Your Tenant Wants to Paint or Drill: What an Ontario Landlord Can Refuse, and How Damage Gets Paid Without a Damage Deposit

Three tools a landlord reaches for: say no, keep the deposit, serve a notice. Each one is shorter than it looks.

I’m Arthur Zhao, a real estate broker in Toronto. Picture the walk-through on the day the keys come back. The bedroom closet doors are off their tracks and leaning against the garage wall. An awning has been bolted into the balcony railing. And one of the returned keys doesn’t turn the front-door lock, because the lock is new.

The tempting thought is: “I’m holding last month’s rent. I’ll keep it.” That money is already gone. Under Ontario law it paid for the last month you just lived through. What follows takes the three things landlords instinctively reach for (refusing, keeping the deposit, serving a notice), shows how far each really goes, and explains where the money for repairs actually comes from.

First, the Act is almost silent on alterations

Search the Residential Tenancies Act for a section that governs a tenant painting, drilling or renovating the unit and you will not find one. The only place the Act says a tenant “shall not alter” anything is s.35(1), and that is about the locking system: a tenant may not change it during the tenancy without the landlord’s consent. If they do, the landlord can apply to the Board, which may order the tenant to hand over keys or pay the reasonable out-of-pocket cost of changing the lock (s.35(3)).

Everything else about alterations comes from the lease. The ontario.ca guide puts it this way: “The standard lease is required for most residential tenancy agreements signed on or after April 30, 2018.” That lease is Form 2229E, and the rule sits in its section 12.

Instinct one: “No.” How far it reaches is written in §12

Section 12, word for word: “The tenant may install decorative items, such as pictures or window coverings. This is subject to any reasonable restrictions set out in the additional terms under Section 15. The tenant cannot make other changes to the rental unit without the landlord’s permission.”

Read that from the landlord’s side and it gives you two different powers:

• Over pictures and window coverings, you have no veto. You can narrow them only with a reasonable restriction written into the additional terms in section 15.
• Over anything else, your permission is required. Pulling closet doors off their tracks or anchoring an awning into a balcony railing is hard to describe as a picture or a window covering, so on the plain wording of §12 those changes need your yes first.

Two limits on the landlord’s pen. The government guide says of §12: “This section cannot be changed. If the landlord and tenant wish to agree to additional details, these can be written out as additional terms in section 15.” And RTA s.4(1) says “a provision in a tenancy agreement that is inconsistent with this Act or the regulations is void.”

So can a §15 term say “no holes in any wall”? The lease allows reasonable restrictions on decorative items; it does not define reasonable, and the Act does not say whether a blanket ban qualifies. If a term effectively cancels the §12 right to hang pictures rather than restricting it, it risks being treated as inconsistent and void. A narrower term (which wall anchors, which rooms, what must be patched) is easier to defend as a restriction.

Instinct two: keep the deposit. It was never a damage deposit

RTA s.105(1) is short: “The only security deposit that a landlord may collect is a rent deposit collected in accordance with section 106.” Under s.106(2) it can be no more than one rent period or one month’s rent, whichever is less, and s.106(10) says the landlord “shall apply” it “in payment of the rent for the last rent period before the tenancy terminates.”

The lease repeats the point in its own section 8: “This cannot be used as a damage deposit.” Its section 15 lists, as an example of a void additional term, one that requires the tenant to pay deposits not permitted under the Act, “e.g., damage or pet deposits.” And s.134(1)(a) bars a landlord from collecting a fee, premium, penalty “or other like amount of money whether or not the money is refundable.”

Put together, by the move-out walk-through the deposit has already done the one job the Act gives it: it covered the final month. There is nothing left in your hands to deduct from.

Instinct three: serve a notice. Both damage notices need undue damage

The Act gives two termination routes built around damage, and neither one is triggered by a missing permission on its own.

s.62 (the 20-day route). Available where the tenant, another occupant or someone the tenant let in “wilfully or negligently causes undue damage.” The notice must give a termination date no earlier than the 20th day after it is given, and must require the tenant, within seven days, to repair or pay for repair (or replace, where repair isn’t reasonable). If the tenant does that within the seven days, the notice is void (s.62(3)). On the LTB forms page, this kind of notice is the N5, whose title names damage among its grounds.

s.63(1)(a) (the 10-day route). Only for damage caused wilfully. The termination date can be as early as the 10th day after the notice, and s.63(3) switches off the seven-day repair window. The LTB form titled for “causing serious problems” is the N7.

Notice what is missing from both: neither section mentions alterations, permission, or §12. An unapproved change that left no undue damage does not fit either wording.

Where the money comes from depends on one fact: is the tenant still there?

“Wear and tear”: the phrase comes from the lease, not the Act

Landlords and tenants both argue about wear and tear, but the RTA never uses the term. The Act’s rule is s.34: the tenant is responsible for repairing “undue damage” caused by the wilful or negligent conduct of the tenant, another occupant, or a person they let in. Next to it, s.33 makes the tenant responsible for “ordinary cleanliness,” and s.20(1) puts the duty of keeping the unit “in a good state of repair and fit for habitation” on the landlord.

According to the plain-language appendix to the standard lease (General Information, Part J), the tenant’s responsibility for damage “does not include damage that results from normal use of the rental unit over time (“wear and tear”).” The LTB’s Interpretation Guideline 5, on maintenance obligations, does not define it either. Whether a given set of anchor holes or a scuffed doorframe is wear and tear or undue damage has no fixed rule in these sources; it is decided on the facts of each case.

One related line from Guideline 5 matters if you are tempted to push repairs onto the tenant through the lease: “If a tenant agreed in a lease to assume the responsibility to maintain any part of the unit or complex, beyond ordinary cleanliness and damage, this would not be enforceable.”

Before you claim anything

Grouped by what you are holding: paper, money, and notices.