Persistent Late Payment Finally Has a Definition

Last fall, I wrote a newsletter about the proposed LTB changes when they were announced.

Many of those are finally scheduled to take effect September 21, 2026.

To see all the changes, you can go to the official Residential Tenancies Act page, and look for these grey boxes:

I'm not going to walk through all of them here, but there is one change that is interesting to me:

Persistent late payment finally gets a definition.

The RTA has long allowed a landlord seek eviction when a tenant has been “persistently" late with rent.

The problem was no one knew what that meant.

There was no clear test. Adjudicators rarely treated it as a real eviction ground and were inconsistent in their application of the word.

As of September 21, the regulations fill that gap.

Here’s the test they wrote.

...a persistent failure to pay rent on the date it becomes due and payable includes circumstances in which a tenant has failed to pay rent within seven days of the date it becomes due and payable on at least three occasions within any six-month period and on each of those occasions the failure to pay was not solely attributable to the landlord applying a rent payment made during that six-month period to another amount owing by the tenant, including rent arrears. 

In other words, a tenant is "persistently late" when all of the following are true:

• They paid rent more than 7 days late
• That happened at least 3 times
• Within any 6 month window

Now, they made sure to add the following line as well:

For greater certainty, a persistent failure to pay rent on the date it becomes due and payable may arise in circumstances not set out in subsection (1) and the circumstances set out in subsection (1) shall not limit what may constitute a persistent failure to pay rent on the date it becomes due and payable.

That section says that this is just one definition or example.

Another set of facts can also be persistent late payment based on discretion of the adjudicator.

But now there is at least one clear line.

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