LTB orders are now a public download — what that changes for renters and landlords

For twenty years, finding out whether a landlord had been to the Landlord and Tenant Board meant filing a records request and waiting, or hoping the order happened to be one of the subset published on CanLII. As of July 24, 2026, that changed: Tribunals Ontario now publishes final LTB orders on the province's Open Data Catalogue, in bulk, under an open licence, updated monthly.

That is a genuinely big deal — and it cuts both ways. The same file that lets you check a landlord's history lets a landlord check yours.

This is general information, not legal advice. For advice on your own tenancy, talk to a legal clinic or a licensed paralegal.

What's actually in the release

The first drop covers final orders issued between January and May 2026. From there:

• Orders issued after May 2026 get published roughly 2 to 3 months after they're issued.
• Historical orders back to 2021 will be added in phases, incrementally.
• The catalogue updates monthly.
• It excludes any order subject to a confidentiality order made by an LTB adjudicator.

It's published by the Ministry of the Attorney General under the Open Government Licence – Ontario, which means you can download it, republish it, and build on it.

What it isn't (yet)

Two limits matter more than the headline suggests.

First, this is not a search engine. The catalogue is distributed as an annual report file — the 2026 file weighs in around 15 MB — and the province's own access instructions say you have to download the report to your device before you can open a PDF copy of any individual order. Casual lookup of "this address, this landlord" is not what the current release gives you.

Second, the historical coverage is thin. Right now you get five months of 2026. If your landlord's messy N12 was in 2023, it's not there yet. Some orders from 2002 onward remain on CanLII, but that's a partial collection, not the whole record.

Transparency arrived as a 15 MB bulk file rather than a search box. That's a meaningful difference — the people best equipped to mine it are the ones who already had the resources to file records requests.

That gap is already being filled by third parties. A widely shared post from a renter who downloaded the full catalogue and ran text extraction across roughly forty thousand order PDFs reported that names, addresses and unit numbers are sitting in the documents in machine-readable form. We haven't independently audited the file, so treat the specifics as reported rather than established — but the direction is clear enough.

The screening problem

Here's the part worth thinking about before you celebrate.

LTB orders name the parties. An order dismissing a landlord's baseless application still contains the tenant's name. So does an order about arrears that were paid off, or a dispute the tenant won. Once that's bulk-downloadable, building an informal "bad tenant list" gets much cheaper — and tenant advocates have warned about exactly this for years.

The legal position is unsettled. The documents are public, which is the argument screening platforms make. But Ontario licenses consumer reporting agencies, and compiling public records into a product sold to landlords for screening decisions may land inside that regime rather than outside it. Landlord screening also has to stay onside of the Ontario Human Rights Code, which limits what you can take into account and how. None of that is settled by a government dataset going live.

If you're a renter: assume a prospective landlord may be able to find an LTB order with your name on it, and that the order will not come with the context. If a past dispute is likely to surface, it's usually better to raise it yourself, briefly and factually, than to have it found.

If you're a landlord: the fact that a file is downloadable does not make every use of it lawful. Get advice before you build screening around it.

What it's genuinely good for

Set the screening question aside and the catalogue is a real research tool for tenants:

• Testing a landlord's pattern. One order tells you little. A landlord who filed six N12 own-use applications across a portfolio in five months tells you something.
• Checking an AGI story. If your building's owner has an above-guideline increase in front of the Board, past orders about the same complex are context.
• Sanity-checking an N12. Own-use evictions have a history of being litigated. Seeing how the Board handled similar facts is more useful than a forum thread. Our walkthrough of what to check on an N12 covers the rest.

The record you can search right now

The LTB catalogue is one layer. The City's enforcement record is the other, and it's address-based, current, and searchable today — which for most renters is the faster answer.

Pull the building's open orders and violations, its bylaw investigations, and, for apartment buildings, its RentSafeTO report card. The property snapshot puts all three in one view. If you already live there, monitoring will email you when something new lands on the file.

A landlord's LTB history tells you how they behave when there's a dispute. The City's record tells you whether there'll be one. Both are worth ten minutes before you sign.