There is no fixed number of days written into the maintenance obligation. What the Board actually weighs is more specific than that, and more demanding than most landlords assume.
Key takeaways
A landlord who responds to every repair request eventually, and generally keeps the building in decent shape, can still lose a T6 application over a single unaddressed issue. The maintenance obligation in Ontario isn't graded on an overall average — each request gets measured against a reasonable-time standard on its own facts.
The obligation is set out plainly: “a landlord is responsible for providing and maintaining a residential complex, including the rental units in it, in a good state of repair and fit for habitation and for complying with health, safety, housing and maintenance standards.” Section 20(2) closes an obvious escape hatch: that duty applies “even if the tenant was aware of a state of non-repair … before entering into the tenancy agreement.” A tenant who moved in knowing about an issue hasn't accepted it as permanent — the landlord's obligation to fix it exists independently of what the tenant knew when they signed.
There's no fixed number of days in the Act itself, and the Board's own guideline says why: “timeliness of response depends on a great number of factors, but principally on the seriousness of the state of non-repair and its possible effects on the tenant and the availability of materials and possibly contractors to do the repairs.” A landlord answering “all legitimate requests … within a reasonable time” is allowed to triage by urgency — a broken window in January is not the same problem as a loose cabinet hinge, and the Board expects the response speed to reflect that difference, not to be uniform across every ticket in the queue.
What the Board actually looks at, when a T6 is filed, is a set of specific questions rather than a single clock: whether the landlord was notified of the problem before the application, whether the landlord had actual or reasonably expected knowledge of the condition, whether the landlord runs a maintenance program that reflects genuine responsibility for the building, and whether the response that was made was appropriate and effective, not just prompt on paper. “If the landlord responded within a reasonable time, and the response was appropriate to effect the repair, no abatement or other remedy should be ordered.” Notably, a good general maintenance program isn't itself a defence to a specific failure — it affects how severe the remedy is, not whether the breach happened.
A tenant's route to a remedy is a T6 application under paragraph 1 of subsection 29(1), and it carries its own limitation period: filed within one year of the date the alleged breach occurred. For an ongoing problem — a leak that's never actually been fixed, say — that year runs from whenever the landlord finally meets the standard, not from the date the tenant first noticed the issue, which effectively means an unresolved maintenance failure doesn't age out of a tenant's ability to bring it forward.
Section 30 gives the Board a genuinely wide toolkit once a breach is established: an order for specific repairs within a set timeframe, authority for the tenant to arrange repairs and be reimbursed by the landlord, rent abatement (partial or complete, for a defined period), termination of the tenancy in serious cases, compensation for damaged property or reasonable out-of-pocket expenses, general damages for the breach itself, and a prohibition on rent increases until a serious breach is remedied. That range is worth keeping in mind when triaging incoming requests — the exposure on an unresolved ticket isn't capped at the cost of the repair itself, and if arrears happen to be building at the same time, an unresolved maintenance complaint is exactly the kind of fact that surfaces as a defence raised at an arrears hearing, not just as its own separate file.
The rent-increase prohibition deserves its own attention because it's easy to miss until it's too late: a landlord sitting on a serious, unresolved maintenance breach can find a scheduled annual increase blocked entirely until the breach is remedied, independent of whatever notice was otherwise properly given for that increase. That's a direct financial cost of delay that compounds the abatement exposure rather than sitting separate from it, and it's one more reason a maintenance ticket that's drifting past a reasonable response time deserves escalation before a rent-increase notice goes out on the same file, not after.
The factors the Board actually weighs — notification, knowledge, the existence of a maintenance program, and whether the response was appropriate — are all easier to prove with a contemporaneous record than to reconstruct months later once a T6 has already been filed. A dated log of when a request came in, what was assessed, what materials or contractors were needed and when they were actually available, and when the work was completed, does double duty: it's the same record that demonstrates a functioning maintenance program in general, and the specific proof of a reasonable response to the one request being challenged. Landlords who only start compiling this after a T6 lands are reconstructing from memory exactly the record the Board expects to already exist.
A tenant reports a non-functioning furnace on a Friday evening in January. The landlord's after-hours line dispatches an emergency HVAC contractor the same night; the contractor confirms a part is needed and can't source it until Monday, provides a space heater in the interim, and completes the repair Monday afternoon — roughly 60 hours from report to fix, with an interim measure in place throughout. Given the seriousness (heat, in winter) weighed against genuine parts availability, and an appropriate interim response, this reads as a reasonable response under the guideline's own factors.
Compare a tenant who reports a slow bathroom drain in the same building. The landlord's maintenance team doesn't attend for three weeks, offers no interim measure, and the eventual fix is a five-minute snake of the drain. Even though three weeks is objectively faster than the furnace file's real-world urgency in absolute terms, it reads worse under the Board's own test: a minor issue that took three weeks and needed only a trivial fix suggests the response wasn't calibrated to the actual seriousness of the problem, and a documented general maintenance program doesn't cure that specific failure — it only affects how severe a remedy the Board orders.
No. Section 20(2) is explicit that the maintenance duty applies even where the tenant knew about the state of non-repair before signing the tenancy agreement.
No fixed figure appears in the Act. The Board weighs the seriousness of the problem, its effect on the tenant, and whether materials or contractors were actually available — a case-by-case reasonable-time test, not a uniform deadline.
Not as a full defence. A documented maintenance program can affect how severe a remedy the Board orders, but it doesn't excuse a specific failure to respond reasonably to a specific request.
One year from when the alleged breach occurred — and for a breach that's still ongoing, that year is measured from whenever the landlord actually meets the standard, not from when the problem was first reported.
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