How to prepare a lease agreement in Toronto and in the GTA area?

To create a legal binding contract for rental purposes, the landlords and the tenants from Toronto and from the Greater-Toronto-Area should fill out the Residential Tenancy Agreement (Standard Form of Lease).

Download the Ontario Residential Tenancy Agreement Files

apdb.ca has retrieved the latest version of the standard Ontario lease agreement form in two formats from the Official government portals:

• The normal PDF format (click to open) which can be opened and filled inside a web browser.
• The Adobe Reader PDF format (click to download) which requires you to install the Adobe Acrobat Reader DC from https://get.adobe.com/reader/.

Looking for other useful rental forms?

This guide created by apdb.ca curated a package of important forms including a form to provide tenant with a rent increase notice, a form to provide landlord with a notice to end tenancy, a form to create a sublet agreement, and a few more.

Background

On February 7, 2018, to increase transparency and to reduce rental disputes, the Ontario Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Ministry of Housing released a standard form for residential lease agreement. The form's title is "Residential Tenancy Agreement (Standard Form of Lease)", and the latest version is released in December 2020. ). The document is sometimes referred as 2229E, the filename of the document pdf provided by the Ontario Government.

Information required to fill the form

The form requires the landlord and the tenant(s) to fill out the following information:

1. Legal names of the landlord(s) and every tenant
2. The address of the rental unit
3. Contact information of the landlord for tenant to provide notices to the landlord
4. Lease terms, e.g. the start date of the lease
5. Rent amount, and terms, e.g. monthly rent or weekly rent
6. Services and utilities provided by the landlord
7. Rent discounts, if any
8. Rent deposits. The law requires that the rent deposit cannot exceed one month's rent or rent for one rental period(e.g. one week in weekly tenancy), whichever is less. This cannot be used as damage deposit and the landlord must pay the tenant interest on the rent deposit every year.
9. Key deposits. The key deposit cannot be more than expected replacement cost.
10. Smoking rules
11. Insurance information. Usually the landlord will require the tenant to have liability insurance at all times. We've covered the best options for apartment insurance in this article(todo).
12. Addition terms such as whether pets are allowed.
13. Signatures the landlord(s) and the tenant(s)

Note that it is helpful to read the entire form in details, including the appendixes, because the form provides valuable information on tenant rights and responsibilities.