What a Landlord Cannot Do in BC

A landlord in BC cannot enter your home without 24 hours' written notice, change the locks, cut off heat or hydro, take your belongings over unpaid rent, break a pet term already in your agreement, raise rent above 2.3% in 2026, or end your tenancy for a reason the Residential Tenancy Act does not list. Each of those is a numbered section of the Act, and each has one thing worth doing before anything else.

The list below is ranked by how often it comes up in Metro Vancouver, not by where it sits in the statute. The Residential Tenancy Branch does not publish a breakdown of tenant applications by complaint type, so treat the order as a judgment call rather than a measurement.

The list

#	What a landlord cannot do	Law	Do this first
1	Enter your unit without written notice at least 24 hours ahead, stating the purpose and a time between 8 a.m. and 9 p.m.	RTA s. 29	Email them the text of s. 29 and ask for notice in writing next time. Keep the email.
2	Raise rent by more than the annual cap, more than once in 12 months, or on less than three full months' written notice	RTA s. 41–43	Write back naming the rule the notice breaks and ask for a corrected Form RTB-7.
3	Take away a pet you are already permitted to keep under the agreement	RTA s. 18, s. 5	Send them the clause in your own signed agreement. It cannot be changed unilaterally.
4	Change the locks on your unit without your agreement and without giving you new keys	RTA s. 31	Apply to the RTB for an expedited hearing the same day, then call 604-660-1020.
5	Terminate or restrict a service essential to living there, including heat, hydro, and water	RTA s. 27	Put the loss and its start date in writing, then apply for an order to restore it.
6	End your tenancy because you complained, filed, or asked for a repair	RTA s. 44, s. 44.1, s. 47	Dispute the notice inside its deadline. Do not move out to be safe.
7	Seize your belongings or block your access to them over unpaid rent	RTA s. 26(3)	Ask in writing for access on a stated date, then apply to the RTB for both the goods and compensation.
8	Keep your post-dated cheques after the tenancy ends	Regulation, Schedule s. 5(4)	Ask for them back in writing before your last day.

Row 8 is the one most lists get wrong.

1. Entering without proper notice

Section 29 is the section Metro Vancouver tenants need most, because so much of the rental stock here is a basement suite or a laneway house with the owner living upstairs. Proximity is not permission.

What s. 29(1)(b) requires	What fails it
Notice in writing, at least 24 hours and not more than 30 days before	A text an hour ahead
A stated purpose, and it must be reasonable	Turning up "to check on things"
A stated date and time	"Sometime Tuesday"
A time between 8 a.m. and 9 p.m., unless you agree otherwise	A 7 a.m. contractor

Five things override this: your permission given at the time or within the previous 30 days, an emergency where entry is necessary to protect life or property, abandonment, an order from the RTB, or housekeeping services written into your agreement. Section 29(2) also lets a landlord inspect monthly, but only with the same 24-hour written notice.

What to do: send one email quoting s. 29 and asking for written notice in future, because a documented warning turns the next entry from an argument into evidence. Repeated illegal entry breaches your right to quiet enjoyment under s. 28, covered by RTB Policy Guideline 6. Compensation is usually modest. The point of filing is to make it stop.

2. Raising rent outside the cap

The maximum increase for a rent increase taking effect in 2026 is 2.3%. It was 3% in 2025. Both figures are published by the Residential Tenancy Branch, page last updated 4 March 2026, checked 9 August 2026.

Three rules have to hold, and a notice failing any one of them is defective: not more than the cap for the year the increase takes effect, not more often than once every 12 months, and at least three full months of written notice on Form RTB-7. On $2,000 a month, 2.3% is $46. A landlord cannot round up, and cannot bank an increase they skipped last year.

What to do: reply in writing naming the specific rule the notice breaks and asking for a corrected RTB-7, because most over-limit notices here come from small landlords using a template off the internet, and they get fixed at that step.

3. Removing a pet the agreement allows

A landlord can refuse pets outright, and most do. What they cannot do is agree to your cat in writing and then reverse it. Section 18 governs pet clauses, a pet damage deposit is capped at half a month's rent regardless of how many animals, and certified guide and service dogs are not pets at all. Section 5 says the Act cannot be contracted out of, and a signed term is a signed term.

What to do: send a photo of the clause in your own copy of the agreement, since the usual cause is a new owner or manager working from a template rather than the document you signed.

4. Changing the locks

Section 31 is short and absolute. A landlord must not change the locks on a rental unit unless you agree and they give you new keys. Changing the locks on common areas requires giving every tenant new keys. Going the other way, you cannot change your own lock without the landlord's written agreement or an RTB order.

A lockout does not become legal because you owe rent. Only a court bailiff acting on a Writ of Possession can remove a tenant in BC.

What to do: apply for an expedited hearing that day. The RTB aims to schedule expedited hearings within 12 days of application, and within 6 days where there is violence or an immediate safety risk. Illegal lockouts are one of the narrow categories that qualify.

5. Cutting utilities or services

Section 27 has two halves worth knowing apart. A landlord must not terminate or restrict a service that is essential to living in the unit, or one that is a material term of the agreement, full stop. For anything else — a parking stall, storage, cable — they may cut it, but only with 30 days' written notice on the approved form and a rent reduction equal to what the loss is worth.

This matters here because a secondary suite is often not separately metered, so the hydro account sits in the owner's name. That is the usual setup in the older detached stock you rent from in East Vancouver, and it does not give a landlord a switch to use in a dispute.

What to do: write down the date and time the service stopped and email it to them the same day, because the RTB's remedy is an order to restore it plus compensation, and both depend on a clear start date. Policy Guideline 22 sets out how the rent reduction is calculated.

6. Evicting you for complaining

BC has no standalone anti-retaliation section, and any guide claiming otherwise is inventing one. The protection works differently. Section 44 lists every way a tenancy can end and s. 47(1) lists every cause for a One Month Notice; neither list contains "filed a dispute" or "asked for repairs." Section 44.1 then says a landlord must not give a notice to end tenancy unless the requirements for the stated purpose actually applied when it was given, or the landlord reasonably believed they did. A cause invented afterwards fails that test.

What to do: dispute the notice inside its deadline, 5 days for a 10 Day Notice and 10 days for a One Month Notice, because missing the window means you are conclusively presumed to have accepted the eviction and the arbitrator never reaches why it was served. The tenancy law guides cover each form and deadline.

7. Seizing your belongings

Section 26(3) is unambiguous: whether or not rent has been paid, a landlord must not seize your personal property or prevent or interfere with your access to it. There is no self-help remedy for arrears in BC. Unpaid rent is collected through a 10 Day Notice and a monetary order, not through a padlocked storage locker.

What to do: email a written request for access on a specific date, then apply to the RTB for return of the goods and compensation under s. 67, because s. 7 makes the non-complying party liable for the resulting loss.

8. Post-dated cheques: the one that is not actually illegal

This appears on nearly every list of what BC landlords cannot do, and it is wrong. Nothing in the Residential Tenancy Act prohibits a landlord from asking for post-dated cheques, or from preferring the applicant who offers them. Post-dated cheques are only excluded from the definition of a security deposit in s. 1, which means they cannot be counted toward the half-month deposit cap. The one real rule is narrow: Residential Tenancy Regulation, Schedule s. 5(4) requires the landlord to return any post-dated cheques still in their possession on or before the last day of the tenancy. Ask for them back in writing.

What none of this fixes

The Act does not cover every rental here. Section 4(c) excludes living accommodation where the tenant shares a bathroom or kitchen with the owner. In a region with this many shared-entry suites, that exclusion catches real people, and none of the sections above apply to them.

Winning at the RTB is also slow. The filing fee is $100, waivable if you cannot afford it, but outside the expedited categories the RTB publishes no target wait time. Your evidence must be received 14 days before the hearing and the landlord's 7 days before, so nothing moves in under about three weeks, and in practice it is longer. An order is a piece of paper: monetary orders are enforced through Small Claims Court, not by the RTB.

That is the honest shape of it. The law is clear, the enforcement is slow, and a landlord who has already changed your locks is rarely persuaded by a citation. File anyway, keep everything in writing, and if the tenancy is genuinely over, start looking early rather than at 30 days' notice. Our Metro Vancouver listings update through the day.