Rental Income Tax on a San Miguel de Allende Property

Rent from a San Miguel de Allende property is taxed by the federation, by the state of Guanajuato and by the municipality of Allende, under three separate statutes, on three different bases, with three filing calendars and three enforcement bodies. No page we could find assembles all three. The pages that rank are either generic Mexico tax explainers written by accountants who have never opened the Guanajuato Ley de Hacienda, or brokerage FAQs written by firms that take twenty to thirty percent of the rental stream and so have a reason to keep the cost stack short.

This page walks the whole chain, from gross booking revenue down to what the owner keeps, and out to what a US or Canadian return does with the same money. Where a figure is verified against primary law, we say so. Where it comes from an advisory blog, we say that too.

The pivot: tax residency, not nationality and not your visa

Mexican tax law does not care what passport you hold. It cares whether you are a Mexican tax resident. Title IV of the income tax law governs residents, Title V governs non-residents, and the two produce materially different outcomes on the same property. The clearest illustration sits on the exit side: the principal-residence exemption in Article 93 fracción XIX is a Title IV provision, so a foreign national who is a Mexican tax resident can use it and a Mexican national who is not a tax resident cannot. Nationality is irrelevant. Residency is decisive.

Tax residency is also not immigration residency. Holding a residente temporal card does not make you a Mexican tax resident. We have not verified the statutory residency test in the Código Fiscal de la Federación and so publish no test here. Every rate below hangs off this question, and it is the first thing to settle with a Mexican contador, before the letting starts rather than after.

The five layers

Four of the five are verified against the statute. The one that is not is the income tax, which is the layer everybody assumes is the settled part.

The rate we will not print

There is a figure in wide circulation: 25 percent of gross rents, with no deductions, for a non-resident landlord in Mexico. We are not publishing it as a fact.

Our research verified Article 160 of the Ley del Impuesto sobre la Renta directly against the Cámara de Diputados text. What it says is that a non-resident selling Mexican real estate pays 25 percent of the total income obtained, sin deducción alguna, with an election to apply the top Article 152 rate of 35 percent to the computed gain instead. That is the sale of property. It is not the letting of property. Rents paid to a non-resident fall under a different article of Title V, with a different base, and our research did not verify that article against the same text.

The two numbers may well coincide. Many practitioner pages state that they do. But a figure repeated in five blogs is not a figure checked in one statute. If a page tells you 25 percent applies to your rents and cites nothing, it may be entirely right, and it has not shown you.

What we can source is the digital platforms regime. Mexican tax-advisory publishers report that where a host has a registered RFC, a platform withholds 4 percent for income tax under Article 113-A on lodging services, plus half of the 16 percent IVA, that is 8 percent. Without an RFC, they report penalty rates of 20 percent for income tax and the full 16 percent of IVA. The 4 percent rate under Article 113-A is long-standing and uncontroversial. The without-RFC penalty rates are the part we would want checked against the statute before anyone relied on them, and we flag them rather than presenting all four with equal confidence.

That source has two further limits. It describes the regime as it applies to hosts with an RFC, meaning in practice Mexican-resident hosts, and says nothing about a non-resident owner beyond the penalty rate. And it does not say whether the withholding is a final tax or a payment on account, which is the difference between it ending the matter and it starting an annual filing obligation.

The furnished-rental trap

This is the layer most owners get wrong, and it is the plainest text on this page.

Article 20 fracción II of the Ley del Impuesto al Valor Agregado exempts from IVA the letting of buildings or parts of buildings used exclusively as a dwelling. Then it removes the exemption: the provision does not apply to property supplied furnished, or used as a hotel or casa de hospedaje.

The trigger is furnishing, not lease length. An unfurnished long let of a house in Guadalupe is IVA-exempt. The same house let furnished on a twelve-month lease is taxable at 16 percent. Nothing about the tenancy has changed except the sofa. Most guidance flattens this into a claim that long-term letting is exempt and short-term letting is not, which is wrong at the statutory level and understates the tax on a very common San Miguel arrangement, the furnished annual let to a snowbird or a remote professional.

IVA is also not a tax on the owner. The supplier collects it from the customer and remits it. Whether it reduces your take depends on whether your rate is quoted inclusive or exclusive of it. Where a platform’s headline price is the all-in figure the guest pays, a sixth of what looks like revenue was never yours.

Three statutes, three different triggers

Each of the three governments defines the taxable activity differently, and the definitions do not line up.

A furnished annual let therefore sits unambiguously inside the IVA charge and ambiguously inside the other two. We found no sourced definition of where an ordinary furnished tenancy stops and hospedaje begins, and will not invent one.

Guanajuato’s four percent, and why the platform is probably not covering you

Article 55 of the Ley de Hacienda para el Estado de Guanajuato sets the lodging tax at 4 percent of the total consideration, excluding food, related services and IVA. The November 2025 consolidated reform did not alter it.

Since a reform published on 30 December 2022, Articles 53 and 57 make digital platforms the statutory withholding agents. That sounds like relief for the host, and it is not unconditional. Article 57 relieves the host only on amounts collected through the platform, and only cuando éstos realicen el entero correspondiente, when the platform actually makes the payment. Income obtained without platform intermediation stays the host’s liability in every case.

That condition matters in 2026, because Guanajuato says the platforms are not paying. In July 2026 the state’s Subsecretario de Finanzas e Inversión publicly accused Airbnb of three and a half years of non-compliance, said the company has no registered fiscal domicile in the state, and said it refuses to let Finance review its calculations or share host identity data. A June 2026 tax-vendor guide separately lists Guanajuato among the states where Airbnb does not handle lodging tax retention. Airbnb has published no response we could locate and the reporting is single-outlet, so we present it as one side of a live dispute. But an owner reading Article 57 cannot assume the relief has been earned on their behalf.

If it falls to you: register in the Registro Estatal de Contribuyentes within ten business days of starting operations under Article 58, then file definitive monthly returns by the 22nd of the following month under Article 57, including nil returns for months with no income, until you file deregistration notices.

On rate, Guanajuato sits mid-table.

Guanajuato applies the same 4 percent to hotels and to platforms, unlike Quintana Roo, which charges platforms more than hotels.

The municipal layer is a flat fee, and flat fees are regressive

Article 24 fracción XIV of the 2026 San Miguel de Allende revenue law sets the specific land-use permit for property destined to lodging or temporary accommodation at 45,000 pesos per fiscal year. Not once. Every year. A separate one-time charge of 11,248.64 pesos under fracción XIII inciso d) covers authorising the change of land use itself, so an owner converting a residential property pays both in year one.

Two corrections. Press reporting on 19 July 2026 gave the annual figure as 40,000 pesos. The statute says 45,000 and the statute governs. And the fee has not risen since 2023, when it went up from 10,000 pesos, so the narrative of continuously escalating municipal pressure is not supported by the tariff. What has escalated is enforcement.

Because the charge is flat rather than proportional, it lands hardest on the smallest listings, the opposite of how every yield model in this market presents it.

The stack, itemised

Below is the walk from gross booking revenue to what is left, at four points on AirROI’s revenue distribution for San Miguel de Allende, July 2025 to June 2026. Management is at 20 percent, the rate one named local operator publishes. The permit converts at the European Central Bank reference rate of 17.4601 on 23 July 2026. Withholding is at the 4 percent rate reported for hosts with an RFC. Everything here is arithmetic applied to sourced inputs, not a measurement of any real property, and the revenue inputs are scraped listings rather than verified bookings.

Four things that table is not. It is not net income: predial, utilities, insurance, repairs, cleaning, furnishing amortisation, platform fees and vacancy are all still to come, and one commission-adjacent publisher puts combined operating costs at 55 to 65 percent of gross. It does not net IVA, because we cannot source whether the revenue figures are inclusive or exclusive of it. It assumes an RFC: at the 20 percent rate reported for hosts without one, the median listing keeps about 4,789 rather than 6,893. And it ignores home-country tax.

The bottom row is the finding. At the bottom quartile the permit alone takes 48 percent of gross. A flat 45,000 peso charge is close to irrelevant to a top-decile listing and close to fatal to a small one. No yield model published in this market shows that, because none of them includes the permit at all.

The same publisher that gives the 20 to 30 percent short-term management band gives 8 to 12 percent for long-term letting. An unfurnished long let also drops the IVA charge, sits outside the lodging tax, and needs no permit. Against measured occupancy estimates running from 29.9 to 44 percent depending on whose scraper you believe, the arithmetic case for short-term letting here is weaker than the marketing.

What your home-country return does with the same money

This page publishes no US or Canadian rate, threshold, form number or deadline, because our research sources none. What we can set out is the shape of the problem, which is where most owners are misled.

The same rent appears on two returns, and relief from taxing it twice runs through a foreign tax credit. That credit does not map cleanly onto the Mexican stack, for four structural reasons.

First, only income taxes are creditable. Of the five layers above, IVA is a consumption tax, the Guanajuato lodging tax is levied on the consideration for lodging rather than on income, and the municipal permit is a land-use fee and not a tax at all. Adding your Mexican outgoings together and calling the sum foreign tax paid will overstate the credit, possibly by most of it.

Second, a withholding on gross is not a tax on net. Mexico may take a share of every peso that arrives. Your home return taxes what remains after management, repairs, insurance, interest and depreciation. Where the gross-basis Mexican tax exceeds the home-country tax on the net, the excess is refunded by neither government. That stranded amount is a recurring cost of the structure and appears in no brokerage projection we have seen.

Third, credits are generally limited to the home-country tax on the same category of income, and rental losses are often restricted at home, so a credit earned in a year of Mexican tax can be unusable in it.

Fourth, currency. Peso receipts have to be converted, and the two available measures are routinely conflated.

Note the direction. The peso was stronger on the spot market in mid-2026 than either annual average, and the 2025 average is weaker than the 2024 average, the opposite of the direction the spot rate moved across the same period. Quoting one measure as if it were the other produces a wrong number, in either direction depending on which way you err.

Whether the tax treaty between Mexico and your country changes any of this is a question we have not researched and will not guess at. It belongs with a cross-border accountant who files in both jurisdictions.

The 2026 enforcement turn

For most of the past decade the honest description of this stack was that almost nobody paid it. The municipality collected 175,442 pesos from the lodging land-use charge in all of 2022, from roughly 243 registered properties in the historic centre, a fraction of what those registrations alone should have produced at the fee then in force. Its 2026 revenue law budgets 3,374,592 pesos as its share of the state lodging tax, covering hotels and platforms together, in a market carrying somewhere between 1,843 and roughly 4,200 listings depending on whose count you use.

What is changing is enforcement, not rates. In approximately the week of 13 July 2026, Guanajuato’s tax administration sent around 5,000 personalised invitation letters to owners letting through digital platforms, asking them to register and pay the 4 percent lodging tax. The director described this first phase as amigable, with no sanctions, and indicated a second phase of fiscal audits is possible for those who do not comply.

The detail that matters most is the period targeted: 2021 and 2022, before the December 2022 reform that moved the withholding obligation onto the platforms. For those years the liability sat with owners directly, with no platform to point at. Any foreign owner letting here in 2021 or 2022 has historical exposure that no platform withholding covers, and the campaign has been reported only in Spanish.

What we could not establish

Naming these is more useful than filling them with plausible numbers.

• The federal income tax rate and article governing rents paid to a non-resident. Verified for the sale of real estate under Article 160; not verified for rents.
• Whether platform withholding is a final tax or a payment on account, and how the regime treats an owner with no RFC.
• How a non-resident owner obtains an RFC. Registration generally requires proof of a Mexican domicile, and we found no statutory or SAT source resolving that circularity.
• Whether a furnished long let constitutes hospedaje for the state tax, or temporary accommodation for the municipal permit. Neither statute sets a threshold.
• Any independent confirmation that Airbnb does not withhold the Guanajuato lodging tax. The claim rests on one tax-vendor guide and the state’s own accusations.
• The peso amounts of the penalties. Article 34 of the state short-term rental law carries no fine schedule and cross-references the tourism law, whose amounts we could not source.
• How many San Miguel properties hold and pay the 45,000 peso permit. The compliance rate is the most decision-relevant regulatory number in this market and nobody publishes it.
• Whether the permit transfers to a buyer on sale. Nothing addresses this anywhere, and if it does not convey, every property marketed as a turnkey rental carries an undisclosed year-one cost.
• Any US or Canadian rate, threshold or filing requirement. We did not research foreign domestic tax law and publish none of it.

The standing position

This is published research, not legal or tax advice. Your notario is the legal authority on your transaction, and a Mexican contador is the authority on your filings. Where this page and either of them differ on your property, they are right and we are general.

We earn no commission on any San Miguel de Allende transaction, take no share of any rental stream, and have no financial interest in whether yours closes or lets. That is the only reason this page can afford to tell you that a flat municipal permit eats nearly half the gross revenue of a bottom-quartile listing, and that the most quoted rate on this subject is one we could not verify.