Breaking a Lease Early in Ontario

If you need to leave before your fixed-term lease ends, the Residential Tenancies Act, 2006 gives you a few legitimate routes:

• Assignment or subletting: Find a replacement tenant, subject to your landlord's consent, which cannot be unreasonably withheld. If the landlord unreasonably refuses an assignment, that refusal can itself become grounds to end the tenancy early.
• Form N9 (tenant's notice): Generally, this cannot be used to end a fixed-term lease early except at the end of the term, or following an unreasonably refused assignment request. It can be used to end a month-to-month tenancy with proper notice.
• Form N11 (mutual agreement): If both you and your landlord sign N11, you can end the tenancy at any date you both agree to, regardless of the lease term.

If a tenant leaves a fixed-term lease early without using one of the routes above, the landlord's ability to claim money from that tenant is limited. The landlord can only claim actual, documented costs of re-renting the unit -- for example, reasonable advertising costs -- and generally only the rent gap for the period during which the landlord made reasonable efforts to re-rent the unit promptly. This is known as the landlord's duty to mitigate.

A landlord cannot charge an arbitrary penalty for leaving early, and cannot simply keep your last month's rent deposit as a flat penalty -- any claim must be tied to actual, documented losses, and only for the period the landlord could not reasonably have re-rented the unit despite trying.

Communicate with your landlord in writing as early as possible. If you can find a suitable replacement tenant, propose an assignment and provide their information for screening. If your landlord agrees to simply end the tenancy on an agreed date, get it in writing using Form N11. Keep records of all communication in case a dispute arises later about costs or notice.