Most people find out about the notification of work at the worst possible moment: three weeks before a closing, when a buyer’s lawyer asks for paperwork on a subpanel that went in eleven years ago.
So this page is the boring version, in advance.
What actually needs a notification
The Ontario Electrical Safety Code requires almost all electrical work to be reported to the Electrical Safety Authority. You file a notification of work before the work begins, and that filing triggers a review.
The word “almost” is doing less work than people hope. New circuits, new devices, alterations, and repairs or replacements of existing wiring are all in scope. It is not a rule about size.
The jobs that surprise people
A panel change is obvious. These are the ones that get skipped:
| Job | Notification |
|---|---|
| Adding a subpanel in a garage or a workshop | Yes |
| Running a new circuit to a detached building | Yes |
| Replacing a fuse panel with breakers | Yes |
| A charger, a hot tub or a heat pump circuit | Yes |
| Rewiring one room during a renovation | Yes |
| Anything at a dock, a boathouse or a lift | Yes |
Does changing a light fixture need an electrical permit?
Swapping a fixture on an existing outlet box, like for like, is the one everybody asks about and the one closest to the line. The safer question is a different one: if this work were concealed and never recorded, would a future owner want to know it happened? That is the test the notification exists to answer.
A building permit is not an electrical notification. They are separate systems run by separate bodies, and a renovation frequently needs both. Having one does not cover you for the other.
Who is allowed to do the work
This is the part most homeowners get wrong, and it is not the part they expect.
You may do electrical work on the home you own and live in. That right does not travel. A friend who is handy, a neighbour who used to be in the trade, a family member doing you a favour on a Saturday — none of them may do it, licensed or not.
The homeowner rule and its edges
Tenants may do work inside a rental, and should speak to the property manager before starting. Everything else — a rental you own but do not live in, a cottage you let out, a building with a second unit — is contractor work.
Two more conditions travel with the homeowner rule. The work has to meet the Ontario Electrical Safety Code, which is a real book and not a feeling. And the work must not be concealed before it has been reviewed. Drywall over an unreviewed circuit is the one mistake that cannot be undone cheaply.
Can a family member wire my house for me?
No, and this is worth being blunt about because the answer is counter-intuitive. The permission is attached to the owner-occupant, not to competence. Somebody who genuinely knows what they are doing is still not permitted to do it on your house unless they hold the licence.
What you get at the end
Once the work has been reviewed and passed, the Electrical Safety Authority issues a Certificate of Acceptance to whoever filed the notification.
That certificate is the entire point. It is a permanent record that the work happened and was looked at, and it is what carries weight with an insurer, a lender or a buyer years later. A verbal assurance from whoever did the work carries none.
The 2026 fee schedule is published and exact. A small no-service wiring job starts at $46 at the contractor rate, the inspection notification minimum is $92, and a panel or service change filed by a licensed contractor is $86 - the same notification filed by a homeowner is $212, one more argument for the contractor filing it. None of these is a reason to skip it and a good reason not to.
Why this bites harder around Georgian Bay
Two regional facts make the paperwork worse here than it is in a city.
Seasonal buildings change hands more often. A cottage on the Muskoka lakes or the shoreline near Parry Sound turns over faster than a family home in town, and every sale is another moment when somebody asks for records that were never created. Decades of small undocumented alterations concentrate in exactly this kind of building.
Anything at the water is notifiable and inspected. Dock, boathouse and lift wiring falls under Section 78 of the code, which is a stricter world than the house is, and a great deal of what is installed along this shoreline predates the current rules.
Add the service disconnect, which is scheduled by whichever of the region’s nine distributors holds your town — Hydro One in Orillia, Newmarket-Tay in Midland, Lakeland Power across Muskoka, EPCOR in Collingwood since it bought Collus — and the sequencing matters. The notification goes in first, because the utility and the inspection both hang off it.
What we will tell you not to spend money on
Do not pay anybody to make unpermitted work compliant on paper. It is not a thing that exists. Corrective work can be notified and certified; history cannot.
Do not commission a full rewire because a home inspector found one undocumented circuit. An assessment in writing, then a notification covering the corrective scope, is usually the whole job. The rewire question is a separate one, and what insurers actually want on older wiring is where it gets decided.
And do not conceal the work. Everything else on this page can be fixed later, expensively. That one cannot.