By A.J. Keilty, President, KEILTY Realty Management
The headline change is the notice period for non-payment of rent. On 2026-09-21, subsection 59 (1) of the Residential Tenancies Act, 2006 is repealed and replaced with a single flat rule: a notice of termination for unpaid rent may be effective "not earlier than the 7th day after the notice is given." Today that is 7 days only for a daily or weekly tenancy and 14 days in all other cases, which covers every monthly tenancy. Monthly tenancies gain a week.
That is one of seven changes to O. Reg. 516/06 landing the same day, alongside amendments to fourteen provisions of the Act. Two of them are worth as much attention as the notice period: persistent late payment finally gets a written test, and a tenant who wants to raise their own issues at an arrears hearing will have to pay half the claimed arrears first, unless the regulations provide otherwise. Here is the whole list, what each one does, and what an owner should change before the date rather than after it.
A batch of amendments passed in 2023 and 2025 comes into force together, along with the regulation made to support them. The date is not a guess. Each amendment carries an editorial note in the e-Laws consolidation reading "On September 21, 2026, the day named by order of the Lieutenant Governor in Council", so the day has been named rather than left open. We read the Act at a consolidation period beginning 2026-07-01 and the regulation at one beginning 2026-07-21, both with an e-Laws currency date of 2026-08-24.
Two statutes are doing the work. Schedule 12 to the Fighting Delays, Building Faster Act, 2025 supplies the notice period, the persistent late payment provision, the hearing changes, the eviction discretion changes and the own-use compensation change. Schedule 7 to the Helping Homebuyers, Protecting Tenants Act, 2023 supplies the right of first refusal and bad faith changes. On the regulation side, every one of the seven changes comes from O. Reg. 241/26, and each is keyed to a named section of Schedule 12 coming into force.
Worth knowing where this is not yet documented. The Landlord and Tenant Board published an operational update dated 2026-06-30 covering the changes that took effect on 2026-07-01, and on this batch it says only: "Some of the changes come into effect on July 1, 2026, and others, outlined in Bills 60 and 97, are to take effect in September 2026." The update is detailed on the July changes and links to both schedules, but on the September batch that one sentence is all of it, with no date and no description. The 2026-09-21 date in this post comes from the legislation itself, not from the Board, and the Board's own forms and instructions have not caught up yet.
Subsection 59 (1) as it reads today lets a landlord give notice effective not earlier than the 7th day after the notice is given for a daily or weekly tenancy, and the 14th day in all other cases. From 2026-09-21 the two branches collapse into one and everything runs on the 7th day. Nothing else in section 59 moves. Subsection 59 (2) still requires the notice to set out the amount of rent due and to specify that the tenant may avoid termination by paying, on or before the termination date, both that rent and any additional rent that has become due as at the date of payment. Subsection 59 (3) still voids the notice entirely if, before the day the landlord applies to the Board, the tenant pays both the rent in arrears and the additional rent that would have come due had the notice not been given.
The trap is the form. The instructions for the N4 are dated 2015-11-30 and they group monthly, bi-weekly and yearly tenancies together at 14 days, with daily and weekly at 7 days. From 2026-09-21 that grouping is wrong on the Act, so a monthly termination date taken from the printed instructions would sit two weeks out when a week is all the Act requires. The instructions also carry the delivery arithmetic, telling a landlord to add five days for mail and one business day for courier. Note that the five days for mail matches Rule 3.9 of the LTB Rules of Procedure, which deems a mailed document served on the fifth day after mailing, while the "business day" language for courier is the instructions' wording rather than the Rule's. Rule 3.9 puts a couriered document on the day after it was given to the courier, or if that day is a holiday, the next day that is not a holiday.
Take a monthly tenancy in Cobourg with rent due on the first. The tenant does not pay on 2026-10-01. The N4 instructions say the earliest day you can give the notice is the day after the rent was due, so 2026-10-02.
So the amendment moves the front of the process by seven days on a hand-delivered notice, and hand delivery is worth more than it was. We set the methods out one by one in how to serve a notice to a tenant in Ontario.
One practical wrinkle in that example. Both of the hand-delivery filing dates, 2026-10-10 and 2026-10-17, fall on a Saturday, and 2026-10-12 is Thanksgiving. Rule 1.1 of the LTB Rules of Procedure defines a holiday to include any Saturday, Sunday or other day on which the Board's offices are closed. Subsection 74 (1) sets the earliest day you may apply, not a day you must apply on, so the practical answer is to work out the earliest lawful date and then plan the filing for the next day the office is open.
It makes the first step shorter, and it leaves every later step where it was. Nothing in this batch changes the Board's scheduling, and the tenant's routes out survive intact: subsection 59 (3) voids the notice on payment before you apply, subsection 74 (2) requires the application to be discontinued if, before the Board issues the eviction order, the Board is satisfied the tenant has paid to the landlord or to the Board the arrears, the additional rent that would have come due, and your application fee, and subsection 74 (4) makes an eviction order itself void if the tenant pays a defined list of amounts, arrears, additional rent, allowed NSF charges and administration charges, and ordered costs, before the order becomes enforceable. We walked the full sequence through in how long it takes to evict a tenant in Ontario.
The honest description of the change is that it removes a week of waiting at the start. That is worth having and it is not a new remedy. The negotiated route is still there as well, though it sits inside the process rather than outside it: section 206 lets the Board make an order including terms of payment without holding a hearing where a landlord has already applied under section 69, and since 2026-07-01 the Board's Payment Agreement Form is mandatory when parties enter into a repayment plan under that section.
Paragraph 1 of subsection 58 (1) has always let a landlord give notice at the end of a period or term on the ground that "the tenant has persistently failed to pay rent on the date it becomes due and payable", with nothing in the Act or the regulations defining persistently. On 2026-09-21 a new subsection 58 (1.1) commences, saying that what constitutes a persistent failure "shall be determined in accordance with the regulations, if any", and the regulation now exists.
New section 8.1 of O. Reg. 516/06 provides that a persistent failure to pay rent on the date it becomes due and payable "includes circumstances in which a tenant has failed to pay rent within seven days of the date it becomes due and payable on at least three occasions within any six-month period". Read the two limits that come with it, because both matter more than the count.
So the regulation gives a floor an owner can plan against without closing off anything else, and section 8.1 is made expressly for the purposes of paragraph 1 of subsection 58 (1). It is a tenant provision, and it goes into Part II of the regulation, whose heading changes on the same day from "Matters Relating to Rent" to "Matters Relating to Rent, Termination and Eviction". That heading change is the seventh of the seven regulation amendments, and it is a fair signal of what the batch is for.
It can, and the carve-out in section 8.1 deserves its own paragraph because it is an unforced error waiting to happen. If a tenant pays their October rent and the office applies it to an old arrears balance, October reads as unpaid on the ledger, and the reason for that lateness is the landlord applying a payment to another amount owing. Read the carve-out closely, because it turns on the word "solely": an occasion drops out of the count where the failure to pay was not solely attributable to that misapplication. So a month the office created by reallocating a payment is a month you cannot rely on, while a month the tenant was genuinely late for its own reasons is not rescued by a later reallocation. Either way, a ledger that reallocates payments as a matter of routine is a ledger you cannot easily read the test off.
Two things follow, and both are bookkeeping rather than law. Record the date each payment is actually received against the period it is for, not just the balance it reduces. And decide deliberately, in writing, before applying any payment to something other than current rent. The same discipline matters on charges that are not rent at all, which is a separate trap we covered in what you can charge a tenant for a bounced rent cheque.
Because its timing rules are untouched. Subsection 58 (2) requires the termination date in a section 58 notice to be at least the number of days after the notice that section 44 sets out, and to be the day a period of the tenancy ends or, on a fixed term, the end of the term. For a monthly tenancy section 44 (2) is 60 days, and the date has to land on a period end. So the section 58 notice remains a 60 day, period-end instrument while the section 59 notice becomes a 7 day one.
That is the parallel track worth understanding. On a tenant who is chronically a fortnight late but always pays in the end, section 59 tends to run out of road, because once the arrears and the additional rent are paid before you apply the notice is void under subsection 59 (3). Section 58 is the provision aimed at that pattern, and from 2026-09-21 it has a written test behind it for the first time. It is slower and it needs six months of clean records, and it is the only one of the two that addresses the behaviour rather than the balance.
This is the change that puts a number on the tenant's side of the file. Today, subsection 82 (1) requires the Board to let a tenant raise any issue that could have been the subject of their own application, either where the tenant meets the notice requirements in subsection 82 (2) or where the tenant "provides an explanation satisfactory to the Board explaining why the tenant could not comply" with them. From 2026-09-21 subsection 82 (1) is replaced and that second route is gone. Meeting subsection 82 (2) becomes the only way in.
Subsection 82 (2) itself gains two paragraphs. Unless the regulations provide otherwise, the tenant shall pay to the landlord, or into the Board if the regulations so provide, half of any rent arrears that were claimed in the application when it was filed, plus any other prescribed amounts, and those amounts have to be paid before the hearing within prescribed timelines. New section 8.3 of the regulation sets that timeline: no later than seven days before the hearing.
The transition rules are drafted carefully and they decide which of your files this touches. Subsection 82 (4) is replaced so that the old subsection 82 (1) continues to apply to any application made before the commencement day that has not been finally determined by then, even if the hearing is on or after that day, and a genuinely new subsection 82 (5) does the same for the old subsection 82 (2). On the face of those provisions, an application filed on 2026-09-20 stays on the old rules.
Clause 83 (1) (b), the Board's power to postpone enforcement of an eviction order, is amended by adding "subject to any prescribed limitations or conditions" at the beginning, and new section 8.4 of the regulation supplies them. Enforcement may be postponed only if the landlord consents, or if conditions are satisfied that now differ by application type. On an application based on a notice under section 48, 49 or 50, the Board must be satisfied that postponement would not be unfair to the landlord or other tenants of the residential complex. On any other application, including an arrears application, the Board must be satisfied both of that and that there are compelling grounds to postpone.
Read the boundary of this one carefully, because it is narrower than it first looks. Clause 83 (1) (a), the power to refuse the eviction outright unless it would be unfair to refuse, is not amended. Neither is subsection 83 (2), which provides that if a hearing is held the Board shall not grant the application unless it has reviewed the circumstances and considered whether to exercise its powers under subsection 83 (1), and neither is subsection 83 (3), which lists five situations where the Board shall refuse. Only the postponement power is being fenced.
Clause 77 (8) (b) is repealed and replaced. Subsection 77 (8) says that on a tenant's motion the Board shall, after a hearing, do one of three things, and clause (b) is the set-aside option. Today clause (b) lets the Board set the order aside where it is satisfied, having regard to all the circumstances, that it would not be unfair to do so. From 2026-09-21 the same clause instead reads that the Board is to set the order aside "if the prescribed circumstances, conditions or tests have been satisfied", and new section 8.2 of the regulation prescribes them. The test moves from open-ended discretion to a defined one, not from permissive to mandatory.
Section 8.2 keeps the not-unfair standard but subtracts something from it. The Board is to consider all the circumstances other than those in subsection 8.2 (2), and subsection (2) says the Board shall not consider changes in the tenant's circumstances that arose after the agreement to terminate was entered into or after the tenant gave the notice. So a change in the tenant's own circumstances after that point falls outside what the Board may weigh.
From 2026-09-21, yes, by giving twice the notice. This one is from Schedule 12 rather than the Bill 97 group below. Section 48.1 currently requires a landlord who gives a notice under section 48 to compensate the tenant one month's rent or offer another acceptable unit, with no exceptions. The amendment puts "Subject to subsection (2)" at the front and adds a subsection (2) removing that requirement where the notice is given on or after the commencement day, the termination date is at least 120 days after the notice is given, and the termination date is the day a period of the tenancy ends or the end of a fixed term.
Two limits on section 48 itself are worth stating before anyone plans around this. Subsection 48 (5) confines the section to cases where the rental unit is owned in whole or in part by an individual and the landlord is an individual, so it is not available to a corporate owner at all. And the ordinary notice period for a section 48 notice is in subsection 48 (2), which requires at least 60 days and a termination date on the day a period of the tenancy ends, not in section 44.
So there is a real choice here, and it is arithmetic rather than advice. The ordinary route is 60 days notice plus one month's rent out of pocket. The new route is 120 days notice and no payment, with the unit occupied for the extra 60 days. What you cannot assume is that the extra 60 days is 60 days of rent: subsection 48 (3) lets a tenant who receives the notice terminate earlier than the date you specified, on only 10 days notice under subsection 48 (4). So the new route trades a certain payment for a later possession date and an uncertain amount of extra rent. Which way that falls depends on what you are doing with the unit and when you need it, and it is worth running both ways on the individual file rather than adopting one as policy.
The Bill 97 half of this batch runs the other way, and an owner planning a renovation should read it before serving anything.
One caveat on that last one, and it is a dated caveat. Subsection 57 (6.1) turns on "the prescribed period of time", and the power to prescribe it is a new paragraph 3.2 of subsection 241.1 (1), which is itself one of the provisions commencing 2026-09-21. So as at 2026-08-27 the power to make that regulation is not yet in force and no period can have been prescribed under it. Until one is, the presumption has nothing to measure. Check both the regulation and the Minister's regulations before relying on that in either direction.
A good deal, and knowing what stayed put is how you avoid over-reading the rest.
It has its own parallel set, and it is a different regime rather than the same one applied twice. The regulation gains a new Part II.1 headed "Matters Related to Non-Profit Housing Co-operatives", containing section 17.1 and section 17.2. Section 17.1 is the mirror of section 8.1, but it is made for the purposes of paragraph 1 of subsection 94.2 (1) of the Act, it applies to a member rather than a tenant, and it measures regular monthly housing charges rather than rent. Section 17.2 is the co-operative counterpart to section 8.4, and it is stricter: it has no split by application type, so postponing enforcement needs the co-operative's consent, or both that it would not be unfair and that there are compelling grounds, in every case. If you are dealing with a member of a non-profit housing co-operative, work from Part V.1 of the Act and Part II.1 of the regulation, and do not read the tenant provisions across.
One boundary further out. Section 5 (i) takes living accommodation outside the Act altogether where the occupant must share a bathroom or kitchen facility with the owner, or the owner's spouse, child or parent, or the spouse's child or parent, and that person lives in the building. None of the notice periods in this post reach accommodation in that position, because none of the Act does.
None of this is in the Act. It is preparation, and most of it takes an afternoon.
An owner with one or two units can absolutely handle a rule change like this. It is one date, a handful of provisions, and a template to fix. What is harder is the part that has no deadline attached: keeping a payment-date record clean across every suite for six rolling months, deciding consistently how payments get applied, and having the notice served correctly on the right day by somebody who is there.
That is the work KEILTY does on an arrears file, and it is why we are rebuilding our own templates and ledger rules before the date rather than after the first notice goes out wrong. If you own a building and would rather not audit all of this yourself, our apartment communities page sets out how we run it.
Want a second set of eyes on your arrears process before these rules change? Get a free rental evaluation and we will look at the whole file, not just the rent.
This post is general information about Ontario residential tenancy law as of 2026-08-27, not legal advice. Legislation, regulations and tribunal practice change. For advice on a specific property or situation, speak with a lawyer or licensed paralegal.
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