Is OREA Form 410 Mandatory? What an Ontario Landlord Can Ask on a Rental Application

Is Form 410 required by law?

For a private-market residential tenancy, no Ontario law we reviewed requires a prospective tenant to use Form 410 or another particular rental application form. Form 410 is a form of the Ontario Real Estate Association (OREA), a professional association with voluntary membership. The form itself says it "was developed by OREA for the use and reproduction by its members and licensees only". A private-market landlord or agent authorized to use OREA forms may choose Form 410; nothing we reviewed requires that landlord to use it or another written application form.

What Ontario does prescribe is the form of the lease. For most private residential tenancies with agreements signed on or after April 30, 2018, the tenancy agreement must be written on the Ontario Standard Lease (form 047-2229; agreements signed since March 1, 2021 use the edition dated December 2020). There are exceptions, such as care homes, most social and supportive housing and co-operative housing. Form 410 states that it "is not a Rental or Lease Agreement". Still, read any application before you sign it: in Ontario a tenancy agreement can also be oral or implied, so agree on the terms before you commit.

What a landlord may ask

Ontario's Human Rights Code gives everyone the right to equal treatment in housing without discrimination because of race, ancestry, place of origin, colour, ethnic origin, citizenship, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, family status, disability or the receipt of public assistance, subject to exceptions in the Code (for example, where you would share a kitchen or bathroom with the owner or the owner's family). To screen tenants without breaching that right, landlords can rely on the practices listed in Ontario Regulation 290/98:

• Credit references and rental history. A landlord may ask for either or both.
• A credit check. A landlord may ask for your authorization to run one.
• Income. A landlord may ask about income only if it also asks for the information listed above (credit references, rental history, a credit check authorization). It must consider income together with the other information it obtains; it may consider income alone only if it gets no other information. Separate rules apply when social housing providers use income to decide rent-geared-to-income eligibility.
• A guarantee and a rent deposit. A landlord may require a guarantor for the rent and a rent deposit that follows the Residential Tenancies Act.

The Ontario Human Rights Commission's policy on rental housing adds its interpretation:

• income information should be limited to confirming that you can pay the rent, and outside rent-geared-to-income housing, a rent-to-income cut-off such as 30% is illegal;
• a lack of rental or credit history should not be treated as a bad history;
• nothing in Regulation 290/98 permits asking about employment history;
• landlords should use means other than a Social Insurance Number to run a credit check;
• a guarantor may be required only under criteria applied to all applicants, never simply because an applicant belongs to a protected group, and the guarantor cannot be held to an income ratio that could not be imposed on the applicant.

Deposits and credit checks

The deposit rules below apply to tenancies covered by the Residential Tenancies Act, 2006; some arrangements are not covered, for example where you are required to share a kitchen or bathroom with the owner, the owner's spouse, child or parent, or the spouse's child or parent, and the owner, spouse, child or parent lives in the building. Under the Act, the only security deposit a landlord may collect is a rent deposit. It must be requested on or before entering into the tenancy agreement, cannot be more than one month's rent (or one rent period's rent if that is less), and must be applied to the rent for the last rent period of the tenancy. The landlord must also pay interest on the deposit every year. Separately, a landlord may take a refundable deposit for keys, remote entry devices or cards, no greater than the expected direct replacement cost. The Act also bars a landlord from collecting a fee or other like amount from a prospective tenant unless a regulation exempts the payment, and the exempt payments (the key deposit above is one) do not include an application fee or a credit-check fee. If the landlord does not give you vacant possession of the unit, it must repay the rent deposit; if, before you would otherwise get possession, you agree to rent a different unit from the same landlord instead, the deposit may be applied to that unit, and anything above the permitted deposit for it must be repaid.

Under Ontario's Consumer Reporting Act, a landlord who obtains information about you from a consumer reporting agency (a credit check) must first tell you in writing and, if you ask, give you the name and address of the agency. Notices referred to in section 10 of the Act must be in bold or underlined type of at least 10 points.

Form 410 compared with PDFLiner's template

Why the difference? We built our template around the list in Regulation 290/98 and the Commission's policy: it asks for the kinds of information those rules name, and it leaves out employment history and the Social Insurance Number, which the Commission says the regulation does not permit asking for or landlords should replace with other means. It also leaves out banking details, vehicles, pets and occupants' relationships. None of the private-market screening rules discussed above requires those fields. Some answers on any application can still reveal a protected characteristic: a date of birth reveals age, and a source of income can reveal that you receive public assistance. A landlord must not use them to discriminate.

We are not saying that a landlord who hands you Form 410 is breaking the law. But some questions carry their own risk: the Commission's policy says application forms are often used to ask the ages of prospective tenants, and that the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario has found this practice to be, on its face, discrimination based on family status. Human rights law governs how landlords select tenants, and federal privacy law (PIPEDA) applies to landlords handling personal information in the course of commercial activity. According to the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, landlords must identify their reasons for collecting personal information, should not collect more than they need for the stated purpose and can only use a tenant's personal information for the purposes for which it was collected, and you are under no obligation to provide your Social Insurance Number just because someone asks for it. If a form asks for something you are not comfortable giving, such as a Social Insurance Number, banking details or your employment history, you can ask why it is needed and suggest an alternative; for a credit check, the Commissioner suggests explaining that a Social Insurance Number is not needed for a basic check and offering other identification.

An alternative template

PDFLiner's Ontario Rental Application is our own generic template: two pages, nine sections, fillable online, with separate credit-check authorizations for the applicant and a co-applicant. It is not a government or OREA form, and it is not legal advice or a certification that every field is necessary in every rental. If you are a landlord, you can use it as a starting point; if you are a tenant, you can offer it to a landlord who has no form of their own.

If your application is accepted, ask for the Ontario Standard Lease and read it before you pay or move in.

This article explains Ontario rules as of October 2026 and is general information, not legal advice. If you have a specific dispute, get legal advice.