the last day of a rental period. If you pay daily or weekly, it is 28 days. The notice has to be in writing, and the form the Landlord and Tenant Board expects is Form N9, Tenant's Notice to Terminate the Tenancy.
That covers most people. The part that trips tenants up is not the 60 days. It is the "last day of a rental period" rule, which pushes your earliest possible move-out date further out than you would expect. Here is how the counting actually works, what happens if you get it wrong, and the handful of situations where you can leave sooner.
Section 47 of the Residential Tenancies Act, 2006 gives you the right to end your tenancy by giving notice. Section 44 sets how much notice you have to give:
Almost every residential tenancy in Ontario is monthly, or a fixed term that pays monthly, so 60 days is the number that matters for most renters.
Because the termination date has to fall on the last day of a rental period, not 60 days from whenever you hand over the notice. Rent is usually due on the 1st, so your rental period runs from the 1st to the end of the month, and your move-out date has to be the last day of some month.
Work through it. Say you pay rent on the 1st and you give notice on 2026-08-15. Sixty days from there is 2026-10-14, which sits in the middle of a rental period, so it does not qualify. The next available last-day-of-month is 2026-10-31. That is your earliest date, and you owe October's rent in full.
Give the same notice two weeks earlier, on 2026-07-31, and the maths changes. Sixty days lands on 2026-09-29, and the next last-day-of-month is 2026-09-30. You are out a full month sooner for the sake of delivering the notice fifteen days earlier. That is a month of rent, so it is worth pulling up a calendar before you sign anything.
The practical rule: to move out at the end of a given month, get your notice in before the start of the month two months prior. To leave on 2026-11-30, deliver notice on or before 2026-09-30.
The LTB's rule is simple once you know it. Do not count the day you deliver the notice. Do count the termination date.
If you mail the notice instead of handing it over, the LTB adds five days for delivery. That means 65 days instead of 60, or 33 instead of 28. Hand-delivering, or emailing where your lease permits email, removes the guesswork. Whatever route you take, keep proof: a photo of the signed notice, the email in your sent folder, or a note of the date and time you dropped it off.
Yes, and this is the most common mistake we see.
A fixed-term lease in Ontario does not end itself on its end date. If you say nothing, it converts automatically to a month-to-month tenancy on the same terms, and you are now a monthly tenant who owes 60 days of notice. A one-year lease ending 2026-08-31 does not release you on 2026-09-01. It rolls over.
So if your lease ends 2026-08-31 and you intend to leave, your notice has to be in your landlord's hands by 2026-07-02 at the latest. Miss that and 2026-10-31 becomes your realistic exit, with two extra months of rent attached.
There is, and it exists because February is short. A strict 60-day count makes end-of-February and end-of-March moves close to impossible, so the LTB allows less than 60 days in two specific cases:
The termination date still has to be the last day of your rental period. This is a narrow exception, and it does not apply to any other month.
Sometimes. A fixed-term lease is a commitment to pay rent for the whole term, so there is no general right to walk away mid-lease. There are five real routes out.
You and your landlord can agree to end the tenancy on any date you both accept. Form N11 exists for this, though a written agreement in any form works. Get it in writing. An oral agreement is legally valid and completely useless in a dispute six months later.
Worth knowing: your landlord cannot make you sign an N11, or a pre-dated N9, as a condition of renting the unit in the first place. If that happened, the document is not valid. University and college residences are the exception.
An assignment means someone else takes over your lease entirely, at your rent, with the same parking spot and utilities and everything else included. It is different from a sublet, where you plan to come back.
You need your landlord's consent. If they refuse outright, or do not answer within seven days of your request, you can end the tenancy with 30 days of notice on Form N9, delivered within 30 days of your original request. If they agree to an assignment in principle but reject the specific person you found, they cannot do that arbitrarily or unreasonably, and you can take it to the LTB.
Assignment rights do not apply to subsidised, public, or non-profit housing, superintendent's units, or housing tied to your job or your studies.
For most tenancies entered into on or after 2018-04-30, the landlord has to use the Ontario Standard Lease. If yours is on some other document, you can demand a signed standard lease in writing. If your landlord does not produce one within 21 days, you can give 60 days of notice and leave, even mid-term. If they do produce one, you can decline to sign it and give notice within 30 days instead.
In both cases the termination date does not have to be the end of your fixed term, which is what makes this route useful.
You can end your tenancy with 28 days of notice at any point in the tenancy, using Form N15 plus either a tenant's statement or a copy of a court order such as a restraining order or peace bond. Your landlord is not permitted to disclose those documents to other people, including your roommates. If you are in a joint tenancy, the tenancy continues for the other tenants.
You can apply to the LTB to end the tenancy early if your landlord has failed their duties under the Act: not maintaining the property, entering unlawfully, cutting off a vital service, changing the locks without giving you keys, harassment, or unreasonably refusing an assignment. You will need to prove it at a hearing, and that means a record. Written maintenance requests with dates are the difference between a complaint and evidence, which is one reason we ask KEILTY residents to submit everything through the portal rather than by text. Our guide to submitting a maintenance request walks through it.
You stay on the hook for rent, but not forever. You owe rent until the earlier of two dates: the day the unit is re-rented to somebody else, or the earliest termination date you could have given with proper notice.
The catch is that the first date is out of your control, and in 2026 it is taking longer than it used to. Ontario's rental market has loosened. CMHC's 2026 mid-year rental market update has vacancy rising across the province's major markets, with Ottawa moving from 2.0% to 2.7% on the back of the largest addition of new rental supply in nearly fifty years, and Kingston's city vacancy rate up to 2.4%. Kingston has posted the largest year-over-year drop in average rents in the country.
That is good news if you are the one looking for a place. It is bad news if you are counting on a fast re-rent to cap what you owe, because a unit that would have gone in ten days two years ago may now sit for a month or more. Sixty days of proper notice costs you nothing extra. Skipping it can cost you two months of rent on a place you have already left. We looked at what the softer market means from the owner's side in this breakdown of rising vacancy and falling asking rents.
Yes, and that is the only thing it can be used for. A rent deposit in Ontario applies to the last rental period of the tenancy. It is not a damage deposit, and your landlord cannot hold it back against cleaning or repairs. We went through that in detail in what Ontario landlords can legally collect.
Your landlord also owes you interest on that deposit every year, at the same rate as the annual rent increase guideline. The guideline for 2026 is 2.1%, and for 2027 it drops to 1.9%. If nobody has ever paid you deposit interest, ask for it, and if that goes nowhere you can apply to the LTB with a Form T1.
Not on your own. Once you have given notice or signed an agreement to end the tenancy, you are committed to the date. Your landlord can consent to cancel it, and often will if they have not started marketing the unit yet, but they are not required to.
If you do not move out on the termination date, your landlord can apply to the LTB for an eviction order, and they can file that application before your date has even passed if they think you are staying. Treat the date on the notice as real.
The 60 days are not dead time. A few things make the exit clean:
Our resident guide covers the day-to-day side of living in a KEILTY-managed home.
Sixty days, in writing, on Form N9, ending on the last day of a rental period. Count backwards from the last day of the month you want to leave, not forward from today. If your lease is ending, you still have to give notice. If you are mailing it, add five days.
KEILTY manages residential and commercial rentals across Ontario, from Kingston and Belleville through Peterborough, Oshawa, Cornwall, and Ottawa. If you rent from us and you are planning a move, send your notice through the resident portal or reach out, and we will confirm your earliest termination date in writing so there is no argument about the number later. You can see where we operate on our locations page.
Renting out a property yourself and not sure how notice, turnover, and re-leasing timelines fit together? A free rental evaluation from KEILTY will tell you what your unit should rent for and how long it should take to lease, or get in touch and we will walk you through it.
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