They want $25,000 to leave. Work out what saying no costs first.

01The number everyone watches is the wrong one

A tenant stops paying in October. By August the ledger says eighteen thousand dollars, and that figure is what the landlord thinks about at two in the morning. It is also almost irrelevant to the decision in front of them.

Those arrears are behind you. They are the same on every path from here: whether you wait for a hearing or hand someone money to leave tomorrow, the eighteen thousand has already happened. What separates the two paths is what happens next.

So the arrears belong in one column only, and it is not the cost column. It is the recovery column, next to an honest answer about how much of it you will ever see.

02What the wait actually costs

Forward from today, holding out costs you three things: the rent you do not collect until you have the unit back, what you spend getting there, and the time.

The first is the big one and it compounds quietly. On a $2,400 unit, every month of process is $2,400 you will not invoice for. Eight months is $19,200. Twelve is $28,800. That is before a paralegal, before the filing fee, and before the turnover you will pay for at the end regardless.

The second is more predictable and much smaller. The third is the one nobody puts a number on and everybody feels.

03Now put the ask next to it

Against $31,300, a demand for $25,000 stops sounding outrageous and starts sounding like a number someone else has also run.

That does not mean pay it. It means the refusal has a price, and it is worth knowing the price before refusing. The break-even is the payment at which both paths cost the same. Below it you are ahead by settling on your own assumptions; above it you are ahead by waiting, for exactly as long as those assumptions hold.

And the assumption doing all the work is the timeline. Nobody can tell you how long your file will take. Hearings get scheduled and adjourned, and an order is not the same as having your keys back. Every extra month moves the break-even by one month's rent, in the direction of settling.

TenantBay calculator

They asked for cash to leave. What does saying no cost?

The arrears already owed are behind you whichever way this goes, and an order for them is not money until somebody collects it. The decision is forward looking: what you lose waiting, against what it costs to end it now.

Where things stand

Monthly rent$Arrears owed so far$Counted only toward what you might recover, never as a cost of waiting.Months until you expect the unit backFiling, scheduling, the hearing, an adjournment or two, then enforcement.Legal and filing costs$

Realistically, how much of an order would you collect?

Probably nothingMaybe a quarterMost of it

An order is enforceable, but only against someone with something to enforce against.

Months empty between tenantsTurnover costs$What are they asking for?$Optional. Leave blank to just see the break-even.

The comparison

Enter the monthly rent to start.

An agreement to end a tenancy is lawful in Ontario and is recorded on Form N11. It has to be genuinely agreed: pressure applied to get a signature is how an agreement stops being one. This is arithmetic under your own assumptions, not advice about whether to settle, and the timeline is the assumption most likely to be wrong.

04How this goes when the arithmetic is skipped

05If you do settle, do it properly

An agreement to end a tenancy is lawful in Ontario and it has a form: the N11, signed by both sides. It is a normal commercial resolution, not an admission that you were in the wrong.

Two things make it stick. It has to be genuinely agreed, because pressure applied to get a signature is how an agreement stops being one and becomes something a tenant can later unpick. And the money should be tied to the unit actually being empty, on the date the form says, rather than handed over on a promise.

• Use the N11 rather than a letter you wrote yourself
• Write down what is being waived, including the arrears, so nobody revisits it
• Pay on vacant possession, not before
• Do a final walkthrough and record the condition the same way you would at any move-out
• Keep the signed agreement with the tenancy file, not in an inbox

06The record is what makes any of this survivable

Every version of this decision runs on the same inputs: what is actually owed, what was paid and when, what has been spent, and what was agreed. Landlords who reconstruct those from a bank app under time pressure make worse decisions than landlords who already have them.

TenantBay keeps rent against the tenancy with the date each payment actually arrived, so the arrears figure in a calculation like this is the real one. The same record is what an N4 has to match, and what an arrears application is proved with.