Landlord Won’t Fix It? Ontario’s T6 Application, Step by Step

The paper trail you build before you file, how the LTB calculates a rent abatement, what orders you can actually win — and why withholding rent is the fastest way to lose.

I’m Arthur Zhao, a Toronto broker with 12 years full-time in this business and more than 160 landlord representations behind me. Let me show you a story I’ve watched play out many times. It’s January, the furnace keeps cutting out overnight, and a living-room window won’t seal against the cold; the tenant has emailed twice, left a voicemail, and heard nothing back for a week. Cold, frustrated and out of patience, they land on one idea — “I’ll just hold back next month’s rent until the heat is sorted.” Stop right there — in Ontario, withholding rent is how tenants hand the landlord the upper hand. The tool that actually works is a formal application called the T6. This piece isn’t about who is responsible for a given repair — that’s a separate question. It’s about the T6 machinery: the record you build before you file, how the form works, what the Board can order, how an abatement gets calculated, and the one-year clock most people miss.

What a T6 is — and the fight it does not settle

A T6 assumes the repair was the landlord’s job in the first place. Section 20 of the Residential Tenancies Act requires a landlord to keep the unit in a good state of repair and fit for habitation, and to comply with health, safety and maintenance standards — an obligation you cannot sign away in a lease and that does not shrink just because the building is old.

So a T6 is about the landlord who should have fixed it and did not. Whether a given bit of damage counts as normal wear or was caused by the tenant — and who should pay — is a different dispute, and not what this article is about. Here I assume the landlord’s duty is being ignored, and focus on how to push that in front of the Board effectively.

Notice first: the step landlords count on you skipping

RTA s. 30(2) is explicit: when the Board decides your case, it must consider whether you told the landlord about the problem before you applied, and gave a reasonable chance to fix it. Oral notice can count — but only if you can prove it. A phone call you both remember differently is, for evidence purposes, no call at all.

So the rule is simple: put every repair request in writing. Email, text, or a dated letter all work. Say what the problem is, when it started, and by when you expect it fixed — and keep a copy. This is the single most common weak spot in tenant cases: the problem is real, but there is no paper showing you told the landlord and nothing was done.

The evidence that actually moves an adjudicator

A T6 lives or dies on its record. A file an adjudicator can read at a glance usually holds:

• Dated photos or video of the leak, the mould, the dead furnace or appliance — timestamped where you can;
• Your written repair requests and the landlord’s replies — and if they never replied, that silence is itself evidence;
• Municipal property standards records — if you also complained to the city, the inspection notes and any work order are powerful third-party proof;
• Receipts for out-of-pocket costs you took on because the landlord did nothing (a space heater, mould cleanup, a hotel night);
• A clean timeline — when it broke, when you reported it, when (or whether) the landlord answered, how long it dragged.

Filing a T6, step by step

Once the groundwork above is done, the mechanics are straightforward. Here they are in order.

Two paths: withhold-and-DIY vs the T6 route

What the Board can order

Section 30 hands the LTB a full toolkit. The common orders include:

• Rent abatement — a proportional refund of rent for the period the problem existed;
• A repair order — specified work done by a deadline;
• Authorization for you to repair — you fix or replace, and the landlord pays you back;
• Compensation — for property damaged by the breach and your reasonable out-of-pocket costs;
• A rent-increase freeze — no increases until a serious breach is remedied;
• Termination — where the unit is unfit for habitation;
• General damages — for breach of the tenancy agreement.

You can ask for several at once on a single T6 — say, both a repair order and an abatement for the past few months.

How a rent abatement is calculated

People expect a fixed rate card. There isn’t one. The LTB’s Interpretation Guideline 5 lays out the approach: look at what proportion of the package of shelter and services you rented was not available to you, and for how long, then translate that into a dollar amount.

Picture it: you rent a two-bedroom, and one bedroom is unusable for months because of a leak. The Board might award back a percentage of your monthly rent reflecting the space and time you lost. The more severe the impact and the longer it ran, the larger the abatement tends to be. Because there is no formula, the more precisely your T6 spells out what you lost and for how long, the easier it is for the adjudicator to put a number on it.

The one-year clock — and the city-hall track beside it

The one-year limit (RTA s. 29(2)): you can’t include a problem that was fixed more than a year before you filed. Put plainly, if a problem has been resolved, apply within one year of the fix; if it’s ongoing, the clock generally runs from the day it is finally resolved. Don’t let an obvious claim age past that line.

The parallel city track: besides the T6, you can complain to your municipality to enforce its property standards by-law. The city inspects and can issue a notice of violation or a work order requiring the landlord to fix things by a deadline. The two tracks run side by side — they don’t cancel each other out — and a municipal work order is some of the strongest third-party evidence you can bring to your T6.

Arthur Zhao

Real Estate Broker · FRI · ABR · SRS · PSA · MCNE · E-PRO · CLHMS & GUILD Elite · REAIS

VP & Branch Manager, Bay Street Group Inc.

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