Eviction Notices in Ontario: What an N4, N11, N12 or N13 Actually Starts

This article explains how termination notices work in Ontario as of 2026 and is general information, not legal advice. Notice periods, compensation amounts and filing deadlines are quoted from the Landlord and Tenant Board's own forms, instructions and brochures, retrieved 10 August 2026, and the underlying rules come from the Residential Tenancies Act, 2006, S.O. 2006, c. 17. Pending amendments are flagged where they apply. A licensed representative can advise on your own situation.

The first thing worth knowing about an eviction notice Ontario landlords serve is that it is not an eviction. It is a form with a date on it, and that date starts a clock. Only the Landlord and Tenant Board can order someone out, and only the Sheriff can enforce that order.

What separates the four forms people search for most is not how serious they sound. It is what stops the clock. One of them stops for money. One of them never started, because the tenant signed it. Two of them cannot be stopped at all, and the Act charges the landlord for that privilege in cash.

Get that distinction right and the rest of the process is readable. Get it wrong and people either move out when they did not have to, or serve a notice that a hearing will throw out months later.

Eviction notice Ontario rules in one screen

An Ontario termination notice sets a date, and what happens on that date depends entirely on which form it is.

• N4, non-payment of rent: at least 14 days if rent is paid monthly or yearly, 7 days if daily or weekly. Paying everything owed by the termination date voids it.
• N11, agreement to end the tenancy: no notice period at all, and a landlord cannot require a tenant to sign one as a condition of renting.
• N12, landlord's or purchaser's own use: 60 days ending on the last day of a rental period, plus one month's rent or another acceptable unit.
• N13, demolition, renovation or conversion: 120 days, plus one month's rent under five units or three months' rent at five or more.
• A notice is not an order. If the tenant stays, the landlord applies and the Landlord and Tenant Board decides after a hearing.
• Only two of the four can be filed on immediately. An N12 or N13 can go to the Board the same day; an N4 waits until the day after its termination date.

A notice is a clock, not an eviction

A termination notice does one thing: it sets a date and creates the right to apply to the Board if the tenant is still there afterwards. Nothing about it obliges anyone to leave on the spot, and Ontario's own summary of tenant and landlord rights describes security of tenancy in the same terms.

The Board's guide to how a landlord can end a tenancy puts the sequence plainly: notice, then application, then hearing, then order, then, if it comes to it, the Court Enforcement Office. A landlord who changes the locks instead is committing an offence, and since 1 July 2026 the maximum fine on conviction under the Residential Tenancies Act is $100,000 for an individual and $500,000 for a corporation, doubled from the previous ceilings.

Every eviction notice Ontario law recognises comes from a numbered form, and the form decides everything that follows. That gap between the date on the paper and the day anything can happen is also long: add the Board's own queue to the notice period and an N13 file can run the better part of a year before a hearing.

N4: the only eviction notice Ontario tenants can cancel by paying

The N4 is served when rent has not been paid in full, and it is the only one of the four with an exit built into it. Paying everything owed by the termination date voids the notice outright, and the landlord cannot then apply on it.

The counting is mechanical and worth doing carefully. The day the notice is given is not counted. Mail adds five days, courier adds one business day, and a notice cannot be given by taping it to the door. The Board's own worked example in the instructions to Form N4 runs a notice handed over on 3 March to a termination date of 17 March, and the same notice mailed on 3 March to 22 March.

Two details do most of the damage. The amount owed is not frozen at the figure on the form, since any rent falling due before payment has to be covered as well. And the landlord cannot file until the day after the termination date, so the last day to pay and the first day to file are consecutive.

Say a tenant rents a one-bedroom in Hamilton at $1,650 a month, due on the first, and comes up short in July. The landlord hands over an N4 on 4 July claiming $1,650, with a termination date of 18 July. By 18 July the August rent has not yet fallen due, so $1,650 clears it. Leave it to 2 August and the figure is $3,300, because the tenancy did not stop generating rent while the clock ran.

If an order does get issued, the LTB's published fee schedule still lists a Motion to Void an Eviction Order for Arrears of Rent, filed at no charge, on the terms set out in the order itself.

N11: the form that is not a notice at all

The N11 carries more monthly searches in Ontario than the N4 and the N12 combined, which is a problem, because it is not a notice a landlord can serve. It is an agreement, and it only exists once both sides have signed.

The distinction matters more than it sounds. A notice makes an allegation, and an allegation can be answered at a hearing. An agreement makes none. The Board's guidance is blunt about what follows: where a tenant has agreed to end the tenancy, the LTB will not usually schedule a hearing at all. The landlord files an L3, and the order can arrive without anyone having heard the tenant's side.

Two protections sit around it. A landlord cannot require a tenant to sign an N11 as a condition of agreeing to rent the unit, with narrow exceptions for post-secondary student accommodation and certain care home tenancies tied to rehabilitative or therapeutic services. And a tenant who receives an eviction order after signing has 10 days from receiving it to apply to the Board to stop the eviction.

None of that makes the N11 a trap. It is genuinely useful when both sides want out and want a clean date. It stops being useful the moment it is presented as something the tenant has no choice about, which is the version that shows up most often in the questions we see.

N12: sixty days, one month's rent, and a promise to stay a year

The N12 ends a tenancy because someone intends to move in: the landlord, a purchaser, a close family member of either, or a caregiver for one of them. It runs 60 days, the termination date has to fall on the last day of a rental period, and the person moving in has to intend to occupy the unit for at least a year.

It cannot be voided. There is nothing a tenant can pay or fix, which is precisely why the Act attaches a price: one month's rent, payable by the termination date, or another rental unit the tenant finds acceptable. Compensation that never arrives is a defect in the notice, not a separate debt to chase afterwards.

The purchaser version has a limit that is easy to miss: it only applies where the property has no more than three residential units, so an N12 served on a tenant in a 20-unit building on the strength of an agreement of purchase and sale does not work. Where a sale is in the background, our guide to what real estate lawyers check on a transaction covers where those obligations surface before closing.

Where a tenant moves out and nobody moves in, the remedy is a T5, the bad faith application, at $53 or $48 through the Tribunals Ontario Portal. Proving the intention was never genuine is the hard part, which is why an empty unit afterwards is worth documenting at the time rather than reconstructing later.

N13: one hundred and twenty days and the largest cheque in the Act

The N13 covers demolition, conversion to a non-residential use, and repairs so extensive that a building permit is required and the unit has to be empty. It runs 120 days, or a full year for a mobile home or land lease site where the tenant owns the home.

The compensation scales with the building. In a residential complex of five or more units the landlord owes three months' rent or another acceptable unit; under five units it is one month. Where the work is a renovation and the tenant intends to return, the landlord instead owes the rent for the period the unit is out of use, capped at the same three months or one month. Nothing is owed at all where the demolition or repair was ordered under another Act.

Consider a tenant paying $1,900 a month in a 40-unit building in Ottawa who receives an N13 for a gut renovation. Three months' rent is $5,700, due by the termination date, not on completion. If that tenant gives written notice before moving out that they intend to come back, they keep a right of first refusal: the landlord cannot refuse them, and cannot charge more than they would have been paying had they never left.

That written notice before vacating is the whole mechanism. A tenant who moves out without giving it keeps the compensation but loses the right to return, and rent at the old rate in a renovated unit is usually worth considerably more than one month's difference.

The four notices side by side

These four forms sit behind almost every eviction notice Ontario tenants and landlords deal with. Periods, compensation and filing rules are taken from the LTB's forms and its brochure on how a landlord can end a tenancy, retrieved 10 August 2026.

The pattern in that table is the part worth carrying away. The one notice that can be stopped is also the one where the landlord waits for the clock to run out before filing. The two that cannot be stopped can be filed the same day they are served, and both cost the landlord money. The Act trades speed against price, in both directions.

What is changing, and what already has

Two statutes are rewriting parts of this in 2026, and the larger part is passed but not yet proclaimed, which is an unusual moment to be reading a notice.

Already in force since 1 July 2026: the window to ask the Board to review an order dropped from 30 days to 15, the maximum fines above doubled, the LTB's payment agreement form became mandatory for repayment plans, and new rules arrived for window and portable air conditioners.

Passed but waiting on proclamation, under Schedule 12 of the Fighting Delays, Building Faster Act, 2025 and Schedule 7 of the Helping Homebuyers, Protecting Tenants Act, 2023:

• A shorter N4. A rewritten section 59(1) lets a non-payment notice take effect as early as the seventh day after it is given, for every tenancy, not just weekly and daily ones.
• An N12 with no cheque attached. A new section 48.1(2) removes the one month's compensation where the notice gives at least 120 days and ends on a rental period. Sixty days keeps the payment; four months replaces it.
• A price on raising tenant issues. Section 82 currently lets a tenant raise any issue at an arrears hearing. The amendment adds conditions, including paying half the arrears claimed in the application before the hearing.
• A report behind every renoviction. Section 50(3) will require an N13 for repairs to come with a report from a person with prescribed qualifications confirming the work needs the unit empty, and a notice without one is void.
• A presumption against bad faith. A new section 57(6.1) presumes an N12 was given in bad faith where nobody named in it moved in within a prescribed period, shifting the burden onto the landlord.

Both schedules come into force on a day named by the Lieutenant Governor in Council, and Tribunals Ontario has said further changes from Bills 60 and 97 are to take effect in September 2026. As of 10 August 2026 the Board's published forms and brochures still set out the current rules, which is the clearest available signal that these provisions have not been proclaimed yet. Checking a form's own version date is worth a moment before relying on any figure in it.

Why nearly six in ten Ontario eviction files begin with an N4

Arrears dominate the system to a degree the public conversation does not reflect. Of 77,039 landlord applications received in 2024-25, 45,435 were L1 applications, the one that follows an N4.

That is 59 percent of everything landlords filed, and close to three times the 15,838 L2 applications that carry every other ground put together, the N12 and N13 included. The L1 stream has also grown fastest, up from 31,240 in 2021-22, a 45 percent rise in three years. The figures come from the Tribunals Ontario 2024-2025 annual report.

Renovictions and own-use notices get the coverage, and they matter enormously to the households that receive them. But the overwhelmingly common Ontario file is a money file, and money files have an exit built into them. Across the Ontario housing requests that reach our platform, arrears and the notice that follows them are what people describe first.

Where notices fall apart

Most notices that fail do not fail on the merits. They fail on the face of the form, and the Board's guidance says so directly: a notice that leaves out required information may be void, and an application built on a void notice may be dismissed. The recurring defects are worth knowing in both directions.

• A termination date that is too early, usually because the day of service was counted or the five days for mail were not added.
• A date that does not land on the end of a rental period on an N12 or N13, where that is a requirement rather than a preference.
• An N4 that includes charges other than rent, such as an NSF fee or the last month's rent deposit.
• Compensation not paid by the termination date on an N12 or N13, which goes to the validity of the notice itself.
• Service by taping the notice to the door, which the instructions to all three landlord notices exclude.
• Names or a unit address that do not match the tenancy, including missing a tenant in possession.

None of this is a reason for a tenant to ignore a notice: a defective notice still becomes an eviction order if nobody turns up to point out the defect. And for a landlord, a form redone properly on day one is far cheaper than an application dismissed four months in. Our note on how a demand letter frames a dispute before it becomes formal applies just as well to the conversation that precedes a notice.

When it is worth talking to someone

Some situations are ordinary paperwork. Others are worth a professional opinion before a date passes.

• The notice is an N12 or N13, since there is no way to cure it and the deadline to contest is the hearing.
• Compensation has not arrived and the termination date is close.
• A tenant is being asked to sign an N11 rather than agreeing to one.
• An eviction order has been issued and the 15-day review window is running.
• The unit is a basement apartment or a room in a house, where whether the Act applies at all is genuinely arguable.
• The amounts have grown past what a tenancy dispute usually involves, which raises the boundary with Small Claims Court and the question of which venue a money claim belongs in.

A tenant on a low income may not have to pay for that opinion at all, since community legal clinics work in housing law and take files directly rather than handing out a name, a difference our guide to Ontario's lawyer referral service and the alternatives to it sets out route by route. Ontario is also one of the provinces where a licensed paralegal can appear at the Board, not just a lawyer, which usually makes paid representation cheaper here than the equivalent help in court. Checking a licence first takes about a minute using the method in our guide to looking up a lawyer or paralegal in Ontario, and the broader questions of how to find a lawyer in Canada and how to tell a trustworthy one from the rest are covered separately. If the date on the notice is close, our guide to finding a lawyer urgently is built for that compression, and whether you need a lawyer at all is a reasonable place to start.

How Olanur helps

We built Olanur because the hardest part of a tenancy dispute is rarely the law, it is finding someone who does this work every week and is free before the date on the form. These matters run on short deadlines, and a week spent calling around is a week off the clock.

Describe the notice and the date on it, and our matching system routes the request to landlord and tenant lawyers and paralegals who handle Board files, at no cost to be matched. Everyone on our platform is licensed by the Law Society of Ontario, and you can compare who responds before committing. To browse the practice areas first, the full directory is open.

Before the date on the form arrives

Whichever form arrived, the useful first move is the same: work out which of the four it is, count the days properly, and find out whether the clock can be stopped at all. The Board's own forms page carries the current version of each notice with its instructions, and Community Legal Education Ontario's housing law materials explain them in plain language.

If the clock cannot be stopped, the value of advice moves forward rather than disappearing, because the argument now has to be made at a hearing and the preparation starts long before the date. Whichever side of it you are on, describing the notice to a landlord and tenant professional is free and takes a few minutes.