The LTB Order Catalogue, read: half of Ontario's tenancy files this year are about unpaid rent

Key takeaways

• The LTB Order Catalogue has been open data since July 24, 2026. We read the whole file: 49,269 final orders on 44,743 files, issued between January and June 2026. Every number here comes from that file or from a random sample of the orders themselves.
• Just over half of the files, 23,997, carry an L1, the landlord's application for unpaid rent. Tenant applications are 15 percent. Corporate landlords hold 54 percent of all files and 62 percent of the arrears files.
• We read 220 arrears orders drawn at random. Forty percent ended in an eviction order the tenant could still void by paying. A quarter ended by consent, usually with a repayment schedule. Nine percent were discontinued because the tenant paid everything before the hearing. Four percent were dismissed.
• The landlord had a representative in 69 percent of those hearings and the tenant in 10. The tenant did not show up at all in 44 percent.
• Half the arrears files decided this year were filed last year or earlier. Ninety-one percent of the tenant files were. The Board's own annual report puts processing at three to seven months, and the catalogue says the same thing from the other side.

What the catalogue is

The catalogue is a spreadsheet on Ontario's open data portal, published by the Landlord and Tenant Board on July 24, 2026, updated monthly, with a PDF of every final order the Board issued from January onward except the ones under a confidentiality order. Orders back to 2021 are promised in phases. The dataset page carries the Board's own warning: the names and addresses come from the applications as filed, before anyone adjudicated anything, so the order is the record and the spreadsheet is the index.

The index has eighteen columns and no outcome. It tells you the file number, the application codes, the address, the parties, the document type, the date and a link. It does not tell you who won. So we did two things. We counted the index, which anyone can do in an afternoon, and we pulled a random sample of the orders and read them, which is the part nobody had done when we looked on September 21, 2026. The landlord blogs had noticed the catalogue exists. None had opened it.

The whole book, by application

Of the 44,743 files, here is what the application codes say was being asked for. A file can carry more than one code; 1,043 arrears files also carry a second one, usually an L2.

| Application | What it is | Files | Share |

|---|---|---|---|

| L1 | Landlord: evict for unpaid rent | 23,997 | 54% |

| L2 | Landlord: evict for another reason (damage, interference, own use) | 6,899 | 15% |

| T1, T2, T5, T6 | Tenant: rebate, rights, bad-faith eviction, maintenance | 6,669 | 15% |

| L4 | Landlord: tenant missed a term of a mediated settlement or order | 6,256 orders | |

| C1 to C4 | Co-op housing | 451 orders | |

Three notes on the shape. First, 7,927 of the 49,269 orders were issued ex parte, without a hearing, and 3,858 of those sit on L4 files. That is the paper trail of a repayment plan that was missed: the consent order carries a clause under section 78, the tenant misses a payment, and the landlord files within 30 days for an order without a hearing. Second, 2,390 orders are review orders and 739 are amended orders, so about one order in sixteen is the Board looking at its own work again. Third, the volume is flat: between 7,672 and 9,147 orders a month, with arrears orders running at about 4,000 a month all six months.

Who is applying

We sorted landlord names with a plain rule: a name carrying Inc., Ltd., Corporation, Properties, Holdings, Management, Apartments, REIT or one of a dozen similar words is corporate, anything else is a person. On that rule 24,303 files, 54 percent, have a corporate landlord, and among the arrears files it is 15,457 corporate against 9,506 individual, 62 percent. There are 23,524 distinct landlord names in the file. The ten most frequent, all corporations, account for 3,526 files between them, about eight percent of the province's tenancy disputes for the half year. We are not printing the names, for the reason on the dataset page.

Toronto, counting North York, Scarborough, Etobicoke, York and East York, holds 13,359 files, 30 percent. Then Ottawa with 2,392, London 2,131, Hamilton 2,051 and Mississauga 1,951. Six hundred and forty-one files have no usable address.

How old the files are

Every LTB file number ends in the year it was filed. Of the arrears files that got an order in the first half of 2026, half were filed in 2025 or earlier. For L2 files it is 64 percent. For tenant applications it is 91 percent: 607 of the 6,669 tenant files decided this year were filed this year.

That matches what Tribunals Ontario's own 2024-25 annual report reported, as summarised by Tribunal Watch: 108,146 applications resolved in the year to March 2025, a backlog cut from 53,057 to 41,465, 133 adjudicators, and processing times of three to seven months. The catalogue is the first place you can see that lag file by file, and it is not evenly shared. A landlord's arrears file is the fast lane. A tenant's maintenance file is not.

What 220 arrears orders decided

We took a random sample of 220 L1 orders of the ordinary kind, leaving out ex parte, review and amended orders, downloaded each PDF, and sorted them with a fixed set of text rules: an order that says the tenancy is terminated, an order made on consent, an application dismissed, an application discontinued, and so on. The rules are deterministic, so the count is a count, and we read a dozen orders by hand against the labels before trusting them. Fifteen of the 220 fell outside every rule, ten of them adjournments and three withdrawals, and they are reported as such rather than forced into a bin.

| Outcome | Orders | Share |

|---|---|---|

| Eviction ordered, voidable if the tenant pays by a date in the order | 88 | 40% |

| Consent order, usually a repayment schedule | 58 | 26% |

| Discontinued: the tenant paid arrears, new rent and the fee before the hearing | 20 | 9% |

| Payment ordered, no eviction | 16 | 7% |

| Eviction ordered outright, including where the tenant had already left | 13 | 6% |

| Dismissed | 9 | 4% |

| Adjourned, withdrawn, or otherwise not decided | 16 | 7% |

The people in the room. The landlord had a legal representative or agent at the hearing in 152 of the 220, 69 percent. The tenant had one in 22, 10 percent. In 97 of the 220 the tenant was not present at all, and among the 116 orders that terminated a tenancy, the tenant was absent in 69.

The money. Where the order states the lawful rent, the median is $1,775 a month across 129 orders. Where it states the arrears, the median is $6,139 across 125 orders, which is 3.7 months of rent at the median. That is the number to sit with if you manage property: by the time an arrears file reaches an order, the typical tenant is nearly four months behind, and the last month's deposit covers one of them.

The clock. From the hearing date to the order date the median is eight days, across the 206 orders that state both. The wait is in front of the hearing, not behind it.

Forty-six of the 220 orders, 21 percent, set a payment schedule, and 53 carry the section 78 clause that lets the landlord return without notice if a payment is missed. Those are the files an office has to keep alive for a year or more. One consent order in the sample runs to June 2027 in monthly instalments; the first missed one restarts the process.

The nine percent who paid

Twenty of the 220 orders are headed "Order under Subsection 74(2)", and each one says the same thing: before the hearing the tenant paid all the arrears, all the rent that had since come due, and the $186 filing fee, so the application is discontinued and the file closed. That is the law working as written. Under section 74(2) of the Residential Tenancies Act, a tenant who pays everything before the order is issued ends the application, and after the order is issued a tenant can still void it under section 74(4) by paying the amount in the order before it becomes enforceable. The Board's Interpretation Guideline 11, updated September 21, 2026, sets both out.

Add the 40 percent of orders that are voidable and the 26 percent made on consent, and the shape of an arrears file is clear. Three quarters of the time the order is a payment arrangement with an eviction behind it, not an eviction. The Board is a collections process with a hearing in the middle, and the landlord who reads it that way files earlier.

What this means if you run buildings

Three operational reads, from the operator side rather than the legal one.

The file is opened late. A median of 3.7 months of arrears at the order means the N4 was served two or three months into the problem. The September 21 amendments shorten the N4 to seven days, which moves the calendar, not the habit. A ledger that flags a missed payment on day two, and a person who serves the notice on day fifteen, would change the median more than the amendment does.

The consent order is the file that costs the most to hold. A repayment schedule with a section 78 clause means somebody has to check, on a fixed day every month for a year, whether the payment landed, and file within 30 days if it did not. That check belongs in the platform as a dated task and not in a head, because the 30-day window does not forgive a coordinator's vacation.

The tenant who does not show up is the common case. Forty-four percent absent, and 59 percent absent among the terminations. Whatever else a property manager builds, the notice that reaches the tenant, in the form the Board will accept, is the document the whole file rests on.

Method, and what we did not do

The index was read with a script on September 21, 2026, from the CSV the Board published on September 1. City is parsed from the address field and will be wrong on some rows. Corporate versus individual is a keyword rule and will misclassify a person trading under a company-sounding name and a company with a person's name. The sample is 220 ordinary L1 orders and 80 L2 orders, chosen at random with a fixed seed, classified by text rules, and spot-checked by hand. Ex parte, review and amended orders were not sampled, so nothing here describes what happens after a repayment plan is missed. Dollar figures are the medians of the orders that state them, not of all orders. No landlord, tenant, agent or address from the file appears in this post, and none will.

This is an operator's reading of public data, not legal advice. The order is the record; the catalogue is the index; and the index is now open, which is more than it was in June.