No Fideicomiso How Foreigners Own Property in San Miguel de Allende

Two documents settle how a foreigner owns property in San Miguel de Allende: Article 27 of the Constitution of 1917, and a list INEGI published in the Diario Oficial de la Federación on 21 May 1997.

This page separates settled law from practice that varies. The constitutional boundary, the filing required with the Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, and the obligation to formalise in an escritura pública and register the deed are settled. Intermediary fees, processing times, and what any individual notario will ask you to produce are not. Where our sources disagree on those, we print the disagreement rather than the friendlier number.

The rule, and where it actually bites

Article 27 fracción I provides that in a strip of one hundred kilometres along the borders and fifty along the beaches, foreigners may on no account acquire direct dominion over land and water. That is the zona restringida, the restricted zone.

Two details matter. The constitutional wording is “en las playas”, on the beaches, and the fifty kilometres is measured from there. And fracción I was last amended on 20 January 1960. The consolidated constitutional text carries reforms as recent as 2 June 2026, but this particular rule has been untouched for sixty-six years. Copy claiming that Mexico’s foreign ownership rules are changing describes something that has not happened. Article 2 fracción VI of the Ley de Inversión Extranjera restates the same definition in statute and carries no reform annotation at all, meaning it is the original 1993 text as enacted.

San Miguel is outside it, and there is a document that says so

The strongest primary source is not a map. It is a list.

Article 10-A of the Ley de Inversión Extranjera obliged INEGI to publish the municipalities located entirely outside the restricted zone. It did so on 21 May 1997, under the heading “Primera lista de municipios y delegaciones totalmente ubicados fuera de la zona restringida que señala la fracción I del artículo 27 constitucional”. Under Guanajuato, the municipality “Allende” appears. San Miguel de Allende is its cabecera, its seat. Every Guanajuato municipality is on the list, which is what you would expect of a landlocked state with no international border.

Two honest caveats. We cannot tell you how many kilometres San Miguel sits from the nearest restricted-zone boundary; the INEGI list settles the legal question completely, but no source states that margin and we will not measure a map and publish the result as a fact. And on whether INEGI ever issued a second list, the Colegio de Notarios del Estado de Veracruz stated in 2019 that the 1997 publication was a first list with no subsequent one. That is a notary association, not a government source, and absence of a second list is not proof of its non-existence.

What fee simple actually means here

Your name goes on the escritura, and the property is registered to you personally in the Registro Público de la Propiedad. With respect to that property you hold the same rights a Mexican national holds: sell, rent, renovate, mortgage, bequeath, all without a trustee’s consent, because there is no trustee. There is no term, nothing renews, and no bank charges you a fee for the privilege.

What you still have to file

Article 10-A paragraph 1 requires a foreigner acquiring outside the restricted zone to file with the SRE a written instrument agreeing to what Article 27 fracción I provides. That single filing is the whole federal requirement. No fideicomiso, no bank trustee, no trust permit.

Paragraph 5 also empowers the SRE to determine, by general agreements published in the Diario Oficial, cases in which foreigners need only present that written agreement without the corresponding permit. Such an agreement exists: the DOF edition of 2 March 1998 carries an acuerdo general with exactly that title. We confirmed its title and date from the DOF index but could not read its operative articles, because the DOF holds that edition only as a scanned image. The scope of the waiver therefore rests on the SRE’s own summary.

That summary says nationals of countries with which Mexico maintains diplomatic relations need only the written agreement, while nationals of countries without them must also obtain the permit. In practice, American, Canadian and EU buyers in San Miguel file the convenio and nothing more. The page sits behind a bot filter and we could not re-verify it.

The Calvo clause

In the constitutional text, foreigners may acquire land provided they agree before the Ministry of Foreign Relations to be considered as nationals in respect of those assets, and therefore not to invoke the protection of their governments in relation to them, under penalty, should they breach the agreement, of losing the acquired assets to the benefit of the Nation.

Read it precisely. It is an undertaking about one specific property. It is not a renunciation of citizenship, does not make you a Mexican national for any other purpose, and does not affect your passport or your status at home. The stated penalty for breach is forfeiture, which is why no serious buyer treats the convenio as a formality.

The fee, and the timing conflict nobody has resolved

The 2026 statutory fee is set by Article 25 fracción XV of the Ley Federal de Derechos at 5,252.02 pesos. Article 26-A requires fees to be rounded to multiples of five on payment, so 5,250.00 pesos is what actually changes hands. At the European Central Bank reference rate of 17.4601 pesos per US dollar on 23 July 2026, that is roughly 300 US dollars.

That fee line is newer than most people realise. Fracción XV was added by the reform published on 14 November 2022 and first applied in 2023; before then the convenio was not separately tariffed. It is the most recent substantive change touching foreign buyers here, and it changed a fee, not a right. The SRE page still quotes 4,640.00 pesos as effective 2 January 2023, the same fracción at an earlier year’s amount rather than a contradiction.

On timing the sources genuinely disagree, and we are not going to pick one.

The likely reconciliation is that five business days is a legal deadline after which approval is automatic, while twenty days is how long the SRE takes to issue the physical document a notario wants in hand. No source confirms that, so all four figures stand.

That same brokerage reports charging approximately 7,500 pesos per permit per person, roughly 2,250 above the statutory fee, a difference it attributes to the notario or attorney handling the filing. It sells the service, so read it as what buyers are charged, not as the government’s price.

The fideicomiso, and the fifty-year story that gets overstated

Article 11 of the Ley de Inversión Extranjera requires an SRE permit for credit institutions to acquire, as trustees, rights over real property inside the restricted zone. The bank holds title; the foreign buyer is the primary beneficiary. Monex, a Mexican trustee bank, describes that beneficiary as holding all rights, including the ability to sell or transfer the property and to designate and modify beneficiaries at any time. Article 14 gives the SRE five business days to resolve a permit filed at the competent central unit, or thirty at a state delegation, with the application deemed approved if no resolution issues.

Article 13 sets the term: a maximum period of fifty years, which may be extended at the request of the interested party. The statute places no cap on the number of extensions. The common framing fails in both directions. The version that says a fideicomiso expires after fifty years is wrong. The friendlier version that says it renews once for a further fifty also understates the law, which does not limit it to one renewal; Monex’s own page uses that narrower phrasing. The fideicomiso is an administrative burden and a recurring cost, not a countdown.

The costs are where San Miguel’s advantage is quantifiable, and where our sourcing is weakest.

We will not pick a number on the permit fee. Within the Cámara de Diputados text the sibling incisos rose about 8.5 per cent year on year while inciso a) rose about 64 per cent, and resolving that requires Anexo 19 of the Resolución Miscelánea Fiscal para 2026, which we have not retrieved.

On the bank fees, the source is a Puerto Vallarta brokerage whose business depends on buyers being comfortable with fideicomisos. We could corroborate none of those figures against a bank’s own published tariff: BBVA’s fideicomiso page returned an HTTP 403 and Monex’s discloses no amounts. Order of magnitude only.

A San Miguel buyer on fee-simple title incurs none of these, ever.

The notario is not your lawyer

Article 3 of the Ley del Notariado para el Estado de Guanajuato defines a notario as a legal professional invested with public faith, whose role is to receive, interpret, draft and give legal form to the will of the parties, and to confer authenticity and legal certainty on the acts passed before them. Articles 1 and 2 place the function under the state Executive, exercised through the Secretaría de Gobierno, and governed by the principles of rogación, professionalism, impartiality, legality and autonomy.

That is the structural difference from a US closing attorney or title company, and the point most often missed. The notario is a state-appointed public officer, not your agent and not the seller’s; impartiality is a duty, not a courtesy. Buyers who want someone whose duty runs to them alone hire their own attorney as well.

Article 1815 of the Código Civil para el Estado de Guanajuato requires the sale of real property to be recorded in an escritura pública. The Guanajuato rule is unconditional, with no value threshold; generic SRE consular guidance mentioning a threshold of 365 days of minimum wage reflects general civil law and is superseded here. And under Article 126 of the Ley del Impuesto sobre la Renta, the notario calculates the seller’s provisional capital gains tax under his own responsibility and remits it by declaration within fifteen days of signing. That is why a notario will not close over an unresolved tax question.

Registration is the moment your title becomes secure

Signing is not the finish line. Article 1816 provides that a sale of real property produces no effect against third parties until it has been registered, and Article 2497 adds that documents which should have been registered and were not produce effects only between the parties who granted them. Under Article 2506 the inscription may be requested by anyone with a legitimate interest, or by the notario who authorised the escritura.

The Guanajuato registry charges flat fees, not percentages, which contradicts widely repeated brokerage guidance.

Where one escritura covers more than one property the fee is charged per property, and subsequent derived inscriptions cost twenty-five per cent of the first.

Compare that with the common claim that registry fees run about 0.2 per cent of value. On a 10,000,000 peso home, 0.2 per cent would be 20,000 pesos against a statutory 2,574. The percentage guidance is wrong by roughly a factor of eight at that price, and the error makes closing costs look larger than they are.

What the municipality charges

The 2026 acquisition tax, ISAI, in San Miguel de Allende runs from 2.00 per cent on the portion up to 500,000 pesos, through brackets of 2.25, 2.50, 2.75, 3.00 and 3.50 per cent, to 4.00 per cent plus a fixed 39,125.00 pesos on the excess above 1,500,000 pesos. The brackets are in pesos and are not indexed, so virtually every purchase at foreign-buyer price points lands in the top bracket and the effective rate approaches four per cent. The identical tariff appears in the 2024 municipal revenue law, so the schedule has been stable.

We will not give you a confident figure for total closing costs. Published totals disagree: an independent research publisher with no commission motive reports 4 to 9 per cent of price, while two brokerages — both with a commission motive — put it at roughly 5 per cent, budgeting up to 6 or 6.5, with notary and deed formalisation at 1 to 2.5 per cent. Since ISAI alone approaches four per cent and registry fees are flat, the notary’s fee is the main variable, and we found no Guanajuato notarial arancel to test it against.

Nothing changed in 2025 or 2026

The substantive rules are thirty years old and the constitutional boundary is sixty-six. The only recent change that touches a San Miguel buyer is a fee.

What we do not know

Naming the gaps is part of the job.

• The kilometre margin. No source states how far San Miguel sits from the nearest restricted-zone boundary. The INEGI list resolves the legal question; we will not publish a measurement we made ourselves.
• The operative text of the 1998 SRE acuerdo general. The DOF holds that edition only as a scanned image, so we cannot confirm from the primary source which foreigners are exempted from the permit as opposed to required only to file the escrito.
• The fideicomiso permit fee. Two copies of the Ley Federal de Derechos give 21,648.83 and 13,175.56 pesos. Reconciling them requires Anexo 19 of the Resolución Miscelánea Fiscal para 2026.
• The SRE’s current official cost and timeline for the convenio. Its domains sit behind a bot filter. The one page that returned content is undated and quotes a 2023 fee.
• Guanajuato notary fees. We located no published statutory arancel, so the widely quoted 1 to 2.5 per cent has nothing verifiable behind it.
• Whether INEGI ever updated the 1997 list. We found no second list, and a notary association stated in 2019 that none exists. Consistent, not conclusive.

The standing disclaimer

This is published research, not legal or tax advice. Every figure above is traceable to a source listed at the foot of this page, and where our sources disagree we have printed the disagreement rather than the number that reads best.

Your notario is the legal authority on your transaction: a state-appointed public officer with a duty of impartiality and personal responsibility for the tax computation at closing. If anything here conflicts with what your notario tells you about your specific property, your notario is right and we are, at best, general.

Invest In San Miguel earns no commission and takes no referral fee. We have no financial interest in whether your purchase closes, which is precisely why we can afford to tell you that we do not know the fideicomiso permit fee, that the SRE’s stated timeline contradicts the statute, and that the brokerage figures circulating in this market carry a motive.