Your tenant stopped paying rent. Here is the order things happen in Ontario.

01The sequence, start to finish

This process has four steps and they only run in one order. Most of the damage landlords do to their own case happens by trying to compress it.

1. 1

   1. Serve the N4

   You can serve it the day after rent was due. The termination date must be at least 7 days out for a monthly or yearly tenancy on notices given from September 21, 2026, and 14 days on notices given before that. Weekly and daily tenancies have always been 7.

2. 2

   2. Wait out the termination date

   If the tenant pays everything owing before that date, the notice is void and the tenancy simply continues. That is the design. Most N4s end in payment, not eviction.

3. 3

   3. File the L1

   The day after the termination date passes you can file an Application to evict a tenant for non-payment of rent, $186 through the Tribunals Ontario Portal or $201 otherwise. The Board checks the N4 before it grants anything.

4. 4

   4. Hearing, order, Sheriff

   Only the Board can order an eviction and only the Court Enforcement Office can carry one out. A landlord who changes the locks has not saved time, they have started a second case against themselves.

TenantBay calculator

Pick the form, get the earliest lawful date

Almost every notice thrown out at the Landlord and Tenant Board is thrown out on a date, not on the facts. Two things move that date: mail adds five days before the clock even starts, and some forms have to land on the last day of a rental period.

The notice

Which form?

N4N5N6N7N8N12N13N1

Date you are giving the notice

How is it being delivered?

Handed to the tenantLeft in the mailboxCourier (next business day)Canada Post (adds 5 days)

This is a weekly or daily tenancy.

Earliest lawful termination date

Pick a form and a service date.

Notice periods are from the Residential Tenancies Act, 2006 and O. Reg. 516/06. This gives you the earliest date the Act allows. It does not tell you whether you have grounds, and it is not legal advice.

02Only rent goes on an N4

This is the single most expensive line on the form. The N4 is for rent arrears. Not NSF charges, not damage, not utilities unless the tenancy agreement defines them as rent, not a late fee, because Ontario does not permit late fees at all.

Put anything else in the arrears table and you have overstated the amount owing. The tenant can void the notice by paying the real figure, and the Board can dismiss the L1 that follows because the notice was defective. Months of process, undone by one line of arithmetic.

Partial payments make this worse, because the table has to be accurate on the day you serve. If $400 landed last Tuesday, the N4 you serve on Thursday has to reflect it.

03What a good file looks like at the hearing

04The things that make it worse

Every one of these converts a straightforward arrears file into a tenant application you now have to defend, while the money you are owed sits exactly where it was.

• Changing the locks, at any stage, for any reason
• Removing or holding the tenant's belongings against what is owed
• Shutting off heat, water, electricity or gas, which is prohibited regardless of arrears
• Adding a late fee or interest, neither of which Ontario permits
• Taking the last month's rent deposit and applying it to the arrears mid-tenancy
• Agreeing a repayment plan informally, when the Board's Payment Agreement Form has been mandatory since July 1, 2026

05When it is late every month but always arrives

Different problem, different form. Rent that is persistently late, even if it always lands eventually, is a ground under the N8 rather than the N4. That needs 60 days' notice and a termination date at the end of a rental period.

Persistent lateness is a pattern, which means it is proven with dates rather than amounts. The paid-on date for every month is the case. A landlord who records only the amount has nothing to show.

06The record is the whole thing

Read back through the failures above and almost none of them are legal misunderstandings. They are record-keeping problems: an arrears figure that was stale, a service date nobody wrote down, a payment plan agreed by text, paid-on dates that were never captured.

TenantBay tracks rent against the tenancy with the date each payment actually arrived, keeps notices and their delivery record on the same unit, and carries the maintenance history alongside. When the file is needed it already exists, which is the only time it can be built.