Which notice ends a tenancy in Ontario, and how many days it needs

01The whole set on one page

There are eight notices a landlord uses regularly in Ontario. They differ in what they are for, how many days they need, and whether the termination date has to sit at the end of a rental period. That last column is the one people skip.

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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.

02Mistake one: counting from the day you wrote it

The notice period runs from when the tenant is deemed to have received the notice, not from when you filled the form in. Hand delivery and dropping it in the mailbox count the same day. A courier is the day after handover, rolling forward if that day is a weekend or a holiday. Canada Post adds five days.

That five days is the single most expensive number in Ontario tenancy administration. It is the reason a 60-day N12 mailed on the last day of the month lands short, and it is entirely avoidable by hand delivering or by counting properly.

03Mistake two: a termination date in the middle of a period

N8, N12 and N13 have to end on the last day of a rental period. If rent is due on the first of the month, that means the last day of a month. If rent is due on the fifteenth, the rental period runs to the fourteenth, and the termination date has to be the fourteenth.

So a 60-day N12 served on August 1 does not terminate on October 1. Sixty days lands on September 30, which is the end of a period, and that works. Serve the same notice on August 5 and the earliest lawful date is October 31, because September 30 is now less than 60 days away. The form does not warn you about this. The Board does, afterwards.

04What changes on September 21, 2026

Two things move on that date, and they move in opposite directions.

The N4 termination period for monthly and yearly tenancies drops from 14 days to 7, which lets a landlord file an L1 roughly a week sooner. Weekly and daily tenancies were already at 7.

The N12 gets stricter. Give at least 120 days' notice and the one month's compensation no longer applies, which is a real saving. But the person named in the notice must move in within 60 days of the termination date, and if they do not, the notice is presumed to have been given in bad faith. A bad-faith finding can cost you the rent difference the tenant pays elsewhere for up to a year, their moving and storage costs, an abatement, and on top of all of that an administrative fine payable to the Board.

05After the notice, there is still an application

None of these forms end a tenancy on their own. If the tenant does not leave by the termination date, you file the matching application with the Landlord and Tenant Board and go to a hearing. An L1 for arrears, an L2 for most other grounds.

The Board also keeps a discretion under section 83 to refuse or delay an eviction even where the grounds are proven. That discretion is where a sloppy file gets punished and a clean one gets through. It is worth knowing that the quality of your records is doing work long before anyone reads them.

• Serve the right form, on the right day, with a date you can defend on paper
• Keep the delivery record with the notice, not in a separate folder
• Record the tenant's response, or the absence of one, with dates
• File the application promptly after the termination date passes
• Bring the ledger, not a summary of the ledger

06Where TenantBay fits

Every item above is a date attached to a tenancy. The notice date, the deemed service date, the termination date, the date the tenant actually moved out, the date the occupant moved in.

TenantBay keeps notices, leases, payments and tenancy history on the property they belong to, so that sequence can be reconstructed months later without digging through email. That matters more here than anywhere else on the site: a good-faith N12 and a bad-faith one look identical in hindsight unless you can show the dates.