Residency and Visas for Property Buyers in San Miguel de Allende

Buying a house in San Miguel de Allende does not make you a resident of Mexico. It does not extend your permitted stay by one day. Ownership and immigration status run on separate tracks, and the deed does no work at the border.

The mistake is expensive in a direction people rarely anticipate. Buyers are rarely turned away. They buy the house, stay longer than planned, then discover that legal residency requires an application at a consulate outside Mexico, against a dollar income bar that rose roughly 45 percent at one consulate in three years. Mexico’s visa rules were replaced wholesale on 25 July 2025, when SEGOB and SRE published new Lineamientos Generales para la expedición de visas in the Diario Oficial de la Federación. They entered into force around 9 August 2025 and expressly abrogated the guidelines of 10 October 2014. If a guide you are reading cites the 2014 Lineamientos, it is describing rules that no longer exist.

What you can actually do on a tourist entry

A visitor without permission to carry out paid activities may stay no more than 180 uninterrupted days from the date of entry, under article 52 fraction I of the Ley de Migración. That is a ceiling, not an entitlement. Since INM stopped issuing the paper Forma Migratoria Múltiple to air arrivals, the form is generated digitally at the migration filter, and the officer, not the traveller, sets the number of days: the Lineamientos state that for visitor visa holders the permitted stay is determined by the migration authority at the point of entry. With no paper stub to look at, travellers frequently do not notice they were granted fewer than 180 days. Check what you were given on INM’s public portal.

You can buy property on this status. San Miguel de Allende sits outside the restricted zone that runs 50 kilometres inland from any coastline and 100 kilometres from any land border under article 27 of the Constitution, so a foreign buyer here takes direct title by ordinary deed rather than through a bank trust. Nothing in that transaction requires residency, and nothing in it grants residency.

What you cannot do on a tourist entry is convert to residency from inside the country. Article 53 provides that visitors may not change their condition of stay and must leave at the end of the authorised period, with narrow exceptions for humanitarian grounds and a family link to a Mexican or a foreign resident. The application belongs at a consulate abroad.

The two residency categories

Temporary residency authorises a stay of no more than four years in total, under article 52 fraction VII. It is the category most buyers and remote workers use.

Permanent residency is granted under article 54 on a closed list of grounds: asylum, refugee or stateless status; family unity; retirees or pensioners with sufficient foreign-source income; the points system; four years of held temporary residence; a Mexican-born child; or direct ascendancy or descendancy to the second degree from a Mexican by birth. There is no wealth route and no property route. For most foreign buyers the realistic path is four years of temporary residency, then conversion.

The points system deserves a warning. Article 57 empowers SEGOB to establish one by provisions published in the DOF, and the 2025 Lineamientos list it as a ground while stating the requirements will be set out in an acuerdo yet to be published. We found no evidence that acuerdo exists. As drafted the route is inoperative, and anyone selling a points-based Mexican residency service should be treated with suspicion.

The 2026 thresholds, and why they move every year

Every financial threshold is now expressed as a multiple of the daily UMA, the Unidad de Medida y Actualización. INEGI revalues it annually with effect from 1 February, using the previous December’s inflation reading. For 2026 it is MXN 117.31 per day, MXN 3,566.22 per month and MXN 42,794.64 per year, in force to 31 January 2027 and 3.69 percent above 2025. That peg is the whole story of why the numbers move: under the old minimum-wage basis, rising at roughly 12 to 13 percent a year against inflation under 4, the bar would have climbed much faster. An application filed in January is still measured against the previous year’s UMA.

The peso figures below are arithmetic on the published multiplier and the published UMA. They are not themselves government-published amounts.

Two details are routinely misread. The savings test is an average monthly balance across the whole period, not a snapshot on the day you apply. And the permanent residency financial route is confined by the text to jubilados o pensionados: a retirement route, not a general wealth route.

What the consulate asks for in your own currency

The Lineamientos set the rule in UMA. Each consulate converts it at a rate it chooses and does not publish, which is the single largest source of variation between posts and is unmeasured. We retrieved only one current primary consular sheet; most consulate sites sit behind bot protection.

The San Diego rows are the cleanest evidence of the direction of travel: same consulate, same category, income bar up 44.9 percent and savings bar up 46.5 percent in three years. That reflects both threshold changes and exchange-rate shifts, and the published figures alone do not let you separate the two. The Orlando row is a caution rather than a current figure: its USD 53 fee dates it to 2024, yet it was still live in July 2026. Check the year on the document in front of you.

San Diego’s USD 4,510 implies roughly 17.7 pesos to the dollar against the peso rule; the independent publisher Mexperience’s 2026 conversions imply roughly 18.0. Both sit above the ECB reference rate of about 17.46 on 23 July 2026, so the dollar figures currently ask slightly less than the peso rule converted at market. That reverses whenever the peso strengthens.

For Canadian applicants we have nothing verifiable. Toronto and Vancouver consulate pages were unreachable, and the one Canadian guide we found quotes CAD figures while attributing the income rule to 300 times the daily minimum wage, contradicting the DOF text, and stating a property route of roughly USD 40,000, wrong by more than an order of magnitude. Treat any CAD figure as unconfirmed until you read it on your own consulate’s current sheet.

The property route, stated correctly

Real estate is a genuine standalone qualifying ground for temporary residency under Trámite 5, fracción III, inciso f. The applicant produces a public deed executed before a fedatario público showing title to Mexican real estate valued above 91,710 days of UMA. If the property clears that bar, no income or savings test is applied.

The bar is higher than it was. Before the July 2025 rewrite the route was commonly documented at 40,000 days of UMA. We could not source that prior figure from the 2014 Lineamientos themselves, so treat it as uncertain, but the direction is clear: the property bar roughly doubled.

One structural point in San Miguel’s favour. The text requires an escritura pública establishing that the applicant is titular de bienes inmuebles. Whether a fideicomiso beneficiary interest in the restricted zone satisfies “titular” is nowhere addressed, and we found no official guidance on it. Because San Miguel sits outside the restricted zone, buyers here hold direct title and the ambiguity does not arise, which is a real advantage over a coastal purchase for anyone contemplating this route.

Whether it works in practice we cannot tell you. There is no notario association position and no published INM or SRE criterion on how often consulates accept it, whether the property must be fully paid, whether a mortgaged property counts at gross or net value, or which valuation applies. Ask your consulate before building a plan on it.

The process, and the deadline that catches people out

The 180 days on the visa is the window in which to travel to Mexico and use it, not permission to stay 180 days. The canje deadline runs in calendar days, and missing it voids the visa and sends you back to a consulate abroad. The 15-day INM resolution time is a statutory maximum, not an observed norm; practitioner accounts describe 15 to 20 business days or two to four weeks.

The one-year figure of MXN 11,141 is confirmed by the official Ventanilla Única record. The rest of the ladder comes from a law firm and a news outlet reporting the INM tariff, matched against each other, because INM publishes its own 2026 table only as an image we could not read.

Filings are made in person at the INM office covering your Mexican address. The office serving San Miguel de Allende is listed at Carretera a la Cieneguita Km. 2.4, Comunidad Los López, open Monday to Friday 09:00 to 15:00, with the state’s main office in León. INM posted on 7 January 2026 that the San Miguel office had changed address, so confirm before travelling there.

The remote work question

There is no Mexican digital nomad visa. The 2025 Lineamientos contain thirteen procedures and none is a nomad category. Remote workers apply for ordinary temporary residency on economic solvency grounds.

What the consulates add is a documentary requirement that surprises people. San Diego’s 2026 sheet obliges applicants proving solvency through employment to submit a letter from the employer stating its explicit agreement with the applicant’s plan to reside in Mexico and work remotely. The same wording appears on that consulate’s 2023 Spanish sheet, so the practice predates the rewrite. If your employer does not know you intend to move, this will surface it.

Article 52 fraction VII makes a work permit available only where there is a job offer, so temporary residency by itself carries no general permission to earn income in Mexico. Income earned abroad from a foreign employer is not addressed by the statute at all, which is precisely why consulates handle it through an employer letter rather than a work permit. That silence is not a clearance, and the tax treatment of foreign-source income is a separate question for a contador. We found no legislative initiative or SRE statement in either direction on whether Mexico intends to create a nomad category.

Overstays and the family route

Article 134 fraction I lets a foreigner who entered legally but exceeded the authorised stay apply to regularise, provided it is filed within 60 calendar days of expiry. Article 146 imposes a fine of 20 to 100 days of minimum wage, still expressed in the statute in days of the superseded Distrito Federal minimum wage; in practice INM applies the UMA, and we could not source INM’s current peso figure, so we do not publish one. Article 133 adds a right to regularise from inside Mexico for a narrow group, principally close family of Mexicans and of foreign residents and victims of serious crime, plus a general INM discretion that is not a right and should not be planned around.

The family route is slower than it sounds in any case. Under articles 55 and 56 the spouse or concubine of a Mexican or of a permanent resident gets temporary residency for two years first, and permanent residency only afterwards. An acuerdo dated 13 May 2026 also clarifies that consulates cannot demand requirements beyond those in the applicable legislation.

What is not publicly knowable

Several things a buyer would want to know are not available, and we would rather say so than fill the space.

• Current consular figures outside San Diego. Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, New York, Chicago, Houston and Madrid were unreachable. The spread of USD, CAD and EUR thresholds is unmeasured.
• Any consulate’s official 2026 permanent residency figures in dollars. The DOF multipliers are solid, but no consular sheet we retrieved states a dollar equivalent, and the secondary figures in circulation disagree.
• The exchange rate each consulate applies, and when it resets. No retrievable document states it.
• Whether the real estate route works in practice, how often it is used, and how a property is valued against the 91,710 UMA test.
• Appointment wait times in 2026 by city. Every figure we saw, from two weeks to three months, is unsourced commentary.
• How many days INM officers are actually granting. The claim that entries are routinely shorter than 180 days rests on anecdote. INM publishes no distribution of authorised stay lengths.
• Current residency grants by nationality. The most recent official breakdown covers January to June 2023: 30,229 temporary and 35,575 permanent resident cards nationally, of which 8,437 permanent cards went to recognised refugees, so that total is not a measure of lifestyle migration. There is no 2025 or 2026 count and no Guanajuato breakdown.
• Whether spouses may aggregate income or savings toward one threshold, and whether retirement, brokerage and crypto holdings count. The Lineamientos say only “comprobante de inversiones o cuentas bancarias”.
• Whether the SRE electronic visa system went live within the 180-day window that would have expired around February 2026. The residency categories still require an in-person interview and biometrics regardless.
• Observed INM processing time for the canje in Guanajuato, or specifically at the San Miguel de Allende office.

Our standing note on legal pages

This is published research, not legal or tax advice. What is settled law here, the Ley de Migración articles and the DOF Lineamientos, is cited so you can read it yourself. What is practice, including what a consulate will accept, which exchange rate it applies and how long its queue is, varies by post and changes without notice.

Your consulate is the authority on your visa application, and your notario is the legal authority on your property transaction. Neither role is one we occupy. We earn no commission on any property in San Miguel de Allende and have no financial interest in whether you buy, move, or stay exactly where you are.