The Short-Term Rental Permit in San Miguel de Allende

San Miguel de Allende charges 45,000 pesos a year for the right to let a property to visitors. The figure is not a rumour, an estimate or an agent’s recollection. It sits in Article 24 fraction XIV of the municipality’s revenue law for 2026, published in the Periódico Oficial on 30 December 2025, and it has stood at that level since 2023.

At the time of writing we could find no English-language page that states it. The pages that rank for questions about Airbnb rules in this city are short-term rental data dashboards, one of which classifies San Miguel as a low-regulation market with no licensed listings, and brokerage FAQ answers, some of which still quote the superseded 10,000 peso figure. The reason for the silence is not mysterious. A 45,000 peso annual charge changes the arithmetic on every property sold as a rental investment, and the sites answering the question earn their income when the property sells.

This page sets out the statutory position at all three levels of government, then says plainly how much of it is enforced, how much of it is documented, and how much of it nobody knows.

The municipal permit, in the statute’s own words

Article 24 fraction XIV of the Ley de Ingresos para el Municipio de San Miguel de Allende for fiscal year 2026 reads:

Por permiso de uso de suelo específico, que otorgará la unidad administrativa municipal en materia de desarrollo urbano competente, cuando los inmuebles se destinen a la prestación de servicios de hospedaje o alojamiento temporal, la cuota correspondiente al importe será por ejercicio fiscal de $45,000.00.

In English: a specific land-use permit, granted by the competent municipal urban development office, where properties are destined to the provision of lodging or temporary accommodation services, at a charge of 45,000 pesos per fiscal year.

Three words in that text carry most of the weight. Específico marks it as a permission attaching to a defined use rather than a general zoning classification. Hospedaje o alojamiento temporal is a use category, not a platform, so nothing turns on whether the booking arrives through Airbnb, Vrbo, a rental agency or the owner’s own website. And por ejercicio fiscal makes it recurring. It is not a licence you buy once.

A second, separate charge sits one fraction above it.

The change-of-use authorisation covers hotels, hostels, motels, buildings, ranches, apartments and houses let in whole or in part. Press coverage routinely conflates the two charges. An owner converting a residential property to lodging use faces both in year one, about 3,221 dollars, and the 45,000 pesos alone in every year after.

One correction. Reporting on 19 July 2026 described the municipal fee as 40,000 pesos. The published statute says 45,000. Where a newspaper and a revenue law disagree about the contents of the revenue law, the revenue law governs.

The fee history, and why the escalation story is weaker than it sounds

The 2023 increase was proposed by then-mayor Mauricio Trejo and justified on two grounds: levelling competitive conditions with hotels, and enabling Protección Civil inspections. It has not risen since. It was not increased for 2026.

That matters for anyone modelling regulatory risk. The narrative of a municipality steadily tightening the screws on short-term rentals is not what the statutory record shows. The screw was turned once, hard, four years ago, and has not moved. What has changed since is the intensity of collection, which is a different variable and is discussed below.

One further caution. The Ley de Ingresos is enacted annually and published at the end of the preceding December. The 2027 charge is not knowable today. Anyone underwriting a purchase on a ten-year hold should treat the 45,000 as the current figure rather than a fixed one.

What the process involves, and what is not documented

Here the honest answer is unflattering to everyone.

The statute fixes the price and names the office. It does not set out a procedure. We could not locate a published municipal application form, documentary checklist, inspection protocol or statutory processing time for the lodging land-use permit. The stated justification for the 2023 increase implies an inspection function, but no published procedure we could find establishes whether, when or how a Protección Civil inspection takes place, or what happens if it fails. Timelines quoted online are unsourced.

What is documented is the state layer, and it is documented well, because it lives in two statutes anybody can read.

Registration under the 2020 lodging law costs nothing. That is worth stating, because the free state registry and the 45,000 peso municipal permit are constantly discussed as if they were the same requirement. They are two different obligations to two different governments, and holding one does not satisfy the other.

The state lodging tax and the platform-withholding question

Guanajuato levies an Impuesto por Servicios de Hospedaje at 4 per cent of the consideration for lodging, applicable to houses and apartments let in whole or in part. The base excludes food, other related services and IVA. The rate is in Article 55 of the Ley de Hacienda para el Estado de Guanajuato, was set by a reform of 24 December 2020, and survived the November 2025 reform of that law unchanged. A claim circulating in search summaries that the rate is now fixed annually by the state revenue law is wrong; we checked the consolidated text and Article 55 still reads la tasa del 4 por ciento.

Against other states, that is mid-table.

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

Now the clause that decides who actually pays it. A reform published on 30 December 2022 made digital platforms the statutory withholding agents, obliged to determine, withhold and remit the tax monthly. But Article 57 relieves the host of calculating and remitting only on the base collected through the platform, and only cuando éstos realicen el entero correspondiente, when the platform actually makes the payment. The relief is conditional on performance, not on the platform’s designation.

That condition is not academic. A June 2026 tax guide lists Guanajuato as one of the states where Airbnb does not handle lodging tax retention and direct payment, leaving hosts to manage it themselves. In July 2026 the state’s subsecretary of finance and investment publicly asserted that platforms have not complied for three and a half years, that Airbnb declines to let the state review its calculations, has no registered fiscal domicile in Guanajuato, and refuses to share host identity data. Airbnb has published no response on the record, and the reporting comes from a single outlet, so this is one side of a live dispute.

The practical consequence is nonetheless unambiguous. If the platform is not remitting, the conditional relief does not apply and the 4 per cent is the host’s own liability. Nights booked directly, outside any platform, never had the relief at all.

Two federal layers sit above the state one. Furnished lettings and lodging use are expressly excluded from the residential rental IVA exemption by Article 20 fraction II of the IVA law, so they are taxable at 16 per cent regardless of how long the tenancy runs. That is a statutory distinction rather than an enforcement position. Separately, the digital platforms regime provides for withholding of income tax and IVA on host earnings, at 4 per cent income tax for lodging services where the host holds an RFC, with penalised rates where they do not. Those withholding figures come from Mexican tax advisory publishers rather than from the statute text, and should be verified against the law before anyone relies on them.

Enforcement, honestly

No compliance rate is published, for any year. Not by the municipality, not by the state, not by any association. The single most decision-relevant regulatory number in this market does not exist in the public record, and any page that quotes one has manufactured it.

What does exist is a scatter of datapoints that do not reconcile.

Read together, those numbers support one conclusion and refuse to support another. They support the conclusion that compliance has been poor: 175,442 pesos collected in a full year from a city with thousands of active listings is not the signature of a functioning permit regime, and the state’s own count of attributable properties sits below every scraper’s count of listings. They do not support any statement of what proportion of operators complies today. The hardest collection figure available describes calendar 2022 and nothing more recent has been published.

Two structural points make the gap easier to understand.

The first is that no peso-denominated fine schedule exists in the short-term rental statute itself. Article 34 sanctions infractions in accordance with the state Tourism Law and its regulations. We could not source the sanction amounts in that instrument, nor any specific penalty for operating without the municipal land-use permit. A rule with no visible price on breaching it behaves differently from one with a published fine.

The second is the missing implementing regulation. Transitorio Segundo of the 2020 lodging law required the executive to issue a reglamento within 120 days. We found no evidence that one was ever published, and the consolidated text of the law carries no amendment markers at all, suggesting it has stood untouched since 2020. The president of the San Miguel hotel and motel association puts it bluntly, saying the law was born dead because there is no regulation and is therefore useless. He is a direct commercial competitor to short-term rentals and has lobbied for heavier taxation of them, so read the quote as advocacy. The underlying legal point stands independently of who is making it, and this is an absence of evidence rather than proof that no regulation exists.

The permit against what a listing earns

The charge is flat, which makes it regressive. AirROI’s distribution for the year to June 2026 puts the median San Miguel listing at 1,096 dollars a month gross, about 13,152 a year, and the bottom quartile at 446 a month, about 5,352 a year.

A compliant bottom-quartile listing hands nearly half its gross revenue to the municipality before it pays anyone to clean it. Whatever the intent of a flat fee, its effect is to push the small and occasional operator out of the market or into non-compliance. The full gross-to-net arithmetic, including management, taxes and predial, is set out on our short-term rental yields page.

Condominiums write their own rule

Article 17 of the state law is the only condominium provision in it, and it is narrower than it looks. It requires a host to hold an internal regulation and, for units under condominium property law, to also exhibit the condominium’s governing instrument establishing the rules of coexistence. That is a disclosure requirement. It does not authorise short-term letting in a condominium and it does not prohibit it.

Whether your building allows it is decided by its escritura constitutiva and its reglamento. Those are private instruments. They are not published, no register makes them searchable, and no survey of San Miguel de Allende condominium regimes exists. A restriction in the escritura binds you regardless of what permits you hold from the municipality or the state, and a permit does not override it.

The practical step is simple and is skipped constantly. Ask for the escritura constitutiva and the current reglamento, in full, before you are under contract, and have your notario read the use clauses. A property marketed as an income producer inside a building whose deed prohibits commercial lodging is not an income producer.

Does the permit transfer when you sell?

We do not know, and neither does anybody else who has published on it.

We looked for a provision in the municipal revenue law, a municipal rule, an administrative criterion, or any published account of practice on whether the specific land-use permit conveys with the property, lapses on transfer, or must be applied for afresh by a new owner. We found nothing, in either language. This is the emptiest space in the entire subject, and it sits directly under a marketing claim made constantly in this market: that a house comes turnkey as a short-term rental.

The stakes are asymmetric. If the permit runs with the land, a buyer inherits an operating permission and the seller’s compliance record has value. If it does not, then every property sold as a functioning rental carries an undisclosed cost, at minimum the 11,248.64 peso change-of-use authorisation and the 45,000 peso annual permit, and at worst a fresh application whose outcome, timeline and criteria are not documented anywhere.

Neither reading can be supported from published material. The statutory language grants the permit cuando los inmuebles se destinen to lodging, which describes the property’s use rather than its owner, but reading a transfer rule out of that phrasing would be an inference, and we do not publish inferences as findings.

What we would do instead is put the question in writing to the municipal urban development office before closing, ask the seller to produce the current permit and the receipt evidencing payment for the fiscal year, and instruct the notario to confirm the position in the same way they confirm liens and predial. A question no authority has answered publicly is a risk, and a risk with no published answer belongs in the price.

What is not publicly knowable

These are holes in the public record, not omissions from this page.

• The compliance rate. No municipal count of how many San Miguel properties hold and pay the 45,000 peso permit exists for 2026, or for any year since 2022.
• The fine schedule. No peso amounts for breaching the state short-term rental law, and no specific penalty for operating without the municipal permit.
• The implementing regulation. No evidence that the reglamento required within 120 days of the 2020 law was ever issued, and no official confirmation either way.
• The permit process. No published application form, documentary checklist, inspection protocol or processing time from the municipality.
• Whether the permit transfers on sale. Addressed nowhere, by anyone.
• Condominium restrictions. Governed by private escrituras and reglamentos. No survey of San Miguel condominium regimes exists.
• Whether Airbnb withholds in Guanajuato. The claim that it does not rests on one tax-vendor guide and the state’s own accusations. Airbnb has published nothing on the record, and no independent confirmation could be obtained.

Our standing note on legal pages

This is published research, not legal or tax advice. Everything above that is settled law is cited to the statute, article and publication date so that it can be read directly. Everything we could not establish is named as unknown rather than filled in with an estimate.

Your notario is the legal authority on your transaction, including on what permissions attach to a property you are buying and what does not convey with it. Where this page and your notario differ on your specific property, your notario is right and we are general. For the tax layer, a Mexican accountant who files monthly lodging tax returns in Guanajuato will know more about current practice than any published source, including this one.

We earn no commission on any property in San Miguel de Allende, take no fee from any rental manager, and have no financial interest in whether a purchase closes, whether it is let, or whether it is let legally.

All peso conversions on this page use 17.46 pesos per US dollar, the European Central Bank reference rate for 23 July 2026. Annual average exchange rates are a different measure and are not used here.