By A.J. Keilty, President, KEILTY Realty Management
Every August, Ontario landlords start thinking about turnover leases, back to school move-ins and getting units ready for winter. This year there is a compliance item that belongs at the top of that list, and it is not optional. New carbon monoxide alarm rules took effect under the Ontario Fire Code on 2026-01-01, and if you have not walked your units to confirm you are covered, now, before furnace season, is the time.
Section 20 of the Residential Tenancies Act, 2006 puts the duty to maintain a rental unit in a good state of repair and fit for habitation squarely on the landlord, and that duty applies even if a tenant knew about a problem before signing the lease. The Landlord and Tenant Board treats this as a broad obligation, covering anything capable of being repaired, and a finding of non-compliance can lead to a rent abatement order or a repair order under section 30. None of that is new. What is new is a specific, checkable requirement that many owners have not yet confirmed unit by unit.
As of 2026-01-01, Ontario's Fire Code (Section 2.16) expanded carbon monoxide alarm coverage, but it did not replace what was already there. Where a suite has a fuel burning appliance or a fireplace, you still need an alarm adjacent to every sleeping area, that rule has not gone anywhere. What is new is a second, additional layer: an alarm on every storey of that suite that does not have a sleeping area, plus a set of triggers that simply did not exist before 2025. A service room alarm is now required wherever a furnace, boiler or similar appliance sits outside a suite. Any suite that shares a wall or a floor and ceiling assembly with that service room, or with a storage garage, needs its own alarm. Any suite that is heated by air supplied from a furnace located elsewhere in the building needs one too, and so does any public corridor that is directly heated by that kind of forced air system. The requirement applies to existing rental housing, not only new construction, so a building you have owned for twenty years is covered the same as one built last month.
The penalties are not symbolic. Enforcement under the Fire Code can carry fines of up to $50,000 and up to a year in jail for an individual, with fines for a corporation running much higher, reported as high as $500,000 in serious cases, and a fire inspector can issue an order requiring immediate compliance. Beyond the provincial offence, a landlord who ignores a known gap and has a tenant injured or killed faces a hard problem in any civil claim: no working alarm, no record of testing, no good answer.
You do not need an engineer for this. For a single-family property or a basement apartment, walk the unit and confirm the basics: an alarm adjacent to every sleeping area, and an alarm on every other storey, wherever the unit has a fuel burning appliance, fireplace or storage garage. Each alarm should be within its stated service life, check the manufacturer date stamp, and you should have a dated record of the last test.
For multi-family and condo buildings, add one more step, since this is the part of the rule that changed the most and the part most likely to get missed. Check whether any of your suites share a wall or a floor and ceiling assembly with a mechanical or service room, even if that suite has no furnace or appliance of its own. If a central boiler or furnace supplies heated air to a suite, or to a public corridor, that suite and that corridor need an alarm too, and responsibility for the corridor alarms sits with the building owner, not the tenant. If any of these checks turn up a gap, fix it before your next scheduled fall visit. If you manage units in more than one Ontario city, from Kingston to Ottawa and everywhere between, keep the documentation centralized so you are not reconstructing it from memory if the fire department comes calling.
CO compliance is the item with legal teeth, but it should not be the only thing on your fall list. A few benchmark numbers for Ontario in 2026, so you can budget realistically rather than guessing:
None of that is dramatic money on its own. Multiply it across a ten unit portfolio and skip it two years running, and you are choosing between a few thousand dollars of preventive spending now or a burst pipe, a failed furnace mid-January, or a clogged eavestrough that sends water into a foundation, any of which costs multiples more and usually happens with a tenant in the unit demanding an immediate fix.
One rental property, you can walk yourself in an afternoon. Once you are managing several units, especially across more than one Ontario city, from Belleville and Napanee through to Oshawa, Whitby and the Ottawa area, tracking alarm service dates, contractor visits and inspection records by hand starts to slip. That is exactly where a lot of self-managing owners lose the thread, not because they do not care, but because a spreadsheet does not send a reminder when a CO alarm hits end of life in unit fourteen. If you have been weighing whether to keep self-managing or hand day to day operations to a property manager, our property management versus self-management comparison walks through where that line usually falls, including compliance tracking like this.
Preventive maintenance is also a vacancy loss issue. A unit that sits empty for an extra week because a furnace failed and had no service history to point a technician toward the problem is lost income on top of the repair bill. If you have not run the math on what vacancy actually costs you across a year, our vacancy loss calculator is a fast way to see the number, and it tends to make preventive spending look a lot more reasonable by comparison.
On the management side, KEILTY's fee structure is a flat rate per unit per month, not a percentage of rent, so a rate that does not climb just because your rents did, plus a placement fee when we fill a vacancy. We do not publish specific figures in a blog post because the rate can vary by city and portfolio size and it changes over time, but you can see current numbers on our pricing page or get a property-specific number through a free rental evaluation. For a sense of how we think about turnover timing more broadly, our recent piece on the late summer turnover playbook covers a lot of the same seasonal ground from a different angle.
Confirm your CO alarms meet the full 2026-01-01 Fire Code requirement: sleeping areas as before, every other storey, and for multi-family and condo buildings, the service rooms, shared walls and floor/ceiling assemblies, and heated corridors that come with the new rule. Document the check, and book your furnace, eavestrough, roof and water heater visits before the weather turns. It is a modest amount of money and an afternoon of your time against a legal exposure that runs into the tens of thousands of dollars and a maintenance failure that always seems to happen at the worst possible moment.
If you would rather hand the checklist, the documentation and the contractor calls to someone else, start with a free rental evaluation or get in touch and we will walk you through how KEILTY handles it across our Ontario portfolio.
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