Common expenses are the shared costs of running an Ontario condominium corporation — maintenance, management and reserve-fund contributions — billed to every owner in proportion to their unit's share, and they are legally distinct from a cost the corporation charges back to one owner alone.
The Condominium Authority of Ontario describes what the fee funds plainly: common expenses “are used for maintaining the condo corporation’s common elements, contributions to the reserve fund, and paying for important services such as cleaning, building maintenance and condo management services.”
What common expenses exclude is where a status certificate and a chargeback come in. The CAO's own framing treats “special assessments and chargebacks” as additional, separate obligations layered on top of base common expenses, not part of them. A chargeback exists specifically so one owner's own conduct doesn't get pooled into everyone else's fees: “A condominium corporation may charge costs back to an owner through condo fees because of something that owner did or didn’t do. This helps ensure that those costs are not passed onto the other unit owners.” The Condominium Act authorizes five chargeback scenarios — s.92 (repairs an owner should complete but doesn’t), s.105(2) (damage caused by an owner, tenant or resident), s.57(4) (occupancy-limit violations), s.98 (non-compliance with a common-element improvement agreement), and s.134 (court-awarded damages and costs) — and a corporation's own governing documents can add more.
On a purchase, unpaid common expenses on the specific unit are one of the items an Ontario status certificate is required to disclose — “the common expenses for the unit and if the unit’s in arrears of payment” sits alongside any special assessment and any increase in common expenses and why.
An owner ignores a slow plumbing leak long enough that it damages the unit below. Under s.105(2), the corporation charges the repair back to that one owner through their own condo fees, rather than raising every owner's common expenses to cover it — the opposite of how a special assessment spreads a cost across the whole ownership base.
See also: Special assessment · Status certificate · Reserve fund study
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