- Is the Ontario Standard Lease mandatory?
- Yes, for most new residential tenancies in Ontario. The province mandates form 2229E, and a landlord cannot substitute their own document for it.
- Can a landlord add their own terms to the standard lease?
- Additional terms can be attached, but they cannot override or contradict the standard lease or the Residential Tenancies Act. A clause that conflicts with the Act is void — writing it into a side agreement does not make it enforceable.
Mandatory for most new residential tenancies
Ontario's Residential Tenancy Agreement (Standard Form of Lease, form 2229E) is required for most new residential tenancies signed in the province — houses, condos, basement apartments and secondary suites alike, whether the agreement is a fixed term or month-to-month.
It's a government-issued template, downloadable directly from ontario.ca/standardlease. A landlord can't substitute a homemade lease and expect it to carry the same standing — and any term in a side agreement that conflicts with the Residential Tenancies Act simply doesn't bind the tenant, standard lease or not.
What's exempt
- Care homes — long-term care, retirement homes, and supportive housing
- Tenancies where the landlord lives in the same unit and shares a kitchen or bathroom with the tenant
- Commercial tenancies — retail, office, industrial space
What can go in Schedule A — and what can't
Section 15 of the form lets a landlord and tenant agree to additional terms specific to the tenancy — things like requiring the landlord to make changes to the unit before move-in, or setting rules for shared amenities. The province's own guidance is explicit that additional terms must be written in plain language, spelling out exactly what either party must or must not do, and must use at least a 10-point font if typed.
The rule that limits everything else
An additional term cannot take away a right or responsibility set out in the Residential Tenancies Act, 2006. If a term conflicts with the Act — or with any other part of the standard lease — it's void and unenforceable, even if the tenant signed it. A void term doesn't invalidate the rest of the lease; the Landlord and Tenant Board simply disregards that clause at a hearing.
Terms the province names as automatically void
The form itself lists specific examples a landlord cannot enforce, even in Schedule A:
- No-pets clauses (a landlord can still require compliance with a condo corporation's pet restrictions, but can't impose a blanket no-pets rule of their own)
- No-guests, no-roommates, or no-additional-occupants clauses
- Deposits, fees, or penalties the Act doesn't permit — damage deposits, pet deposits, or interest charged on rent arrears
- Requiring the tenant to pay for repairs that are the landlord's legal responsibility
If a landlord doesn't provide the standard lease
A tenant isn't stuck if a landlord hands over a homemade agreement instead of the mandatory form. A tenant can demand — in writing — that the landlord provide a signed copy of the standard lease, which starts a clock: the landlord has 21 days from that demand to provide it.
What happens if the landlord misses the deadline
Miss the 21-day window and, per the Landlord and Tenant Board's own guidance, the tenant can serve notice to end the tenancy — even mid-way through a fixed term — with at least 60 days' notice, effective on the last day of a rental period. Legal summaries of the same provision describe a second remedy running in parallel: the tenant can withhold up to one month's rent, and if the landlord still hasn't provided the lease 30 days after that, isn't required to repay the withheld amount. Either way, a tenant's request for the standard lease isn't optional paperwork to sit on — it's a real financial and tenancy-continuity risk for the landlord.
Inside the form: a section-by-section walkthrough
Form 2229E runs 17 sections in its current (December 2020) version, mandatory for tenancies signed on or after 1 March 2021. Every section is part of the template — a landlord fills in the blanks but can't remove one.
Sections 1 through 4 cover the basics: parties, the rental unit and any parking, the notice address and email-consent preferences, and the tenancy term. Sections 5 through 9 are where the money terms live — rent amount and payment method, bundled services and utilities, any rent discount, the rent deposit, and the key deposit. Two hard caps are easy for a landlord to miss here: the NSF administration charge for a bounced cheque can't exceed $20, and a rent deposit can never exceed one rental period's rent and can't double as a damage deposit — the landlord also owes annual interest on it.
Sections 10 through 14 handle house rules: smoking, tenant's insurance, changes the tenant can make to the unit, maintenance and repair responsibilities, and assignment or subletting, where the landlord's consent is required but can't be unreasonably withheld. Section 15 is the additional terms section covered above. Section 16 requires any post-signing changes to be made in writing and agreed by both parties. Section 17 covers signatures and repeats the landlord's obligation to give the tenant a copy of the signed lease within 21 days.
Signing, notices, and what's changed recently
E-signatures are explicitly allowed
The form itself says so: Section 17 states the landlord and tenant can sign electronically if they both agree. That's backed by Ontario's Electronic Commerce Act, 2000, which gives electronic signatures the same legal effect as a wet-ink signature for documents that create an interest in land — leases included — as long as both parties have consented to accept one.
It doesn't reference N9, N11, or other LTB notices
Despite covering termination-adjacent topics like assignment and subletting, the standard lease doesn't attach or cross-reference any Landlord and Tenant Board notice forms. Notices like N9 (a tenant's own notice to end a tenancy) or N11 (a mutual agreement to end a tenancy) are separate LTB documents used later in the tenancy relationship — the lease itself is a standalone agreement, not a bundle of notice templates.
The template hasn't changed — the rules around it have
Form 2229E hasn't been revised since its December 2020 version; that's still the version the Ministry lists as current. What has changed is the regulatory environment around it: the Fighting Delays, Building Faster Act, 2025 (Statutes of Ontario 2025, chapter 14) received Royal Assent in late 2025 and amended several Residential Tenancies Act provisions, including adding an exception that lets a landlord serving certain notices with 120 or more days' notice skip the usual compensation or alternate-unit requirement. None of that changes the lease form itself, but it changes what a landlord using that form needs to know about ending a tenancy. Separately, the annual rent increase guideline — the cap most tenants' rent increases are measured against — dropped to 2.1% for 2026, down from 2.5% in 2025.
Where this collides with multi-line operations
A portfolio running both long-term leasing and short-term stays needs to be precise about which unit is under which regime: a long-term lease on the standard form is a materially different legal relationship than a short-term guest stay, and treating them as interchangeable — reusing lease paperwork for a nightly booking, say — creates exposure neither the RTA nor a booking platform's terms were built to cover.
Direct PMS stores the signed standard lease against the tenancy, so the document and the rent record are never in two different systems.
Leasing in Direct PMS →- Government of Ontario — Residential Tenancy Agreement (Standard Form of Lease) →
- Government of Ontario — Guide to Ontario's Standard Lease →
- Tribunals Ontario — How a Tenant Can End Their Tenancy →
- Legislative Assembly of Ontario — Bill 60, Fighting Delays, Building Faster Act, 2025 →
- Government of Ontario — Rent Increase Guideline →
BC moved short-term rental regulation from the municipality to the province: a principal-residence requirement in most communities, a provincial registry, and a duty on the platforms to enforce both.
Alberta is the loosest short-term rental regime of the four big provinces — no provincial licence, no principal-residence test — which puts the whole of the compliance burden on the city and the tax.
Quebec put the enforcement duty on the platforms: a listing without a valid registration number is one the platform is not allowed to publish, and the fines for publishing it anyway are aimed at the platform as much as the host.
La France superpose trois régimes : la déclaration, qui est nationale ; le plafond de nuitées, qui dépend de la commune ; et le changement d'usage, qui ne concerne que les logements qui ne sont pas votre résidence principale.