Ontario Rental Application (Form 410): A Landlord's Guide

What is rental application Form 410?

The Ontario rental application Form 410 is OREA’s standard screening questionnaire (currently Form 410, Revised 2022): who the applicant is, where they have lived, what they earn, and who will vouch for them. It creates no tenancy and no obligation on either side.

One catch is printed on the form: the footer licenses it to OREA members - in plain terms, Form 410 is licensed to realtors, and a private landlord without a brokerage is outside that licence. It does not matter. Ontario prescribes no application form, so a rental application form Ontario landlords write themselves, asking the same questions, is just as valid.

What the two pages collect matters less than how you handle three of the blocks:

What can a landlord legally ask on a rental application in Ontario?

Four things, and the fourth has a condition. Ontario Regulation 290/98, made under the Human Rights Code, lets a landlord request rental history, credit references and authorization for a credit check, and consider them alone or in any combination. Income information may be requested only if the landlord also requests those, and may be considered only together with everything they produced. Income stands alone in one case: when you asked for all of it and nothing else came back.

The rent-to-income ratio deserves its own warning, because it is the most common way an Ontario landlord walks into a human rights complaint. The OHRC’s housing brochure for landlords says a 30-percent-style cut-off is illegal outside subsidized housing, minimum-income rules were struck down in Kearney v. Bramalea, and the Commission’s background paper records cease-and-desist orders against landlords who kept using ratios. A missing credit history must not be read as a bad one.

Regulation 290/98 also states the ground rule outright: nothing in it permits refusing accommodation on a protected ground - and receipt of public assistance is on that list. An applicant whose income is ODSP or Ontario Works is not a weaker applicant for that reason, and saying so in writing is evidence against you.

Can a landlord ask for bank statements in Ontario?

Yes, but bank statements are income information, so Regulation 290/98 governs them: you may ask for them only if you also ask for rental history and credit information, and you may weigh them only together with what those produce. Asking for statements instead of running a credit check inverts the rule the regulation sets.

There is a practical argument too. A bank statement exposes every transaction in an applicant's life; a credit report answers the question you actually have - does this person pay what they owe on time - and the Privacy Commissioner notes it needs only a name, an address and a date of birth to pull. If you still want proof of income, a pay stub or employment letter is narrower, and an applicant who redacts transaction lines from a statement is within their rights.

How to run credit and reference checks properly

Consent first, then the check, then a short retention window. Form 410’s signature block does the first step for you: it notifies the applicant that a consumer report containing credit or personal information may be referred to, authorizes verification of what they wrote and of their personal references, and takes their consent to the collection, use and disclosure of that information. A homemade application needs the same language above the signature line, or the check you run is unconsented.

1. 1 Get written consent on the application itself, above the signature, naming credit checks and reference verification.
2. 2 Pull the credit report yourself through a reporting agency, using name, address and date of birth. Do not ask the applicant to buy one and email you a PDF; you cannot tell whether it was edited.
3. 3 Call the previous landlord, not the current one first. A current landlord who wants the tenant out has an incentive; the one before them does not.
4. 4 Ask every applicant the same questions in the same order, and write the answers on the same sheet. Consistency is the whole defence.
5. 5 Never charge for any of it. The Landlord and Tenant Board treats fees, premiums, bonuses, commissions and penalties as illegal charges, refundable or not, and a rejected applicant can file a Form T1 for a rebate. Credit checks cost you a few dollars. An LTB order costs more.

How to spot a fake application

Assume the documents can be bought, because they can. Paystub generators, employment letters from companies that exist only as a phone number, and edited credit-report PDFs are the standard toolkit of the applicant who plans to stop paying once they are in - and with Landlord and Tenant Board proceedings measured in months, the cost of admitting one is severe. The defence is not more paperwork. It is verifying a small number of things through channels the applicant does not control.

Past Board orders are public. The Landlord and Tenant Board publishes decisions through CanLII’s Ontario LTB database, which is searchable by name for free. Coverage is partial - only a fraction of orders are published - so treat a hit as a fact worth reading in full and an empty result as no information, not as a clean record. And remember that everything in this section still runs inside the rules above: verification through consistent, consented checks is lawful screening; a parallel investigation you only run on some applicants is how a discrimination complaint starts.

Choosing an applicant without discrimination risk

Write your criteria down before you advertise, apply them to everyone, and keep the paper. A decision you can explain from a sheet you wrote before you met anyone is very hard to attack. A decision you explain afterwards is an argument.

Two situations trip up careful landlords. A newcomer to Canada often has no credit file at all, and the OHRC is explicit in its policy on human rights and rental housing that an absent credit rating must not be equated with a bad one. And a guarantor request is fine as a general requirement but discriminatory as a selective one: the test is whether you would ask the same of an applicant who was born here and paid by direct deposit.

After you choose: from application to signed lease

Accepting an application changes nothing on paper. The tenancy is created by Ontario’s standard lease, which most private residential landlords have been required to use for tenancy agreements signed on or after April 30, 2018. The current version is the Residential Tenancy Agreement (Standard Form of Lease), form 2229E dated 2020/12, and it does not apply to care homes, mobile home park and land lease sites, most social and supportive housing, or co-operative housing.

Three rules bite at this moment. You must give the tenant a copy of the agreement within 21 days after they sign it. The only money you may collect is a rent deposit and a refundable key deposit: Ontario’s Guide to the standard lease states that the tenant does not have to provide any other form of deposit, such as a pet or damage deposit, and that the rent deposit cannot exceed one month’s rent or one rental period, whichever is less. You must also pay interest on that deposit every year, at the same rate as the rent increase guideline. And you cannot make post-dated cheques a condition: the LTB’s Information for New Tenants brochure says these payment methods can be suggested, but an applicant cannot be refused a unit for declining them.

One more thing to settle before the lease, not after: the rent. The number you write in section 5 is the number the guideline compounds from for the whole tenancy, and the 2026 rent increase guideline is 2.1 percent, with 1.9 percent already published for 2027. Getting the starting rent right at signing matters more than any increase you will be allowed later.