Policy, Legislation & Advocacy
Ontario's Bill 60: What the RTA Overhaul Changes for Landlords
What Bill 60 changes for Ontario landlords under the Residential Tenancies Act — notice timing, LTB hearings, arrears disputes, and what stayed the same.
Bill 60 is Ontario’s package of changes to the Residential Tenancies Act, and it has passed into law. For landlords, the practical shifts sit in three places: how quickly a non-payment file can move toward the Landlord and Tenant Board, what a tenant must do to raise an arrears dispute at a hearing, and how eviction notices are drafted and served. One thing the final bill did not touch is the requirement that a landlord have an ongoing legal reason to end a tenancy — that protection stayed intact. Confirm the current notice periods and forms with a paralegal or the LTB before relying on any specific timeline.
What Bill 60 Actually Changed for Landlords
Bill 60 touched five operational areas for landlords: non-payment filing speed, arrears disputes at hearings, review-application timelines, personal-use notices, and LTB enforcement capacity — plus one high-profile change, security of tenure, that was proposed but ultimately dropped. The table below maps what changed to what it means day-to-day; check the LTB’s current forms and the legislation itself for the exact figures in force today.
| What changed | What it means for landlords |
|---|---|
| The wait before a landlord can file a non-payment (N4) application with the LTB | The minimum wait after a missed rent payment was shortened, so a landlord can file sooner — but the deeper bottleneck (waiting for a hearing once filed) is unchanged. (Separately, a mailed notice is still treated as received a few days after mailing under the RTA’s long-standing service rules — that isn’t new to Bill 60.) |
| How a tenant disputes the arrears amount at a non-payment hearing | A tenant raising this kind of defense now has to pay a portion of the claimed arrears into the Board before the issue is heard, which is meant to discourage using a dispute purely to stall — adjudicators still exercise discretion case by case |
| Review applications | The window to request a review of an order was shortened — parties have less time to ask for one. This is a filing-deadline change; it doesn’t by itself speed up how quickly the Board hears a review once requested |
| Personal-use (N12) notices | The bill’s reforms targeted the personal-use notice period and the compensation requirement tied to it — confirm the current N12 notice period and whether compensation is required directly against the LTB’s published forms before serving one |
| Security of tenure (ending a tenancy because a fixed term simply expired) | Proposed in the bill’s first reading, but it did not survive to the final law — a landlord still needs an ongoing legal reason (an N-notice ground) to end a tenancy |
| LTB enforcement and case-processing capacity | The reform package included added enforcement resources and steps toward more transparent case tracking — landlords may see incremental improvement once an order is granted, but this doesn’t shorten the wait to get a hearing in the first place |
How Bill 60 Changes the Eviction Notice Process
Bill 60’s notice-side changes are about timing and clarity, not about creating new grounds to evict — a landlord still needs the same underlying reason (non-payment, personal use, and so on) to serve a valid notice in the first place.
On timing, the minimum filing wait after a non-payment notice was shortened across the board, so a landlord can file sooner regardless of how the notice was served. (A separate, long-standing rule still treats a mailed notice as received a few days after mailing when counting time — that predates Bill 60 and isn’t a notice-specific electronic-vs-mail difference.) On clarity, the bill’s broader messaging push was to make the N-series forms themselves read more plainly: telling a tenant in the first paragraph that they don’t have to move out immediately, that they can dispute the notice, and that a hearing will be scheduled if they do. That’s a wording change to reduce confusion on both sides, not a change to what grounds a landlord needs.
How Bill 60 Changes What Happens at an LTB Hearing
At a hearing, Bill 60’s main change is procedural: a tenant disputing arrears now has to put money behind that dispute before it gets a full hearing, which is intended to cut down on disputes filed purely to buy time.
That said, the deeper hearing-stage dynamics carried over unchanged. Adjudicators retain discretion under the RTA’s existing “persistently late” and payment-agreement rules — a rule can read as strict on paper while still leaving room for an adjudicator to weigh a tenant’s circumstances. Landlords are also seeing more tenant-initiated applications over harassment, tenant rights, or maintenance filed alongside eviction cases; those applications cost time and legal fees to defend even when the damages sought aren’t fully awarded, so documenting communications and maintenance response times matters more, not less, under the current environment.
What Bill 60 Did Not Change
Two things landlords sometimes assume changed did not: security of tenure and the core hearing-wait bottleneck.
Security of tenure — the rule that a landlord needs an ongoing legal reason to end a tenancy — was proposed for removal in the bill’s first reading but was dropped before the bill passed. A lease simply reaching its end date still isn’t, by itself, grounds to end a tenancy. Separately, neither a landlord-side paralegal nor a landlord advocacy voice who tracked the bill through passage expect it to meaningfully shorten the wait to get an actual hearing date once a case is filed — that capacity problem sits with the Board’s scheduling, not with the notice rules Bill 60 touched.
Who Bill 60 Actually Targets
Bill 60’s changes are aimed at tenants who don’t intend to pay or comply, not at tenants who pay rent and follow their lease — a distinction both a landlord-side paralegal and a landlord advocate who tracked the bill through passage make explicitly.
In practice, that means a landlord with a tenant who pays on time and follows the lease terms shouldn’t expect the relationship to change at all. The provisions that matter — the arrears pay-in requirement, the notice-timing changes, the added enforcement resources — only come into play once a tenancy has already broken down over non-payment or another substantive issue. Framing the changes that way to a tenant base, rather than letting the coverage stand as-is, is one of the more practical takeaways for landlords managing tenant relationships during a period of legislative change.
How Landlords Should Respond to Bill 60
The most useful response to Bill 60 isn’t to memorize its provisions — it’s to verify the current version of whichever notice or process is actually in front of you before you act on it.
- Confirm the current form and timeline before serving a notice. The LTB updates its N-series forms as legislation and regulations change; use the version posted on the Board’s site, not a cached copy.
- Keep a documented rent-payment history. Whether a payment pattern counts as “persistently late” is still something the Board evaluates against a landlord’s records, so late payments, communications, and any payment agreements should be tracked consistently.
- Get professional advice before a contested filing. A paralegal experienced in landlord-tenant matters can confirm which timeline and form version applies to a given tenancy, especially one that started before Bill 60 took effect.
- Expect incremental, not dramatic, change at the hearing stage. Budget for the same realistic wait-to-hearing timeline you’d have planned for before Bill 60, and treat any filing-speed improvement as a bonus rather than the fix to board delay.
- Watch for further legislative refinement. RTA reform in Ontario has moved in stages rather than all at once; provisions that read as unsettled today (like the exact definition of “persistently late”) are the kind of detail future regulations are likely to clarify.