Ontario Condo Act 2026: What Boards Actually Need to Know

If you sit on a condo board in Ontario, the Condominium Act is the rulebook you've sworn to follow — whether you've read it or not. Most board members haven't. It's 184 pages of statute, plus a thick layer of regulations on top, and most of it was written long before email, e-transfer, or any kind of resident portal existed.

This guide is the version we wish we'd had when we started AedoBuild. It's not legal advice — talk to a condo lawyer for the edge cases — but it covers the rules that actually shape what you do as a board, and where boards most often get themselves into trouble.

The TL;DR

If you remember nothing else:

Reserve fund studies are mandatory and have to be funded. A study every three years, with annual contributions based on it.
Records requests are not optional. You have 30 days to respond, and the CAO will hear complaints if you don't.
AGMs require strict notice. 15 days minimum, with proxy forms, financials, and the audit if your building has one.
Status certificates carry legal weight. They have to be accurate in 10 calendar days.
The Condo Authority of Ontario (CAO) is enforcing more aggressively than it used to. Boards have lost cases over avoidable record-keeping failures.

The rest of this article is the why and the how.

What the Act actually is

The Condominium Act, 1998 (sometimes called the "Condo Act") is the Ontario statute that governs every condo corporation in the province. It covers everything from how boards are elected to what records you have to keep, how to assess common expenses, and how to handle disputes between owners.

It was significantly updated by the Protecting Condominium Owners Act, 2015, which is what created the Condominium Authority of Ontario (CAO) and the Condominium Authority Tribunal (CAT). Both of those bodies are now central to how the Act gets enforced — and they've been getting more active each year.

You don't need to read the Act cover to cover. But you do need to know what it requires of you specifically, so let's go through the sections that affect day-to-day board work.

Reserve fund studies — the rule boards underestimate

Every condo corporation in Ontario has to commission a reserve fund study at least once every three years. The study projects future major repair and replacement costs (roof, elevators, mechanical systems, etc.) over a 30-year horizon and tells you what your annual contributions need to be to fund them.

Why this matters in 2026: construction costs have risen sharply since 2020. Studies done before 2022 are systematically underestimating future repair costs. Boards that have not updated their study recently are quietly underfunding their reserve, which sets up a future special assessment.

What you have to do:

Commission a study every three years from a qualified provider (a Class 3 study after the first one, which is the deepest review).
Receive a written report and review it with the board.
Send owners a Notice of Future Funding within 120 days that summarizes the recommended contributions.
Adjust your annual budget to match. The contributions don't have to be exactly what the study recommends, but if they're lower, you owe owners a written explanation of why.

Where boards get burned: skipping the three-year cadence, accepting the study without reading it, or budgeting below the recommended contributions without documenting why. All three show up in CAT complaints regularly.

Records — what you have to keep, and for how long

Section 55 of the Act lists every record a condo corporation must maintain. The list is longer than most boards realize:

Declarations, bylaws, and rules
Minutes of board and owner meetings
Records of owners and mortgagees
All correspondence between the corporation and owners
Financial records (statements, audits, budgets, invoices)
Insurance policies
Reserve fund studies and notices
Contracts with service providers
Returns and notices filed with the CAO

You have to keep most of these for at least seven years. Some, like the declaration and bylaws, you keep permanently.

The 30-day rule

When an owner submits a written records request, you have 30 days to respond. You can charge a reasonable fee, but you can't refuse without legal justification. The CAO publishes the official Form 13 that owners use, and it's increasingly common for owners to use it when they suspect something is off in the building's finances.

If you miss the 30-day deadline, the owner can file a CAT case for as little as $25. The Tribunal has been awarding penalties to corporations that fail to produce records on time — often $500 or more, plus the records still have to be produced.

Practical implication for boards: know where every record is, and have a way to retrieve them in less than 30 days. Paper files in a closet at the property manager's office have been the cause of more than one lost CAT case. A document vault that owners and board members can search beats a filing cabinet every time.

Annual general meetings — the rules are stricter than people think

Every condo corporation has to hold an Annual General Meeting (AGM) within six months of its fiscal year end. The notice requirements are specific:

At least 15 days' written notice to every owner, sent by a method specified in your bylaws (mail is the safe default, but Section 47 lets you use electronic delivery if owners have agreed).
The notice must include the financial statements, the auditor's report (if your building has one, which is required if you have more than 25 units), the proposed agenda, and a proxy form.
For some matters (bylaw amendments, significant changes), a longer notice period and higher voting threshold apply.

A note on electronic and virtual meetings: the temporary COVID-era rules that allowed fully virtual AGMs were made permanent in 2022. You can hold AGMs by phone, video, or hybrid as long as your bylaws permit it and owners can participate meaningfully. Most boards have adopted some form of hybrid format since.

Where boards mess this up: sending the notice late, omitting the proxy form, or failing to include the auditor's report. Any of these can invalidate decisions made at the meeting, including budgets and board elections.

Status certificates — the 10-day rule

When a unit sells, the buyer's lawyer will request a Status Certificate from the corporation. This is a snapshot of the unit's financial standing and the corporation's overall health. By statute, you must produce it within 10 calendar days of receiving the written request and the prescribed fee ($100 plus HST).

The certificate is legally significant. If anything in it is inaccurate — say, you forget to list a special assessment that's about to be voted on — and the buyer relies on it, the corporation can be on the hook for the difference.

Practical implication: if you can't generate an accurate status certificate in less than a day, you're operating manually. A board portal that tracks current charges, upcoming assessments, and active legal matters lets the property manager pull a certificate in minutes instead of hours.

Common-element rules and enforcement

Boards can pass rules under Section 58 to govern the use of common elements — short-term rentals, balcony storage, pet weight limits, smoking, etc. The process matters:

The board passes a rule.
Owners are notified in writing.
Owners have 30 days to requisition a meeting if they want to vote the rule down.
If no requisition comes, the rule takes effect.

Rules that aren't passed through this process aren't enforceable. Boards that try to enforce informal "policies" lose at CAT regularly.

For enforcement of breaches, the Act gives you a few tools:

Written notice to the owner asking them to comply.
Charging the cost of compliance (e.g. removing a non-compliant satellite dish) back to the owner's account.
For continuing breaches, applying to court under Section 134 for a compliance order.

Reasonableness matters. Enforcement that's selective or inconsistent has been thrown out by courts.

The Condo Authority of Ontario (CAO) — what they do

The CAO is a non-profit body that the Act created to oversee Ontario's condo sector. Two functions matter most for boards:

1. Annual returns and fees. Every corporation has to file a return with the CAO each year and pay the per-unit fee (currently $1 per voting unit per month, paid annually). Miss this and you risk losing standing to file complaints at CAT.

2. Director training. Every condo director in Ontario has to complete the CAO's mandatory director training within six months of being elected. The training is free and online. If you skip it, you can technically be disqualified from acting as a director, and any decisions made by a board that includes an untrained director are at risk.

If you've been a director for years and never completed the training because nobody told you to: do it now. It takes about three hours.

The Condominium Authority Tribunal (CAT) — where disputes go

CAT is Ontario's online tribunal for condo disputes. As of 2026, its jurisdiction covers:

Records disputes (the big category — owner-to-corporation conflicts over records access)
Pet, parking, vehicle, and storage rule disputes
Noise, vibration, light, odour, smoke, and vapour disputes
Indemnification claims arising from any of the above

It does not cover assessment or major financial disputes — those still go to court. But the disputes that CAT does handle are exactly the ones boards face every week.

CAT cases are filed online for $25, and most are resolved by negotiation or mediation without ever reaching a decision. Boards that show up prepared and reasonable usually do well. Boards that ignore the process or stonewall lose.

What this means for how you run the building

Boil all of the above down, and a few practical principles fall out:

Document everything. Every decision, every owner correspondence, every vendor contract, every notice. If it's not written down, it didn't happen.
Respect timelines. 30 days for records, 10 days for status certificates, 15 days for AGM notice, three years for reserve studies. Calendar them.
Make information easy for owners to find. Most CAT records cases are filed by owners who couldn't get a straight answer. Transparent boards get sued less.
Train every new director within six months. No exceptions.
Keep your reserve study current and your contributions honest. Underfunding is the slow-motion crisis every building eventually faces.

A lot of this comes down to having the right tools. Spreadsheets and email work for very small buildings; for everything else, you need real software that gives every owner self-serve access to their unit's records, the building's documents, the meeting minutes, and the financials. That's the whole reason we built AedoBuild.

A short reading list

If you want to go deeper, these are the resources we recommend:

The Condominium Act, 1998 itself (Ontario e-Laws)
The CAO website (condoauthorityontario.ca)
CAO mandatory director training (free, in your director portal)
Past CAT decisions (canlii.org — searchable; reading 5–10 records cases will teach you more than any summary)

If you have a specific compliance question for your building, talk to a condo lawyer. The fee for an hour of advice is much cheaper than losing a CAT case or facing a special assessment.

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