A missed payment, in dates.
Enter the first mortgage payment you missed and your regular payment. This works out the arrears, the earliest day the lender can serve a Notice of Sale, the earliest day it can sell, and your deadline to defend if it sues, each with the section of the Mortgages Act or the rule it comes from.
What you will get
First missed payment
Earliest Notice of Sale
Earliest sale or claim for possession
Statement of defence due
Enter the first missed payment and your regular payment.
Counted from the due date of the first missed payment, treating that day as the first day of default, which is the earliest reading and the safe one for you. The fifteen and thirty-five day periods are the lender’s minimums under section 32 of the Mortgages Act and are not shifted for weekends. Your own twenty days to defend run under rule 18.01, shifted to the next business day under rule 3.01 when they end on a weekend or holiday, with the unshifted date shown first. Read off e-Laws on September 4, 2026.
Not covered here
- Foreclosure, which is a court proceeding under rule 64 of the Rules of Civil Procedure with its own clock, and where the lender takes the house instead of selling it.
- A mortgage with no power of sale clause of its own. Part II of the Mortgages Act then gives the lender a statutory power after three months of default, on forty-five days' notice. Almost every standard charge term confers a power of sale, so this is rare.
- A default for a reason other than a missed payment: unpaid property tax, a lapsed insurance policy, an unauthorised second mortgage. The same powers can follow without a payment being missed.
- Second and third mortgages, whose lenders can start their own power of sale while the first is current.
- CMHC-insured mortgages and any hardship or deferral program a lender offers, which are contractual rather than statutory.
- What the house will sell for, and the shortfall the lender can sue you for afterwards.
- Bankruptcy or a consumer proposal. Neither stops a secured creditor on its own, though either changes the conversation with the lender.
These dates are the minimum waiting periods in Part III of the Mortgages Act and the time to defend under rule 18.01 of the Rules of Civil Procedure. They are the earliest a lender can act, not a prediction of when it will: banks often wait longer, private lenders often do not. The arrears figure is your missed payments added up. The interest and payout figures are estimates on the rate and balance you enter, and the lender's legal and administrative costs, which you must also pay to reinstate, are not included. Nothing here is a payout statement; only the lender can give you one. This is general information, not legal advice.
The dates above are the floor, and a lender that has decided to move can hit every one of them. Reinstating under section 22, challenging a defective notice, or negotiating time to sell yourself all work better in the first weeks than the last. If you are behind on a mortgage anywhere in the GTA or Ontario, Telesh Law Firm Professional Corp can tell you where you stand. Our guide to what happens if you cannot pay your mortgage walks through the options in order.