Nearly all of them. Section 20 of the Residential Tenancies Act, 2006 makes the landlord responsible for keeping the residential complex and every rental unit in it in a good state of repair, fit for habitation, and compliant with health, safety, housing and maintenance standards. The tenant's side of the ledger is much smaller: ordinary cleanliness, and damage they or their guests cause. Everything in between, the furnace, the roof, the fridge you supplied, the mice in the basement, is yours.
That answer surprises a lot of first-time owners, usually at the worst possible moment. Here is what the obligation covers, where the tenant's share of it starts, and what it costs when a repair sits too long.
The Landlord and Tenant Board reads section 20 broadly. Its own maintenance brochure lists the categories plainly:
It reaches past the unit door. The LTB's Interpretation Guideline 5 confirms the obligation extends to the whole residential complex, meaning the lobby, hallways, stairwells, laundry, parking, exterior grounds and any recreational facilities. It can even reach a facility that is not on the property at all, if you specifically agreed to provide it, such as parking in a separate lot or storage in another building.
Pest control belongs to the landlord too. So does general cleanliness of common areas. One piece of good news: when something is beyond repair, you are not required to upgrade. If a stove dies, you can replace it with a used stove, as long as the used stove works properly.
No. Section 20(2) says the obligation applies even if the tenant knew about the state of non-repair before signing. A tenant who toured a unit with a cracked window, said nothing, and moved in anyway can still ask for that window to be fixed a year later.
Nor can you write your way out of it. Guideline 5 puts it directly: if a tenant agreed in a lease to take on maintenance of any part of the unit or complex beyond ordinary cleanliness and damage, that agreement is not enforceable. The Board treats the clause as though it were never written. This is one of the most common problems we see in leases owners drafted themselves, and it is a good argument for using the Ontario Standard Lease rather than something borrowed from a template site.
In a single-family rental this is common, and in practice it often works fine, because the tenant wants the yard and is happy to keep it. But understand what you are holding. It is not a transfer of your section 20 obligation. If the walkway ices over and stays that way, the exposure is still yours, both at the Board and with your insurer. Write it as an expectation, budget for a contractor as the backstop, and check in during the first winter rather than assuming.
Two possible sets, and which one applies depends on your municipality.
Most Ontario cities, including Kingston, Belleville, Peterborough, Oshawa, Cornwall and Ottawa, have their own property standards bylaws. Those are the standards you must meet, and the municipality enforces them. Where a community has no bylaw, the provincial maintenance standards under O. Reg. 517/06 apply instead, and the municipality enforces those.
The distinction matters at a hearing. Guideline 5 notes that a tenant cannot pick the provincial standard simply because it reads better for them. Section 20 requires compliance with the standards that are actually enforceable for that complex.
It also matters that a municipal work order is not just a to-do list. Once a tenant files a copy of a notice of violation or work order with the Board, an adjudicator is entitled to accept it as evidence that you did not comply with a standard. Arguing that the compliance deadline has not passed yet does not make the underlying problem disappear.
If you supply the heat, the minimum is 20 degrees Celsius, and heat counts as a vital service from September 1 to June 15. Some municipal standards are higher. Toronto, for example, requires 21 degrees. Interfering with a vital service is not just a maintenance breach, it is an offence under the Act.
Mid-August is the sensible time to deal with this. A furnace that will not start on the first cold night in October becomes an emergency call at emergency rates, and the tenant is entitled to heat regardless of how booked your HVAC contractor is. We covered the rest of the pre-winter list, including the carbon monoxide alarm rules, earlier this season.
Two things, and they are narrower than most owners assume.
The first is ordinary cleanliness. Section 33 requires the tenant to keep the unit clean to the standard most people would call normal. An untidy unit is not, on its own, grounds for eviction. It becomes a problem when it crosses into a safety or health hazard, a unit dirty enough to attract pests or cluttered enough to be a fire risk.
The second is undue damage. Section 34 makes the tenant responsible for repairing damage caused by the wilful or negligent conduct of the tenant, other occupants, or anyone they let into the complex. That includes damage in common areas, not only inside the unit. Intent is irrelevant. Careless counts.
What tenants are not responsible for is normal wear and tear. A carpet worn down over six years of ordinary use is a replacement cost, not a damage claim, and framing it as damage at a hearing tends to cost you credibility on the items that actually are damage.
The tenant files a Tenant Application about Maintenance, Form T6. The filing fee is $53, or $48 through the Tribunals Ontario Portal, so cost is not much of a deterrent.
The remedies under section 30 are broader than most owners expect. The Board can:
That rent-increase prohibition is the one owners underestimate. A guideline increase you skip does not come back later. On a unit renting at $2,100, missing a single 2.1% increase costs roughly $530 in the first year and compounds against every year after it.
Abatements are assessed on impact, not on punishment. The Board looks at how long the problem lasted and how badly it affected the use of the unit, measured against what a reasonable tenant would experience. It also weighs whether you were told. Section 30(2) requires the adjudicator to consider whether the tenant advised you of the problem before applying, and Guideline 5 is clear that if you responded within a reasonable time with a response that actually fixed the issue, an abatement is usually not appropriate. Responsiveness is the defence.
Long enough that the arithmetic works against you. As of 2026-05-29 the LTB reported 80% of cases being heard between 3.2 and 14.1 months after filing, and tenant applications tend to sit toward the back of that queue rather than the front.
Here is why that should worry you more than the hearing itself: where the breach is ongoing, the abatement period can run past the date of the order until the problem is actually fixed. A deficiency that would have cost $1,800 to repair in September can become a repair plus a year of abatement by the time anyone sits down at a hearing.
Yes, and the numbers went up. Withholding a vital service and disobeying an LTB order requiring specific repairs are both offences under the Act. As of 2026-07-02, Ontario lists the maximum penalty on conviction as $100,000 for an individual and $500,000 for a corporation. Prosecutions are not common, but they are not theoretical either, and the Rental Housing Enforcement Unit takes vital service complaints seriously.
The legal test is "a good state of repair" and "within a reasonable time." Neither has a number attached, which means what you can prove matters as much as what you did.
The patterns repeat. A repair request buried in a text thread that nobody logged. A contractor who was booked for three weeks, which was reasonable in the owner's mind and unreasonable in the tenant's. Deferred maintenance on a building bought with existing work orders that the new owner never pulled. A lease clause making the tenant responsible for the furnace, which the Board struck out in about a minute.
None of these are exotic. They are what happens when maintenance is handled off the side of a desk by someone with a day job. If that is the real constraint, the honest comparison is not "self-manage versus pay a fee," it is "self-manage versus what a missed obligation costs." We laid that out in property management versus self-management.
KEILTY charges a flat monthly rate per unit rather than a percentage of rent, so the cost of having someone answer the maintenance call at 9 p.m. does not climb every time the rent does. Current rates for houses and condos are on the single-family rental page, and owners with buildings can find theirs on the small multi-family and apartment communities pages.
Not sure whether your unit is priced right, or what the deferred items on it are actually costing you? Request a free rental evaluation and we will give you a straight read on rent, condition and market timing for your address.
Ontario property management with published pricing, same-day answers, and no surprises. Since 2003.
300-80 Queen Street