Landlord and Tenant Board Ontario: Two Doors Into the Same Hearing Room

This article explains how the Landlord and Tenant Board works in Ontario as of 2026 and is general information, not legal advice. Fees and service timelines are quoted from Tribunals Ontario's published pages, retrieved 1 August 2026, and the rules come from the Residential Tenancies Act, 2006, S.O. 2006, c. 17. Your own situation may differ, and a licensed representative can advise on it.

Almost everyone who searches for landlord tenant board ontario is one of two people. Either you filed something and you are waiting, or something arrived and you have a date on it. Same tribunal, same hearing room, and two journeys that look almost nothing alike.

That difference is not a matter of perception. The Board charges a landlord roughly four times what it charges a tenant to open a file, and then, on its own published numbers, brings the most common landlord application to a hearing in about a third of the time. Knowing which door you walked through explains most of what happens next.

This guide follows both. It covers the cases the Board will not touch, what each application costs, how long the wait actually runs, who is allowed to speak for you, and what the order means once it lands. If you are still working out whether your problem needs professional help at all, our guide on whether you need a lawyer in Canada is a useful place to start first.

Landlord Tenant Board Ontario: the short version

Landlord Tenant Board Ontario matters are decided by an administrative tribunal, not a court. It hears disputes between residential landlords and tenants under one statute, and it cannot help with anything outside it.

• It is a tribunal, not a court. Its members decide cases under the Residential Tenancies Act, 2006. Appeals do not go to a higher tribunal, they go to the Divisional Court, and only on a question of law.
• Landlord applications start with L, tenant applications start with T. L1 for rent arrears, L2 to end a tenancy for other reasons, T2 for tenant rights, T6 for maintenance.
• Filing costs $48 to $201. Most tenant applications are $48 through the online portal, most landlord applications are $186, and filing on paper adds $5 or $15 depending on the form.
• The wait is the real cost. The Board reported that L1 and L9 applications reached a hearing in roughly 3 months in 2024, while most other application types took 5 to 7 months.
• A notice is not an eviction. Only the Board can order a tenant to leave, and only the Sheriff can enforce it.
• Licensed paralegals can represent you. So can lawyers, and in narrow circumstances an unpaid friend or family member.

Before either door: cases the Board will not hear

The first question is not which form to file. It is whether the Residential Tenancies Act covers your situation at all, because the Landlord Tenant Board Ontario has no power over a rental the Act does not reach, and the file goes nowhere.

The Act applies to most private residential rentals, and Ontario's guidance is explicit that this includes houses, apartments, condominiums and secondary units such as basement apartments. Renting the basement of a house is squarely covered.

There is one exclusion that catches more people than any other. The Board's own guide to the Residential Tenancies Act states that the Act does not apply if the tenant must share a kitchen or bathroom with the landlord. Someone in that position is a licensee at common law rather than a tenant under the statute, which means no Board application, no Board hearing, and no Board protection against being asked to leave. Room rentals inside an owner-occupied home very often fall here.

Several other categories sit partly or wholly outside the usual rules. Rent rules do not apply to university and college residences or to commercial properties. The standard lease requirement excludes care homes, sites in mobile home parks and land lease communities, most social and supportive housing, and co-operative housing, which has its own eviction process at the Board.

If the Act does not cover you, the dispute does not disappear, it simply moves. A money claim between a licensee and a homeowner is an ordinary civil claim, which for amounts up to $50,000 belongs in Small Claims Court rather than at this tribunal. Our guide on how to sue someone in Ontario walks through choosing the right venue by dollar amount, and a firm demand letter often resolves the smaller ones without any filing at all.

There is also a form for exactly this uncertainty. An A1 application asks the Board to decide whether the Act applies to a given situation, and it costs $53. Filing one is cheaper than discovering the answer six months into the wrong process.

One more boundary is worth knowing because it changes the money rather than the forum. Ontario's rent increase guideline does not apply to a unit that was not occupied for residential purposes on or before 15 November 2018. A tenant in a purpose-built rental completed in Toronto or Ottawa after that date is still fully covered by the Act for maintenance, notice and eviction, but the annual cap on rent increases does not protect them. Plenty of people discover this only when the increase arrives. Ontario publishes the current position in its guide to renting in Ontario, and the plain-language walkthroughs at Steps to Justice are a reasonable second read before you commit to a form.

Door one: the landlord's file

A landlord application almost always begins with a notice, not a form. The notice period runs first, and only when it expires does the Board application become possible.

The sequence matters because skipping it is the most common reason landlord applications fail. An N4 for unpaid rent, an N5 for damage or interference, an N12 where the owner or a purchaser intends to move in, an N13 for a major renovation: each of these is served on the tenant, each carries its own termination date, and each has to be correct on its face. Only after that date passes does the matching L application go to the Board.

L1 is the workhorse. It asks the Board to end the tenancy and evict for non-payment of rent, and it follows an expired N4. It costs $186 through the Tribunals Ontario Portal, or $201 by mail. L9 is its quieter sibling, asking for the arrears as a money order without ending the tenancy, at the same price.

L2 covers everything else that ends a tenancy: damage, substantial interference, an owner moving in, a renovation. L10 chases money from a tenant who has already moved out, and has to be filed within a year of the tenancy ending. Both cost $186 online.

L4 is the one landlord application the Board charges nothing for, and it is filed through the portal only. It enforces a settlement or a conditional order the tenant did not keep, on the reasoning that the parties already came through the process once.

One number is worth sitting with. The Board reported in its published service timelines that L1 and L9 applications reached a hearing in approximately 3 months during 2024, against 5 to 7 months for most other application types. Rent arrears is the fastest stream the tribunal runs, and it is the stream landlords use most.

Door two: the tenant's file

A tenant application starts differently. There is usually no notice to serve and no waiting period, so the file can be opened the day the problem becomes serious enough to act on.

T2 is the broadest of them. It covers substantial interference with reasonable enjoyment, harassment, entering the unit without proper notice, and illegal lockouts. It costs $48 through the portal or $53 by mail. The Board names an illegal lockout as an example of an urgent matter and reported an average of 5 to 6 weeks to a hearing for that category in 2024, far faster than its general queue.

T6 is the maintenance application: disrepair, pests, heat, a landlord who has stopped responding. It carries the same $48 fee. These cases are decided on the record in front of the member, so dated photographs, written requests and replies matter more than the strength of the complaint in the abstract.

T1 recovers money the landlord holds improperly, including an illegal charge, a rent increase above what the law allowed, a last month's rent deposit never returned, or interest never paid on it.

T5 exists for a specific injustice. A landlord serves an N12 or an N13, the tenant moves out, and the stated reason turns out never to have happened. It is priced with the other tenant applications at $48 through the portal or $53 by mail.

Two remedies cost nothing at all, and they are the ones least likely to be known. A motion to void an eviction order for rent arrears, filed by paying the full amount owed inside the window the order sets, carries no fee. Neither does a motion to set aside an ex parte order. For a tenant holding an eviction order and the means to pay, that is the difference between staying and leaving.

The asymmetry the Board does not advertise

Put the two doors side by side and a pattern appears that neither side tends to notice from inside it. Setting aside the urgent lockout stream, the party paying the most reaches a hearing the soonest.

None of this implies bad faith by the tribunal. Arrears cases are high volume, factually narrow and largely documentary, which makes them straightforward to stream and schedule quickly. A maintenance dispute or a bad faith N12 turns on contested evidence and takes longer to hear. The practical consequence is still real: a tenant waiting seven months for a repair order lives in the unit throughout that wait, and a landlord carrying an arrears file waits about three.

The table also shows that filing online is simply cheaper: $15 less on most landlord applications and $5 less on most tenant ones, for identical outcomes.

Which door gets used, and how often

The Landlord Tenant Board Ontario caseload is not split evenly. Of the 81,490 applications filed through the Board's portal in the 2024-25 fiscal year, landlords filed 72,836 and tenants filed 8,267, close to nine landlord files for every tenant one. The figures come from the tribunal's own annual report.

The Board received 87,993 applications that year across all filing channels, so the portal now carries over 92 per cent of what arrives. Paper filing has become a rounding error, and the more expensive one.

That nine to one ratio does not mean tenants have nine times fewer problems. It means the two sides arrive for different reasons. A landlord with unpaid rent has a standing procedural need to file, because nothing else recovers either the money or the unit. A tenant problem more often ends another way: the repair finally gets done, the increase is withdrawn, or the tenancy ends and the person moves on.

It also explains the fast arrears stream. When more than four in five applications are landlord filings and the largest category among them is rent arrears, streaming that category is the single biggest change the tribunal can make to its own queue. The speed is a consequence of volume, not of sympathy.

The direction of travel matters too. In 2024 the Board scheduled more than 105,000 hearings and resolved almost 100,000 cases, the highest figures in its history, and by 31 March 2025 it had reduced its active caseload to 41,465, a 26 per cent reduction from the peak in December 2023. The L1 and L9 stream that now reaches a hearing in about three months was running at 8 to 10 months in early 2023.

So if your reference point is a story from 2023, recalibrate. The wait on the busiest stream is roughly a third of what it was, which changes the arithmetic of whether filing is worth it at all.

Landlord Tenant Board Ontario forms and fees at a glance

Every Landlord Tenant Board Ontario application has a letter and a number. L is a landlord application, T is a tenant application, A is an application either side can bring, and N is a notice rather than an application at all. Every fee below is taken from the Board's current fee schedule.

Two details in that table are easy to miss and both save money. The A1 is the only one here with no portal route at all, filed by mail, by email or at a ServiceOntario counter, which is why its $53 never comes down. And the two free tenant motions, voiding an arrears eviction and setting aside an ex parte order, are the cheapest remedies at the tribunal precisely because they are time limited rather than queued.

The N forms sit outside this table because they are not applications. An N4, N5, N12 or N13 is served by a landlord on a tenant, costs nothing, and only creates the right to file the matching L application once its termination date has passed. Serving one is not filing one, and nothing reaches the Board until the L form does.

Notice periods: the clock that runs before the Board sees the file

A notice period costs nothing, runs entirely outside the Board, and stacks on top of the hearing wait. It runs from 7 days on an N4 in a weekly tenancy to 120 days on an N13. The Board sets them out in its guide to how a landlord can end a tenancy.

Add the notice period to the queue and the real elapsed time appears. An N4 at 14 days followed by an L1 on the three month stream is about three and a half months from the day the notice was served. An N13 at 120 days followed by an L2 in the 5 to 7 month queue is closer to 9 to 11 months. The ground chosen at the very start does more to set the total than anything either side does afterwards.

Two of these carry a built in escape hatch that is easy to miss. A first N5 is void if the tenant corrects the behaviour within 7 days of receiving it, which ends the matter with no filing, no fee and no hearing. A second N5 served within 6 months carries 14 days and offers no such window. The first notice is worth far more attention than it usually gets.

N12 and N13 also carry money, and it forms part of the notice rather than a separate debt. An N12 requires the landlord to pay the equivalent of one month's rent, or offer another acceptable unit, by the termination date, and the person moving in must occupy the unit for at least a year. An N13 requires compensation too, with the amount turning on the size of the building and, for a renovation, on whether the tenant intends to return: one month's rent in a building with fewer than five units, and up to three months' rent in a building with five or more.

Compensation that was never paid is a defect in the notice itself, not a separate claim to be argued later, which is why it is among the first things a representative checks. The four forms people ask about most, and the one rule that separates them, are covered form by form in our guide to eviction notices in Ontario.

Tenant applications have no notice stage at all. That is the structural advantage of door two: a T2 or a T6 can be filed the day the problem becomes serious enough to act on.

Deposits, interest, and the ceiling on a rent increase

Three money rules generate most tenant applications: what deposit a landlord may collect, what interest that deposit earns each year, and how far the rent may lawfully rise in twelve months.

A landlord may collect a rent deposit of no more than one month's rent, or one week's rent where rent is paid weekly, and it can only ever be applied to the final rental period of the tenancy. Ontario does not permit a damage deposit or a security deposit of any kind. Money held for damage is money held improperly, and recovering it is exactly what a T1 is for.

Interest is the part that accumulates quietly. The deposit earns interest every year at the rent increase guideline in effect when the payment falls due. On a $2,200 deposit at the 2026 guideline that is roughly $46 for the year, easy to overlook once and material across a long tenancy. Interest never paid over several years is one of the more common T1 claims at the Board.

On the increase itself, three conditions have to hold together. At least twelve months must have passed since the tenancy began or since the last increase, written notice in the proper form has to be given at least 90 days before it takes effect, and the amount has to sit inside the guideline. Ontario set the rent increase guideline at 2.1 per cent for 2026, down from 2.5 per cent for 2025, and has already published 1.9 per cent for 2027. The guideline for the following year is announced by 31 August, so a 90 day notice served now may well land in the next year's number rather than this one. Check which year your increase actually takes effect in before doing the arithmetic.

The guideline is not a ceiling. A landlord can apply to the Board for an above guideline increase on three grounds: a significant rise in municipal taxes and charges, major repairs or renovations known as capital expenditures, or the cost of security services provided by people who are not the landlord's employees.

The cap depends on which ground is used, and this is where the number most people carry in their head turns out to be wrong. Capital expenditures and security services cannot support more than 3 per cent above the guideline in any one year, and a larger justified increase is phased across three years at up to 3 per cent above the guideline each year. So an approved capital expenditure in 2026 tops out at 5.1 per cent. On municipal taxes and charges there is no limit at all, which is the exception worth knowing before assuming 5.1 is the worst case. And in a unit first occupied for residential purposes after 15 November 2018, the guideline does not apply in the first place.

The cost the filing fee does not show

The filing fee is almost always the smallest number in the file. What the wait costs, on both sides, dwarfs the $48 or $186 that opened it.

Work it through on the landlord side. A unit in Mississauga renting at $2,200 a month, with a tenant who stops paying in February, produces an L1 filed in March and a hearing around June on the Board's three month figure. If the arrears are never recovered, the carrying cost of that wait is roughly $8,800 in rent, against a $186 filing fee. The fee is about two per cent of the exposure.

Now the tenant side. A T6 about heat or persistent disrepair, filed in Hamilton in March, reaches a hearing somewhere between August and October on the published five to seven month range. The tenant lives in the unit for every one of those months. There is no financial ledger for that, which is part of why the asymmetry matters.

This is also where representation earns its keep or does not. A file with a clean notice, complete ledgers and organised evidence tends to move; a file with a defective notice can be dismissed at the first hearing, sending the applicant back to serve a fresh notice and start the wait again. Losing on a technicality is not a small setback at this tribunal, it is another several months.

None of that argues for representation in every case. It argues for being honest about the number at risk first. Our guide to demand letters in Ontario prices each escalation step against doing nothing, and the same logic holds here: the question is never whether help costs money, but whether it costs less than the delay.

How a Board file actually moves

Every file, from either door, runs through the same seven stages. Knowing where yours sits explains what can still be changed and what cannot.

1. The notice, on landlord files only. N4, N5, N12 or N13. The termination date on it has to be right, and the reason has to be complete. Tenant applications skip this stage entirely.
2. Filing. Through the Tribunals Ontario Portal for $15 less on landlord forms and $5 less on most tenant forms. Since 1 January 2025, everyone licensed by the Law Society has been required to use the portal for files where they represent a party.
3. Scheduling. The Board sets a date. This is the long part: about three months on an L1 or L9, five to seven months for most other application types, five to six weeks for an urgent T2 lockout.
4. Disclosure. Evidence is filed and shared with the other side in advance under the Board's rules. Documents produced for the first time at the hearing are frequently refused.
5. Mediation, where offered. A mediated agreement can include terms the Board has no power to order, such as a longer repayment schedule, and it binds both sides.
6. The hearing. Usually by video or telephone, often block scheduled with other files.
7. The order. Issued within 30 days of the hearing in most cases, and the only document that actually decides anything.

The practical lesson from that list is that stages one, two and four are the ones you control. Stage three is the one you cannot, which is why the earlier stages deserve the care.

What the Board's own scorecard says about the wait

Landlord Tenant Board Ontario performance is published every quarter against the Board's own targets. It meets the scheduling target, beats the order writing target, and misses the target that measures the whole journey by roughly thirty points.

For 2025-26 the Board aims to schedule 80 per cent of L1 and L9 applications within 50 calendar days of receiving them, and 80 per cent of most other application types within 55 days. Through the first three quarters it reported 78, 78 and 81 per cent. Worth noting that the Board publishes this indicator in days from the application receipt date while publishing its service timelines for the same stream in months, and it does not explain how the two relate. For planning your own file, the months figure is the one that describes when you will actually be heard.

Order writing performs better still. The target is 80 per cent of decisions issued within 20 calendar days of the hearing on L1 and L9 files and 35 days on most others, and the reported results were 89, 84 and 83 per cent. Whatever is slow here, it is not the drafting.

The measure that does not land is the one describing the journey rather than a step inside it. The Board tracks the share of cases completing within a 90 calendar day lifecycle against an 80 per cent target, and reported 51, 53 and 52 per cent on English files across those three quarters, and 32, 37 and 39 per cent on French and bilingual ones. The French and bilingual stream is small enough that the percentage moves easily, at roughly 160 files a quarter against about 18,000 English ones, so read it as a signal rather than a verdict.

That gap is the most useful number in the Board's published performance indicators, because it tells you where the delay is not. Every individual stage sits close to target while the end to end measure falls roughly thirty points short, which is the signature of time lost between stages rather than inside any one of them. The consequence is unglamorous: chasing the Board about a file rarely moves it, because no single step is actually late.

One more figure belongs here, and it should change how you think about stage five. The Board's own dispute resolution route, the mediation offered ahead of many hearings, resolved 14, 16 and 18 per cent of cases across those same quarters, and that figure counts files resolved in whole or in part. It is a genuine opportunity and it is trending upward, but it fully settles fewer than one file in five. Prepare for it, and do not build your plan around it.

What actually happens at the hearing

Most Landlord Tenant Board Ontario hearings are held by video or telephone rather than in a physical room. The practical effect is that the hearing arrives on the same laptop you filed from, often with several other files scheduled in the same block.

Many files are offered mediation first. A mediated agreement can settle terms the Board could not otherwise order, such as a longer payment schedule, and it is binding. If the other side later breaks it, the enforcement route is an L4 or a motion, not a fresh application.

At the hearing, both sides explain their case to a member of the Board, who decides on the record that was properly filed and shared beforehand. That single procedural point decides more cases than any argument about the merits.

Then the order. The Board's published service standard is that most orders are issued within 30 days of the hearing, and it invites parties to contact it if nothing has arrived 60 days after. The order is the operative document, not anything said during the hearing.

What to have ready before the date

Preparation for a Landlord Tenant Board Ontario hearing is mostly assembly, not argument. The member has limited time per file and decides on what is properly in front of them, so the work is getting the record complete and shared on time.

A landlord file usually turns on documents that already exist: the lease, a ledger showing every payment and every miss with dates, the notice that was served with proof of how and when it was served, and any written exchanges with the tenant. The ledger does more work than anything else in an arrears case, because it converts a dispute into arithmetic.

A tenant file usually turns on documents that have to be created while the problem is happening. Photographs with visible dates, a written repair request and whatever reply came back, a log of when the heat failed or the pest control visit was promised, and receipts for anything paid out of pocket. Evidence gathered after the repair is finally done is worth a fraction of the same evidence gathered while the unit was cold.

The trap both sides share is timing. A hearing block can run long, so a file scheduled for the morning in Brampton or London may not be reached until the afternoon, which is worth planning the day around rather than being caught by.

Who is allowed to speak for you

You can represent yourself. You can also be represented, and Ontario is one of the places where that does not have to mean hiring a lawyer.

Lawyers and licensed paralegals are both authorised by the Law Society of Ontario to represent parties at the Board. That matters commercially, because a paralegal will often handle a straightforward arrears or maintenance file at a materially lower cost than a lawyer would. The limit is worth knowing in advance: a paralegal can act at the Board, but cannot represent you on an appeal of a Board decision, because that appeal goes to the Divisional Court.

The Board's brochure on who can be a representative also sets out narrow categories of unlicensed people who may act. An unpaid friend or neighbour who is not in the business of providing legal services, receives no compensation and acts in no more than three matters a year. An unpaid family member on the same basis, though without the three matter limit. An employee representing their own employer. Students, volunteers and employees of legal clinics funded through Legal Aid Ontario. Unlicensed representatives file written authorisation signed by the party, before or at the hearing.

Whoever you choose, confirming the licence takes a minute and is worth doing. Our guide to running a lawyer lookup in Ontario explains how to check that someone is licensed and in good standing before you hand over a file, and how to find a trustworthy lawyer in Canada covers what to ask once you have a shortlist.

After the order arrives

An order is not self-executing. What happens next depends on which way it went and what either side does inside the deadlines it sets.

If a tenant is ordered to leave and does not, the landlord files the order with the Court Enforcement Office. Only the Sheriff can physically remove a tenant. A landlord who changes the locks, removes belongings or shuts off a utility is committing an illegal lockout, which is exactly what a T2 is for, and the Board treats that category as urgent.

If an order contains a serious error, a request to review it costs $58 for either side. Review is a narrow remedy, not a second hearing, and the deadline just got shorter. For orders issued on or after 1 July 2026 you have 15 days, down from 30, and the old 30 day window still applies to anything issued before that date. Miss it and you are filing to extend a deadline as well. A request to amend an order, which fixes a clerical error rather than a substantive one, still carries 30 days and no fee. An appeal on a question of law goes to the Divisional Court, which is a court proceeding with court costs and where paralegal representation is no longer available.

If a tenancy has ended and money remains owing, enforcement of a money order moves into the civil system. That is the point at which our guide on how to sue someone in Ontario and the mechanics of Small Claims Court become the relevant reading, because collecting is a separate exercise from winning.

Where each side most often goes wrong

The mistakes at the Landlord Tenant Board Ontario are patterned, and they mirror each other. Most are procedural, most happen before the hearing, and most are avoidable.

On the landlord side, the recurring one is a defective notice. A termination date miscounted by a day, an N5 that does not describe the conduct with enough particularity, or an N12 served without the required compensation, and the application fails on its face regardless of the underlying facts. The second is filing the wrong form, typically an L1 where the tenancy has already ended and an L10 was the right route. The third is treating the notice as the eviction and acting on it, which converts a strong landlord file into a tenant's urgent T2.

On the tenant side, the recurring one is evidence gathered too late. Repairs get done the week before a T6 hearing, and without dated photographs from when the problem was live there may be nothing left to show. The second is missing the window in an order, particularly the period for voiding an eviction for arrears, which is free to use and gone once it closes. The third is assuming a bad faith N12 cannot be challenged after moving out, when the T5 exists precisely for that.

Shared by both, and the most expensive of all, is not checking whether the Act applies before investing months in the process. A room rental in a Toronto house where the kitchen is shared with the owner is not a tenancy under the statute, and no amount of good evidence will give the Board jurisdiction it does not have.

When it is worth bringing in help

Plenty of Landlord Tenant Board Ontario files are run successfully by the people involved. A few patterns are worth taking seriously, and the cost of professional help is usually small next to what is at stake.

• The notice may be defective. A wrong date or an incomplete reason on an N4, N5, N12 or N13 can end a landlord application before the merits are reached, and can be a full answer for a tenant.
• An N12 or N13 that feels pretextual. Bad faith cases turn on evidence gathered before the move, not after, and the T5 remedy has real teeth.
• The amounts are large. Several months of arrears, or a rent rebate covering years, justifies representation on either side.
• There is an eviction order in hand. Deadlines here are short and some of them are absolute.
• The other side has a representative and you do not. Procedure decides more Board files than fairness does.
• You are not sure the Act even applies. A $53 A1 answers that far more cheaply than six months of the wrong process.

Cost is more often the blocker than willingness, and housing is one of the few areas where free representation genuinely exists: Ontario's community legal clinics take Board files for people on low incomes, and our comparison of the routes to a lawyer in Ontario sets out who each one accepts and turns away. If the timing is tight, our guide on finding a lawyer urgently in Canada covers how to move quickly, and the broader process is set out in how to find a lawyer in Canada. Landlords running several units may also find the ownership and compliance side useful in our overview of real estate lawyers in Canada.

How Olanur helps with a Board file

We built Olanur because the hardest part of a tribunal matter is often finding the right person to handle it, quickly, without ringing round offices that do not take this work.

You describe the situation in plain language, including which side you are on and whether a date is already set, and Olanur matches you with verified professionals who handle Board files in your area. Matching is free for clients. Because both lawyers and licensed paralegals can appear at the Board, we can route a straightforward arrears or maintenance file to a paralegal where that is the sensible option, rather than defaulting to the most expensive route. You can start from our landlord and tenant matching page or describe your issue on the general find a lawyer page.

The one thing to do this week

Work out which door you are standing in front of, then check the date. Almost every mistake at this tribunal is a missed deadline or a notice that was defective from the day it was served, and both are far cheaper to catch early than to argue about at a hearing seven months later.

If the situation is already past that point, or if there is an order in hand, matching with someone who runs these files weekly is usually worth more than the filing fee. You can describe your situation and get matched with a landlord and tenant professional in a few minutes, at no cost, and decide from there.