By A.J. Keilty, President, KEILTY Realty Management
In Ontario you can ask a rental applicant for credit references, a credit check with written consent, rental history, income information, and a guarantor. That list comes from Ontario Regulation 290/98 under the Human Rights Code, and it is close to exhaustive. The catch is how you use it: income information can only be requested if you are also asking for credit references, rental history and a credit check, and it has to be weighed together with everything else rather than used as a cutoff on its own.
That single sentence is where most owners get into trouble. Nearly every landlord we talk to knows they are allowed to run a credit check. Far fewer know that the common "rent cannot exceed 30 percent of income" filter is not permitted, or that a blank credit file is not a legitimate reason to pass on an applicant. Here is how the rules actually work, and how to build a screening process that holds up.
Three separate pieces of law govern tenant selection in Ontario, and they do different jobs.
Complaints about screening do not go to the Landlord and Tenant Board. They go to the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario, which is a different process with a different timeline and no rent arrears to offset against. That is worth knowing before you write "young professionals only" in an ad.
Yes, with a condition attached. Regulation 290/98 lets you request income information, defined as the amount, source and steadiness of the applicant's income, only if you are also requesting credit references, rental history and authorization for a credit check. If income is the only thing you ask for, you have stepped outside the regulation.
The second half matters more. You must consider income together with the other information you collected. An applicant with modest income, a clean five year rental history and an 800 credit score is, on the face of the file, a stronger bet than someone earning triple who has two collections and a prior eviction. If your process throws out the first person before anyone reads the rest of the file, the process is the problem.
Practically, this means asking for the same package from every applicant: a completed application, consent for a credit check, two prior landlord references, and one form of income confirmation such as a recent pay stub, an employment letter, a Notice of Assessment, or bank statements. Self employed applicants and retirees should be able to satisfy that last item in a way that fits their situation.
No. The Ontario Human Rights Commission is direct about this: applying a minimum income criterion or a rent-to-income ratio such as a 30 percent cutoff is not permitted in the private rental market. The reasoning is that the cutoff has a disproportionate effect on people protected by the Code, particularly single parents, newcomers, people receiving public assistance and people with disabilities, without actually predicting whether rent gets paid.
The exception is rent-geared-to-income housing, where income is the basis of eligibility by design.
If you are used to running a ratio, replace it with a written set of criteria that looks at the whole file. Something like: verified rental history with no arrears in the last two years, a credit report free of housing-related collections, confirmed income from any lawful source, and a guarantor available if the file is thin. That is defensible. "Must earn 3x the rent" is not.
Yes. A credit report cannot be pulled without the applicant's written authorization, and the consent should be specific about what you are checking and why. Build it into the application form rather than asking for it verbally.
Two related habits are worth adopting. Keep the report itself out of general circulation, since it contains a lot of information you do not need and should not be sharing with a co-owner, a contractor or a friend who is helping you show the unit. And do not run a check on someone who has not applied. Curiosity is not consent.
A lack of credit or rental history should not be treated as a negative on its own. That is the Commission's stated position, and it exists because the people most likely to have thin files are newcomers to Canada, students, young adults and people leaving a family home or a shelter, all of whom are protected on Code grounds.
The permitted workaround is already in the regulation: you can ask for a guarantor. You can also accept alternative evidence, such as a letter from an employer, proof of savings, or references from a previous landlord in another country. In student-heavy markets like Kingston and Peterborough, guarantor-backed leases are ordinary, and the paperwork is straightforward once you have a template. What you cannot do is use "no Canadian credit history" as a screen.
Anything that tells you about a protected ground and nothing about whether rent gets paid. In practice, the questions that generate complaints tend to be conversational rather than written, which is why untrained showing agents are a real exposure.
Advertising copy counts too. "Ideal for a quiet single professional", "not suitable for children", and "adult building" all describe the tenant instead of the unit. Describe the unit.
You are still allowed to enforce neutral occupancy standards tied to health and safety or municipal bylaws, and you can decline someone for a documented, non-discriminatory reason. Write the reason down at the time you make the decision, not three months later when you are asked to explain it.
Less than most owners assume. A rent deposit equal to one rent period, usually last month's rent, is permitted and earns interest at the guideline rate. A refundable key deposit is permitted if it reflects the replacement cost. Damage deposits, pet deposits, cleaning fees and non-refundable administration fees are not permitted, and we have written about that in more detail in Can You Charge a Damage Deposit in Ontario?
You also cannot require post-dated cheques or preauthorized debit as a condition of getting the unit. An applicant can offer them voluntarily, and many do, but requiring them is prohibited under the Residential Tenancies Act.
And use the standard lease. Since 2018-04-30 the Residential Tenancy Agreement (Standard Form of Lease), Form 2229E, has been mandatory for most new residential tenancies in Ontario. If a tenant asks for it in writing and does not receive it within 21 days, they can withhold one month's rent. That is a self-inflicted wound that costs more than the paperwork ever would.
This is the part of screening that has changed most in the past two years. Tenant screening vendors report that roughly one in eight rental applications contains some form of fraud, most often forged income or employment documents, and generative AI has made fake pay stubs, employment letters and bank statements convincing enough that eyeballing a PDF is no longer a control.
What still works is verification that does not run through the applicant.
Apply the same verification steps to every applicant. Selective scrutiny is itself a discrimination risk, and it is the pattern that shows up most often when a screening process is examined after the fact.
Four things, and none of them are complicated.
The practical benefit shows up long before any tribunal does. A consistent file is faster to evaluate, which shortens the gap between showing and signing. In a market where asking rents have softened and vacancy has climbed, days matter, and you can see what they cost with our vacancy loss calculator.
A rejected applicant can file an application with the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario. Remedies in rental housing cases have included monetary damages for injury to dignity, feelings and self-respect, orders to change screening practices, and orders to provide training. The amounts vary widely with the facts, and the process consumes months of an owner's attention regardless of outcome.
The more common outcome, though, is quieter. Owners who over-screen sit on vacant units, turn down good applicants, and then take the first person who clears an arbitrary income bar. That is how you end up with the file that becomes an eviction proceeding a year later. Compliant screening and effective screening are the same thing, done properly.
The Code and the regulation are provincial, so the rules do not change between Belleville and Barrhaven. What changes is the applicant pool. A Kingston student unit and a Whitby single-family rental draw completely different files, and a criteria set written for one will misfire on the other. Guarantors are routine in one and unusual in the other. Thin credit files are the norm in one and a flag in the other.
KEILTY screens across all of the Ontario markets we operate in, which means one process, applied consistently, tuned to what a normal file looks like in each city. Owners weighing whether to keep this in house can compare the tradeoffs in our property management versus self-management breakdown. Our management model is a flat monthly rate per unit rather than a percentage of rent, so screening well does not cost you more when rents rise. Current rates for single-family rentals are on the single-family rental page.
If you are listing a unit this fall and want a second set of eyes on your screening process, or a read on what your property should be renting for, book a free rental evaluation or get in touch. No obligation, and you keep the analysis either way.
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