By A.J. Keilty, President, KEILTY Realty Management
If a tenant vanishes from an Ontario rental, you cannot simply change the locks and start over. Under the Residential Tenancies Act, 2006, a unit is only abandoned if the tenant has gone and rent is actually owing. Once both are true, you have two lawful routes to deal with whatever is left inside it: get an order from the Landlord and Tenant Board terminating the tenancy under s. 79, or give notice of your intention to dispose of the property to the tenant and to the Board under s. 42 (1) (b). Only the first of those ends the tenancy.
Most owners get this wrong in the same way. They treat an empty unit as a free unit. It is not. Here is what the Act actually requires, in the order you will need it.
Abandonment is not a state of the unit. It is a state of the tenancy. The Board's own Interpretation Guideline 4 describes it as a unilateral act by the tenant to give up the tenancy and possession of the unit without properly giving notice of termination.
Two things have to line up. The tenant has to be gone, and there has to be rent owing. Section 2 (3) of the Act is blunt about the second one: "For the purposes of this Act, a tenant has not abandoned a rental unit if the tenant is not in arrears of rent."
Read that carefully, because it is narrower than it looks. It does not say a paid-up tenant can never leave. It says that while the rent is current, the Act will not let you call the unit abandoned. Furniture gone, mail piling up, phone disconnected, none of it matters if the rent is paid through the end of the rental period. You wait.
No, and an owner should know that before they start building a file.
Section 2 (3) is the only hard rule in the Act on this question, and all it does is tell you when a unit is not abandoned. Nothing in the Act defines when it is. Guideline 4 fills the gap, but a guideline is not law. Tribunals Ontario says so on the face of the document: guidelines exist to promote consistency, and "a Member is not required to follow a Guideline and may make a different decision depending on the facts of the case."
So the standard you are actually measured against is the evidence you can put in front of a Member, not a checklist you can tick. Guideline 4 sorts that evidence into two tiers, and the distinction is worth keeping.
The first tier is the clear case, where one fact would carry it on its own. The tenant tells you or the superintendent they are moving out. Someone watches them move out of the building, and the unit door is later found open with the furniture and personal effects gone. Absent evidence to the contrary, the Guideline treats that as supporting a finding of abandonment.
The second tier is cumulative, where no single fact would be enough. A neighbour saw them loading a truck, the tenant had mentioned taking a job in another city, and the mail has not been collected for weeks. The Guideline's own language is that in circumstances like those the landlord "may be justified in considering the unit to be abandoned." May be. That is the register to write your file in.
Guideline 4 also says a landlord should make reasonable efforts to make contact before concluding the unit is abandoned. Note what that is and is not. It is guidance about how you prove abandonment. It is not a statutory notice requirement, and it has nothing to do with the notice under s. 42 (1) (b), which is a separate thing entirely and comes later. Write to the tenant, call at different times of day, give them a reason to reply, and keep notes of the dates and times you tried. The pattern you are looking for is one that fits a tenant who has left for good and does not fit a tenant who is on vacation or away on business.
Because abandonment is one of only two situations, alongside a tenant simply vacating, where the Act lets a landlord take back a unit without an eviction order. The arrears requirement is the guardrail on that power. Section 39 sets the rule: a landlord shall not recover possession of a rental unit subject to a tenancy unless the tenant has vacated or abandoned it, or a Board order evicting the tenant has authorized the possession. Everything else runs through the Board.
The practical effect for owners is a timing question. A tenant who pays on the first and disappears on the third has left you a fully paid rental period with no arrears. You do not have an abandoned unit yet. You may well have one on the first of the following month, when rent comes due and goes unpaid.
That wait is not dead time, and abandonment is not your only route. Once rent is owing you have a second track that does not depend on proving anything about where the tenant went. The LTB's L10 instructions set it out plainly: to evict for non-payment of rent you file an Application to Evict a Tenant for Non-Payment of Rent and to Collect Rent the Tenant Owes (Form L1), and before you file it you must give the tenant an N4 Notice to End your Tenancy for Non-Payment of Rent.
The difference matters. The N4 track asks you to prove one thing, that rent is owing, and you will have the ledger for that. The abandonment track asks you to prove something much softer, that the tenant has gone and does not intend to come back. Where your evidence of departure is thin, the N4 is the cleaner file, and nothing stops you from building the abandonment record while it runs.
You can, in the sense that Guideline 4 says an order is not mandatory before you treat a unit as abandoned. The Board's own words are worth quoting: it is "not mandatory for this type of order to be issued for the landlord to treat the unit as abandoned. However, there is a substantial risk in re-renting the unit without such an order unless it is clear that the tenant has vacated and does not intend to continue the tenancy."
That risk is the whole ball game. If you re-rent and the tenant turns out to have been in hospital, or working out of province for six weeks, you have handed their home to somebody else and you are the one explaining it at a hearing. What matters there is the evidence you can show for what you knew and when, not what you meant.
"Substantial risk" is doing a lot of work in that Guideline passage, so here is what sits behind it.
Section 24 bars a landlord from altering the locking system on a door giving entry to a rental unit or the residential complex, or causing it to be altered, during the tenant's occupancy, without giving the tenant replacement keys. The tenant, or a former tenant, applies under paragraph 5 of s. 29 (1), which reaches the landlord, a superintendent or an agent of the landlord. Section 29 (2) gives them a year from the day the conduct occurred.
What the Board can do then is the part owners underestimate.
Under s. 31 (3), if the Board finds the locking system was altered without replacement keys and it is satisfied the rental unit is vacant, it may order you to let the tenant back into possession and order you to refrain from renting the unit to anyone else. Read the condition: the remedy turns on the unit still being vacant. That is precisely why re-renting quickly is the move that turns a bad file into a much worse one.
Section 31 (1) (d) lets the Board order the landlord to pay it an administrative fine not exceeding the greater of $10,000 and the monetary jurisdiction of the Small Claims Court. That is a formula, not a figure. Ontario raised the Small Claims Court limit to $50,000 effective 2025-10-01, so as of 2026-08-19 the formula computes to $50,000. It is payable to the Board, not to the tenant, and it is on top of whatever the tenant recovers.
Then there is the offence. Under s. 234 (w) a person is guilty of an offence if the person unlawfully recovers possession of a rental unit. On conviction, s. 238 (1) exposes an individual to a fine of not more than $100,000 and s. 238 (2) exposes a corporation to not more than $500,000. Those figures were raised in 2023, so older articles quoting half of them are out of date.
None of that is a prediction about any particular case. It is the range the Act puts on the table, and it is the reason the paperwork route is the cheap one.
Section 79 is short: if a landlord believes that a tenant has abandoned a rental unit, the landlord may apply to the Board for an order terminating the tenancy. You do that on Form L2, selecting Reason 2, "I believe the tenant abandoned the rental unit," and explaining why you believe it.
Two features of this route are unusually landlord friendly, and both are easy to miss.
First, there is no notice to serve beforehand. The L2 instructions confirm there are no steps you are required to take before applying when you are applying because you believe the tenant abandoned the unit. No N4, no N5, no waiting period. You file.
Second, the general bar on filing an L2 after a tenant has moved out does not apply here. The instructions say you cannot file an L2 if the tenant has already moved out, "unless you are applying because you believe the tenant has abandoned the rental unit." Abandonment is the carve-out.
None of that means nothing gets served. Guideline 4 is clear that an application under s. 79 must be served on the tenant in accordance with s. 191. What you skip is the notice of termination that normally has to come first.
Run the termination and the money on the same L2 where you can. The Board has to net your rent deposit against an arrears order when it also terminates, and doing both in one application is how that arithmetic gets done once rather than argued twice.
The filing fee is on the LTB's Forms, filing and fees page, which when read on 2026-08-18 set the L2 at $201, or $186 if you file through the Tribunals Ontario Portal. Fees change, so check the page rather than trusting a number in an article, including this one.
This is where owners create liability for themselves, usually by moving fast. Section 40 is one sentence and it is worth having exactly: "No landlord shall, without legal process, seize a tenant's property for default in the payment of rent or for the breach of any other obligation of the tenant." Abandoned goods are governed by their own section, and you have to earn the right to touch them.
Section 42 (1) lets you dispose of property the tenant has abandoned only if one of two conditions is met. Either you obtain an order terminating the tenancy under s. 79, or you give notice to the tenant and to the Board of your intention to dispose of the property. Note that both limbs are available. The notice route means you are not required to wait for a hearing date to start the clock.
Where the unit has been abandoned, s. 42 (2) lets you dispose of unsafe or unhygienic items immediately. Rotting food, a leaking battery. Everything else waits. Under s. 42 (3), you may sell it, keep it for your own use, or otherwise dispose of it only after 30 days have passed from the date you obtained the order or gave the notice.
Photograph everything before you move it, and keep your receipts for the moving and storage. The reason why is in the next section.
They have a window, and you have a bill.
Under s. 42 (4), if the tenant notifies you before the 30 days are up that they intend to remove their property, they may remove it within that 30 day period. Section 42 (5) then requires you to make the property available at a reasonable time and at a location close to the rental unit. You cannot make them drive to a storage yard two towns over.
Section 42 (6) is the part owners overlook. Before you let the tenant take the property, you may require them to pay you the arrears of rent and any reasonable out of pocket expenses you incurred in moving, storing or securing it. That is a real lever, and it exists nowhere else in this process. Document the costs as you incur them, because you will be asked to justify them.
If you have already sold the items, s. 42 (7) gives the tenant six months from the date the notice was given or the order was issued to claim the proceeds. You pay them the amount by which the proceeds exceed your reasonable out of pocket expenses for moving, storing, securing or selling the property, plus any arrears of rent. Note that selling costs are deductible here but are not on the list in s. 42 (6). Follow the section you are actually in.
Section 42 (8) is often described as a shield, and it is not an unconditional one. It says a landlord is not liable to any person for selling, retaining or otherwise disposing of the property in accordance with the section, but it opens with the words "Subject to subsections (5) and (7)". Miss the duty to make the property available, or the duty to account for sale proceeds, and the protection does not cover you. It protects a process followed, not a unit cleared out.
One distinction worth holding onto. Section 42 is the abandonment section. Section 41 is a different one, covering property left behind when a unit has been vacated under a notice of termination given by either party, an agreement to terminate, subsection 93 (2), or a Board order terminating the tenancy or evicting the tenant. In those cases you may dispose of the property straight away, with one exception. Where an eviction order has actually been enforced, s. 41 (2) says you shall not sell, retain or otherwise dispose of the property before 72 hours have elapsed after enforcement, and s. 41 (3) requires you to make the property available to be retrieved at a location close to the rental unit during the prescribed hours within that 72 hours. The prescribed hours are in s. 46 of O. Reg. 516/06, and they are 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Do not apply the 72 hour rule to an abandonment, and do not apply the 30 day rule to an enforced eviction.
Then you are in a different regime from start to finish, and running the abandonment playbook on it is a serious error. A silent unit with unopened mail is sometimes a deceased tenant.
Under s. 91 (1), if a tenant dies and there are no other tenants of the rental unit, the tenancy is deemed to be terminated 30 days after the death. That happens on its own. No s. 79 application, no hearing, no order. If there is a co-tenant, the section does not apply and the tenancy carries on.
During those 30 days s. 91 (2) puts two duties on you. You must preserve the deceased tenant's property in the unit or the complex, other than property that is unsafe or unhygienic, and you must afford the executor or administrator of the estate reasonable access to the unit and the complex for the purpose of removing the property. Where there is no executor or administrator, that access runs to a member of the tenant's family.
Disposal is then governed by s. 92. Under s. 92 (1) you may sell the property, keep it for your own use, or otherwise dispose of it, immediately if it is unsafe or unhygienic and otherwise after the tenancy has terminated under s. 91. Two claims run for six months from the death. Under s. 92 (3), if the estate or a family member claims property you have already sold, you pay over the amount by which the proceeds exceed your reasonable out of pocket expenses for moving, storing, securing or selling it, plus any arrears of rent. Under s. 92 (4), if they claim property you retained for your own use, you return it.
The practical point is that the clock runs differently, the notice steps are different, and the person you deal with is an estate rather than a tenant. If there is any chance the tenant has died, stop and find out before you file anything.
Mobile home parks and land lease communities are their own regime, and the general rules above will get you into trouble there.
Start with s. 2 (4): a rented site for a mobile home or a land lease home is a rental unit for the purposes of the Act even if the home on the site is owned by the tenant of the site. So the tenancy rules apply to the site, while the structure sitting on it is somebody else's asset.
Section 162 governs what you may do with that home. It applies in two situations. Either the tenant vacated in accordance with a notice of termination, an agreement to terminate, or a Board order terminating the tenancy or evicting the tenant; or you applied for an order under s. 79 and the Board made an order terminating the tenancy. Note the second limb carefully. It is not enough to have applied. You need the order.
The notice requirements are heavier than anywhere else in this article. Under s. 162 (2) you cannot dispose of a mobile home without first notifying the tenant of your intention both by registered mail to their last known mailing address and by publishing a notice in a newspaper having general circulation in the locality of the park. Both, not either.
Then the waiting period is 60 days rather than 30. Section 162 (3) lets you sell, retain or dispose of the home beginning 60 days after those notices have been given, and only if the tenant has not made a claim in the meantime. The tenant's own window is longer than yours: under s. 162 (4) and (5) they have six months from the date the notices were given to claim the proceeds of a sale, or to have a home you retained for your own use returned to them.
More than most owners assume, and less than the first calculation suggests.
Section 88 (1) applies where a tenant abandons or vacates without giving notice of termination in accordance with the Act, and where no agreement to terminate has been made and you have not given notice to terminate either. Rule 2 covers the tenant who left without giving any notice at all. Arrears are owing for the period that ends on the earliest termination date that could have been specified in a notice of termination, had the tenant given that notice in accordance with s. 47, 96 or 145, as the case may be, on the date you knew or ought to have known they had gone. If you had already served a notice of your own under s. 48, 49 or 50, s. 88 (2) governs instead and the arithmetic is different.
In other words, the meter does not stop the day you find the unit empty. It runs forward as if the tenant had served proper notice that day. For a monthly tenancy, s. 44 (2) requires at least 60 days' notice ending on the last day of a rental period.
Take a Belleville unit rented month to month, rent due on the first, and assume you establish that you knew of the abandonment on the 14th. A notice given that day could not have ended the tenancy at the end of the following month, because that is fewer than 60 days out. The earliest date it could have specified is the last day of the month after that. On s. 88 (1) alone, your arrears claim runs to that date, not to the day you found the door open.
Yes, and any article that tells you the claim survives untouched while you re-rent has skipped two subsections.
Section 88 (3) is the first. If you enter into a new tenancy agreement with a new tenant for the unit, the tenant who abandoned or vacated is not liable for arrears exceeding the lesser of two amounts: the amount worked out under s. 88 (1) or (2), and the amount of arrears owing for the period that ends on the date the new tenant is entitled to occupy the unit. It is a lesser-of test, not a flat cap, and it only bites if you actually sign a new tenancy agreement.
Run the Belleville example the second way. Same discovery on the 14th, but this time you re-let and the new tenant is entitled to occupy on the first of the following month. Section 88 (3) caps the claim at the arrears for the period ending on that date. You have just cut roughly six weeks off the number you could otherwise have claimed.
Section 88 (4) is the second, and it cuts the other way. In determining arrears under subsections (1), (2) and (3), consideration shall be given to whether or not the landlord has taken reasonable steps to minimize losses in accordance with s. 16. Section 16 puts a duty on whichever party is entitled to claim an amount arising from a breach to take reasonable steps to minimize their losses. So sitting on a vacant unit to protect a paper claim is not a strategy. It is the thing the Board is directed to look at.
Put the two together and the honest answer for an owner is this. Re-letting reduces the claim, and not re-letting does not reliably preserve it. Rent from a paying tenant beats an order against someone whose current address you do not have. We have written before about what a vacant unit actually costs per day, and that arithmetic runs regardless of who caused the vacancy.
Through a former tenant application, and there is a hard deadline on it.
Section 87 (1) lets a landlord apply for an order requiring a tenant or former tenant to pay arrears of rent. Section 87 (1.1) (b) sets the window for someone no longer in possession: no later than one year after the tenant or former tenant ceased to be in possession of the rental unit. That amendment came from the Protecting Tenants and Strengthening Community Housing Act, 2020, Schedule 4, s. 18 (1). Damage is a separate head with its own matching clock: s. 89 (1) covers undue damage caused wilfully or negligently, and s. 89 (1.1) (b) gives you the same one year from the end of possession.
Before you fill in a number, net off the deposit. Section 106 (10) requires a landlord to apply a rent deposit in payment of the rent for the last rent period before the tenancy terminates. Section 87 (4) then requires the Board, in an order terminating the tenancy and requiring payment of arrears, to subtract from the amount owing any rent deposit or interest on a rent deposit that would be owing to the tenant on termination. Claim the arrears without accounting for the last month's rent and you have overstated your own application on its face, which is a poor way to open a hearing.
The form is Form L10, Application to Collect Money a Former Tenant Owes. Its July 2026 instructions confirm the practical limits: the tenant must have moved out on or after 2021-09-01, and you cannot file more than one year after the date they moved out.
The ceiling is statutory rather than administrative. Section 168 (2) gives the Board exclusive jurisdiction to determine all applications under the Act. Section 207 (1) then caps what it can order at the greater of $10,000 and the monetary jurisdiction of the Small Claims Court, which as of 2026-08-19 means $50,000. Section 207 (3) is the sting: where a party claims a sum equal to or less than that ceiling, all of that party's rights above the ceiling are extinguished once the Board issues its order. If you are genuinely owed more, that is a decision to make before you file, not after.
The L10 covers rent and compensation, charges related to NSF cheques, unpaid heat, electricity and water, damage, and expenses from substantial interference with your reasonable enjoyment or lawful rights, which is s. 88.1 (1). The NSF administration charge is capped at $20 per cheque.
Service is the trap. You cannot leave the tenant's copy at the rental unit, because they no longer live there. The instructions require you to give the application and the Notice of Hearing to each former tenant at least 30 days before the hearing, and to file a Certificate of Service for a former tenant at least 20 days before. If you cannot reach them by any of the listed methods, a Request to use Alternative Service has to go in at least 40 days before the hearing. Miss those and the Board may cancel your hearing and close the file, and the filing fee is not refunded.
Two cases fall outside all of this. A tenant who ceased possession before 2021-09-01, and a tenant who left more than a year ago, cannot be pursued at the Board at all. That is a court file, and the Board's exclusive jurisdiction under s. 168 (2) does not reach a claim it has no application for. Get advice before you spend money chasing either one.
One note on Guideline 4, which dates from 2007. It says the Board has no jurisdiction to order rent or compensation once a tenant is no longer in possession, and points landlords to court. That reflected the law at the time. The former tenant applications created in 2021 are the current answer for a tenant who left on or after 2021-09-01.
The legal file is only half of the job. An empty unit with an unresolved tenancy is exposed in ways an occupied one is not, and three of those are worth handling in the first few days.
Call your insurance broker. Policies commonly carry a condition about vacant or unoccupied units, and both the wording and the time limits vary between insurers. Do not assume your coverage is untouched because you have not made a claim yet. Ask what your policy actually says and what it requires you to do.
Find out whether the utilities are still on and whose name they are in. If the tenant held the account and closed it on the way out, the heat may already be off, and an unheated unit is a burst pipe waiting to happen. That is a maintenance emergency wearing a paperwork disguise.
Secure the unit, but do not change the locks. Until the tenancy has ended, the tenant still has a right of possession under s. 39, and s. 24 is the provision that turns a new cylinder into an application against you. Cover the broken window, keep the heat running, drain what needs draining, and leave the locking system alone until you have your order.
An owner with one rental will meet this problem two or three times in a working life, and will be learning it under pressure each time. KEILTY runs it as a process instead, which is the difference between a file that produces an order and a file that produces an argument. Our management pricing is a flat monthly rate per unit rather than a percentage, so it does not climb as your rent does, and you can see how it works on our single family rental page.
A last word on temptation. Every part of this process is slower than changing the locks on a Tuesday. It is also the part that holds up when the tenant reappears, and the protection in s. 42 (8) reaches only a landlord who followed the section. The same discipline applies when a tenant gives notice and then stays put, which we covered in what happens if a tenant gives notice then does not move out.
If you have a unit sitting empty and you are not certain where you stand, a free rental evaluation will tell you what it should be renting for and what it is costing you in the meantime.
This post is general information about Ontario residential tenancy law as of 2026-08-19, 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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