Yes — but only because your lease says so, not because the law does.
Short answer
Yes. Property management fees sit inside CAM/TMI as an ordinary Additional Rent line item in Ontario commercial leases, alongside taxes, insurance and common-area maintenance. There is no statutory ceiling on the fee — only whatever cap your own lease negotiated, commonly 3–5% of gross rents or of total operating costs.
Ontario commercial leases are almost entirely bespoke — the Commercial Tenancies Act gives tenants none of the standard-form protection the Residential Tenancies Act does, so whatever the lease's definition of Additional Rent says, controls. That definition typically bundles taxes, maintenance and insurance (TMI) with utilities for common areas, and, explicitly, “property management fees” and “building management and administration fees.” None of that is a legal default — it is what the CAM clause enumerates, which is exactly why the clause is worth reading line by line rather than skimming for the word “CAM” and moving on.
There is no Ontario statute that limits what a landlord can charge for managing a building. As treadstonelaw puts it plainly: a cap exists “not by law — only by negotiation. Many leases cap management fees at a percentage of gross rents (often 3–5%).” Everything else in the gross-vs-net leasing structure that puts TMI in tenants' hands works the same way: property taxes, building insurance, common area maintenance and property management fees are all listed as ordinary TMI components, with no provincial ceiling attached to any of them. Standard exclusions on the other side of the ledger are capital expenditures such as a roof replacement or parking lot repaving, costs tied to another tenant's lease breach, leasing commissions and tenant inducements for other units, and — the one that matters most here — “executive salaries above a reasonable management-fee level.” That last exclusion is the boundary a poorly capped fee clause exists to police.
A 50,000 sq ft plaza runs $400,000 a year in total recoverable operating costs. The lease caps the management fee at 4% of that pool: 4% × $400,000 = $16,000, added to the CAM bill and split pro-rata among tenants by leased square footage. Without that 4% cap written into the lease, the landlord could route a much larger administrative-staff salary line through the same “management” label, and the tenant's only defence is a CAM reconciliation audit clause, not a statute.
Tenants often assume that if the lease is silent on a specific management-fee percentage, none is chargeable. The opposite is usually true: a broad CAM clause that lets the landlord pass through “any other costs the landlord designates as passable to tenants” permits a management fee by default. The absence of a cap, not the presence of a fee clause, is the actual risk. This is Ontario contract practice under the Commercial Tenancies Act; other provinces run their own commercial tenancy law, so confirm the governing statute before assuming the same reasoning travels with the lease template.
Related: what else legitimately belongs in CAM, and whether a gross-up clause changes the math.
A short call is enough to flag an uncapped management-fee line before it becomes next year's surprise.
