Ontario's Small Claims Court hears money claims up to $50,000, not counting interest and costs. The ceiling rose from $35,000 on 1 October 2025. Below it, this is the cheapest court in the province. Above it, you are in the Superior Court's simplified or ordinary stream.
Our charges include applicable taxes. Disbursements are extra and billed at cost — itemized upfront, in writing, never hidden.
From $450.87 taxes included
Small Claims Court awards money, or the return of specific personal property, up to the limit. That is the whole menu. It cannot grant an injunction, make a declaration, decide who owns land, or order somebody to perform a contract. If what you need is an order that someone stop doing something, you are in the wrong court.
It is a branch of the Superior Court of Justice, presided over by deputy judges. You can appear yourself, or be represented by a lawyer or a licensed paralegal. The rules of evidence are relaxed and the whole process is designed to be usable by people without representation.
If your claim is worth more than the limit you can abandon the excess and sue here anyway — a real trade-off between speed and recovery, and one worth doing the arithmetic on. What you cannot do is carve a single claim into several smaller ones to slip under the ceiling.
The basic limitation period is two years from the day you knew, or ought reasonably to have known, that you had a claim worth bringing. The Limitations Act, 2002 presumes you knew on the day the loss occurred unless you can show otherwise. Two years passes faster than people expect while they are negotiating.
You file a plaintiff's claim in the right territorial division, serve it, and the defendant has twenty days to file a defence. No defence, and you can move for default judgment. If a defence is filed, the file goes to a mandatory settlement conference in front of a deputy judge — which is where a large share of cases actually end.
Only what survives the settlement conference is set down for trial. Timelines vary considerably between courthouses, so ask what the local backlog looks like before you promise yourself a date.
The winner normally recovers filing and service disbursements plus a limited allowance toward representation. Costs in Small Claims are generally capped at 15 per cent of the amount claimed, unless a party behaved unreasonably — and that cap is the single most important number in deciding whether to sue.
Run it before you file. Win an $8,000 claim and your costs allowance is in the low four figures plus disbursements. Your own time is never recoverable. For claims at the small end, the honest advice is often that a firm demand letter is the best value available.
Make a written offer to settle, early and in the proper form. Beating your own offer at trial can increase the costs the court allows, and it puts genuine pressure on the other side to engage before the settlement conference.
Enforcement is a separate exercise with its own steps and its own costs. Start with an examination in aid of execution: the debtor attends under oath, with documents, and answers questions about income, assets, and what they have done with anything they used to own.
From there the tools are garnishment of bank accounts, receivables or wages, and a writ of seizure and sale filed with the sheriff in each county where the debtor owns land. Writs frequently do nothing for years and then pay out in full when the debtor sells or refinances.
Postjudgment interest runs on the judgment. But if the debtor has no job, no bank balance and no real property, a judgment is paper. Search for assets before you sue, not after you win.
Straightforward defended claims commonly run around a year from filing to resolution, with most ending at or shortly after the settlement conference. Undefended claims can be done in a couple of months. Contested matters that go to trial take longer, and the wait depends heavily on which courthouse hears it.
You can run it yourself, and the court is built on that assumption. Representation earns its keep where liability is genuinely contested, where the other side has counsel, or where the enforcement stage is going to be the hard part. Given the 15 per cent costs cap, weigh the fee against the claim before committing.
Yes, to the Divisional Court, and generally only where the amount in issue exceeds a prescribed threshold that was raised on 1 October 2025. The deadline is short — 30 days — and an appeal is a review of the record, not a fresh trial. Appeals are expensive relative to the amounts in play at this level.
Then decide before you spend anything whether there is a second defendant. A director who made the misrepresentation personally, a personal guarantor, or a related company that received the money may all be worth adding. Suing an empty corporation produces a judgment and nothing else.
Almost never. Damages compensate for provable financial loss. Ontario courts do not generally award damages for the inconvenience of a commercial dispute, and your own hours spent preparing the case are not a recoverable cost.
Open your file tonight — a licensed Ontario lawyer will confirm everything with you by tomorrow.