Rental Applications and Screening in Ontario

Ontario landlords are generally permitted to request credit checks, require a guarantor, and ask for income information as part of screening a rental applicant. References from previous landlords are also commonly requested and are legal to ask for.

This is an important and often misunderstood protection. Under the Ontario Human Rights Code, a landlord cannot apply a fixed minimum rent-to-income ratio -- for example, an automatic rule that an applicant "must earn 3 times the rent" -- as a blanket screening cutoff. Income information must instead be considered together with other factors like credit history and rental history, rather than used on its own as an automatic disqualifier. Applying a rigid income ratio rule to every applicant has been found to be discriminatory.

If you believe you were rejected purely because of a fixed income multiple, without any consideration of your credit or rental history, that is worth raising as a potential human rights concern.

A landlord cannot require, as a condition of your application or tenancy, that you pay by postdated cheques, automatic bank debiting, or automatic credit card charging. A lease clause that tries to make this mandatory is not enforceable. You and your landlord can voluntarily agree to use postdated cheques or automatic payments, but it cannot be forced on you as a requirement to get or keep the tenancy.

If you're concerned about how your income or credit history will be viewed, consider proactively providing context: a letter from your employer, a larger last month's rent deposit (where within the legal one-month cap), or a co-signer/guarantor. These are legitimate ways to address a landlord's concerns without being subject to an automatic, discriminatory cutoff.