Repairs, Damage and Ordinary Wear in Calgary

Section 21 of the RTA sets the tenant's baseline obligations: don't cause significant damage to the premises, and keep the unit in reasonably clean condition. What the Act doesn't do is define exactly where ordinary deterioration stops and "significant damage" starts. That gap is intentional in the sense that a fixed rule couldn't account for every situation, but it also means landlords and tenants are frequently left guessing at exactly the moment they need certainty most, during a move-out walkthrough with a deposit on the line.

This is why the actual working definition comes from case law rather than the statute's text alone. Relying on the bare words of section 21 without the case law that interprets them is how landlords end up either over-charging for ordinary deterioration or under-documenting genuine damage they were entitled to claim.

The clearest statement of the test comes from Barry v Navratil, where the decision defines reasonable wear and tear as unavoidable deterioration in the dwelling and its fixtures resulting from normal use. The court's own examples are worth keeping close at hand: carpet wear from ordinary foot traffic over the course of a tenancy is wear and tear, not damage. A cigarette burn, by contrast, is avoidable, and counts as damage regardless of how it happened.

The distinguishing factor isn't how bad something looks, it's whether the deterioration is something that happens simply from someone living in the space, or whether it resulted from an event or conduct that a reasonable tenant could have avoided. The court itself acknowledges this involves some genuine ambiguity and subjectivity, since what counts as "normal" use varies between people and households. That ambiguity doesn't mean the test is useless, it means applying it carefully and documenting the reasoning matters more, not less.

This is the part landlords most often get wrong in the other direction. Once something is genuinely damage rather than wear and tear, it's tempting to assume the tenant owes the full cost of replacing it. Courts don't work that way. When a damaged item still had remaining useful life, or when its replacement is of higher quality than the original, the landlord's recovery gets reduced through what's called a betterment adjustment, crediting the tenant for the value the landlord effectively gained.

Courts have applied this in a few different ways: calculating the accelerated cost of having to replace something sooner than it would otherwise have needed replacing, accounting for the cost of borrowing money for the replacement or the interest lost, or simply awarding the item's depreciated value rather than its replacement cost. In Barry v Navratil itself, the landlord recovered only 75 percent of the cost to replace a damaged countertop and backsplash, because the new materials installed were of better quality than what had been there originally.

Everything above determines whether a deduction is justified in principle. Whether it's actually lawful to take depends on a separate, procedural requirement: move-in and move-out inspection reports. These have to be completed within one week before or after the tenant moves in and moves out respectively, and they need to include the statements and signatures the regulation requires. If a tenant refuses to participate, the landlord can still complete the report on their own, but only after offering the tenant two separate inspection times, on different non-holiday days, between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m.

Without a proper inspection report on both ends, the landlord cannot deduct for cleaning or repair costs from the deposit, even where the underlying damage is completely genuine and would otherwise pass the normal-use test easily. Unpaid rent is the one exception; that can still be deducted regardless of inspection-report status. This procedural requirement trips up more landlords than the wear-and-tear distinction itself, because it's easy to have a strong substantive case and still lose the ability to act on it over a missing or incomplete report.

Once a tenancy ends, the landlord has 10 days to either return the security deposit plus any interest owed, or provide the tenant a statement of account explaining what's being deducted and why. A full, final accounting is due within 30 days. Interest on the deposit compounds annually on the tenancy's anniversary date, at a rate the province sets each year, and generally has to be paid annually unless both parties agreed in writing to defer that payment until the tenancy actually ends.

This timeline runs independently of how solid the underlying damage claim is. A landlord with a well-documented, legitimate damage claim who misses the 10-day statement-of-account deadline is in a weaker position procedurally, even though the substantive claim itself hasn't changed. The two obligations, having a valid claim and meeting the return/accounting timeline, are separate requirements that both need to be satisfied.