San Miguel de Allende Against Five Other Mexican Markets

8.44%

Guanajuato house-price appreciation, Q1 2026

Below the 8.74% national figure. A state index built from mortgage appraisals, not a San Miguel number.

Level 3

US advisory, Guanajuato

The highest rating of the six comparator states, tied with Jalisco. Yucatan is Level 1.

No fideicomiso

San Miguel title structure

The municipality of Allende is named on INEGI's 1997 list of municipalities wholly outside the restricted zone.

29.9%

San Miguel short-term rental occupancy

Second lowest of the six, at the Mexican national average of 30.0%, on the second highest nightly rate.

San Miguel de Allende is compared with the same five markets over and over: Mérida, Oaxaca City, Puerto Vallarta, Lake Chapala and Ajijic, and Tulum. Almost every published comparison is written by somebody who earns a commission in one of them, and almost all of them assemble figures from six different measurement systems and set them side by side as if they were the same thing.

Two datasets cover all six markets on a single consistent methodology. Mexico’s federal SHF house-price index, a government primary source, publishes appreciation at state level and for selected municipalities as of Q1 2026. AirROI publishes short-term rental performance for each of the six on a trailing twelve months to June 2026. Everything else, prices in particular, is uneven and in one case entirely absent.

The table below reports what those two datasets say, plus title status, advisory level, climate, population and airport access. Where nothing is published, the cell says so.

The comparison

All dollar figures are US dollars. Short-term rental figures are AirROI’s trailing twelve months to June 2026. Appreciation figures are SHF, Q1 2026, annual. Advisory levels are from the US State Department advisory issued 29 May 2026.

The row that stays empty

Gross rental yield is the number most buyers want and the number nobody publishes. It cannot be responsibly built from what exists.

The revenue side of the fraction averages across every active listing in a market, including part-time and badly run ones. The price side is a different universe in every market: closed MLS averages in San Miguel, undisclosed-source averages in Puerto Vallarta, aggregator medians in Mérida and Ajijic, and asking prices in Tulum. Dividing $17,033 by a San Miguel median would produce a figure accurate to four significant digits and wrong in ways the reader could not see.

The components are in the table instead. A reader who wants a yield can divide, knowing exactly which two numbers were divided and how badly matched they are. That is a different act from being handed one.

Two further gaps sit behind that one. Nothing usable exists on net yields after management fees, the 16 per cent IVA a furnished letting bears under Article 20 fracción II of the Ley del Impuesto al Valor Agregado, Mexican income tax on rental income, state lodging taxes, acquisition tax, trust fees, HOA and maintenance, in any of the six markets. And nothing at all is published on short-term rental regulation by market: registration requirements, caps, lodging taxes and pending restrictions are all material to forward income and none of it is sourced here.

Title is the one row that is structural

Every other row in the table is a matter of degree. This one is binary, and it separates the six markets into two groups.

Article 27 fracción I of the Mexican Constitution bars foreigners from direct ownership within 100 km of a border and 50 km of a beach. That provision was last amended on 20 January 1960 and has stood unchanged for 66 years. Article 2 of the Foreign Investment Law repeats the definition; Article 11 sets out the mechanism inside the zone, a fideicomiso held by a Mexican bank under a permit from the Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, with the foreigner as beneficiary rather than titleholder. Article 13 caps the trust term at 50 years, renewable at the beneficiary’s request with no stated limit on renewals.

Puerto Vallarta and Tulum are unambiguously coastal. Mérida is the one people get wrong. It sits roughly 35 km inland from the Gulf, which is inside the 50 km strip, and an independent Yucatán legal commentary states plainly that all of Mérida is within the zone. Brokerage and relocation pages that describe Mérida as “technically just outside” are giving a buyer a false picture of what they will sign.

San Miguel de Allende’s position is the best documented of the six. INEGI published a list in the Diario Oficial de la Federación on 21 May 1997 naming municipalities “totally located outside the restricted zone,” and the municipality of Allende, Guanajuato, appears on it. That is a primary source naming the municipality. Oaxaca City and Chapala are almost certainly also outside, on the same geographic logic, but no notario, SRE or municipal confirmation naming them was located. That distinction is worth keeping.

What it costs, in the two directions:

Two cautions on that table. The MXN 21,648.83 permit fee is anomalous: the sibling fee lines in the same law rose about 8.5 per cent while that one rose about 64 per cent, and the discrepancy could not be reconciled against the official fee annex. And every dollar figure in circulation for trustee fees traces back to brokerages. No Mexican bank publishes its own fideicomiso tariff in a form that could be retrieved.

Where San Miguel loses

Four rows, plainly.

Appreciation. Guanajuato recorded 8.44 per cent in the year to Q1 2026, below the 8.74 per cent national figure. Of the five distinct states in this comparison, only Oaxaca appreciated more slowly. Quintana Roo led all 32 federal entities at 13.42 per cent and Jalisco was second at 12.56 per cent. Claims that San Miguel is outpacing the Mexican market are not supported by the only government index that measures it. The counterweight is real but cuts both ways: the SHF index is built from appraisals tied to mortgage lending, so it systematically under-represents the cash dollar purchases that define San Miguel’s foreign-buyer segment. It is not a San Miguel number. It is also the only comparable number there is.

Advisory level. Guanajuato carries Level 3, Reconsider Travel, one of seven states at that level alongside Jalisco. Yucatán is Level 1, the strongest single differentiator Mérida has. San Miguel is not named in the current advisory at all, and it lies north of Federal Highway 45D, the line the advisory draws around Celaya, Salamanca and Irapuato. It is also absent from the UK FCDO’s list of 20 named Guanajuato municipalities. None of that makes it separate from the state. Guanajuato logged 789 intentional homicides in the first half of 2026, the highest state total in Mexico, and San Miguel de Allende recorded 88 homicides over the twelve months to August 2025, a rate of 49.3 per 100,000 that placed it fiftieth among Mexican municipalities. In February 2026, cartel reprisal violence reached roughly 23 Guanajuato municipalities including San Miguel.

Airport access. The weakest of the six. No commercial airport in the municipality; Bajío International handled 3.31 million passengers in 2025 and sits about 1.5 hours away by road, with Querétaro a similar drive. Ajijic, marketed as the sleepier option, has Mexico’s second-busiest airport half an hour away.

Occupancy and inventory. San Miguel’s 29.9 per cent rental occupancy sits at the Mexican national average of 30.0 per cent and second-lowest of the six. On the sales side, active listings rose from 593 in May 2025 to 860 in May 2026, a 45 per cent increase, while closings ran essentially flat at 197 through May against 190 a year earlier. Average price per home fell 12.5 per cent between 2024 and 2025, from $650,462 to $568,829, even as unit volume rose. That is a mix shift rather than a proven price decline, but the inventory figure is not ambiguous.

Mérida

Choose Mérida for the advisory level, the entry price and the appreciation. Yucatán is one of only two Level 1 states in Mexico. Mérida municipality is the sole city in this comparison with a government-sourced appreciation figure, 10.41 per cent, and it sits above the national average. Prices, on the best estimates available, are roughly half San Miguel’s.

Against that: the rental market is the weakest of the six on revenue and RevPAR, earning $9,254 a year at an $89 nightly rate, and supply is growing faster than anywhere else in the set at 22.7 per cent. It is also inside the restricted zone, which means a fideicomiso, an annual trustee fee, and a bank between the buyer and the title. And the mean annual temperature is 26.7°C against San Miguel’s 18.2°C, a difference of 8.5 degrees that no comparison table can convey and that decides the question for a large number of people.

Oaxaca City

Choose Oaxaca City if rental income matters more than capital appreciation and the buyer is comfortable operating on thin data.

It is the only one of the six with positive year-on-year rental revenue, up 6.5 per cent, and it achieved that with flat supply while four of the other five markets fell. Oaxaca state also posted the lowest appreciation of the six, at 7.06 per cent. Demand for nights is outrunning demand for deeds, which is the exact inverse of Tulum.

The problem is that no credible price source for Oaxaca City could be found at all. Not closed sales, not asking prices, not price per square metre. A buyer can see what a property earns and cannot see what comparable properties sold for. That is a real constraint on underwriting, and it should be stated rather than papered over with a plausible-looking range.

Puerto Vallarta

Choose Puerto Vallarta for rental performance. It leads the six on revenue at $22,166, on RevPAR at $87, and on nightly rate at $224, and it is the only market combining top-quartile rate with top-quartile occupancy.

Then read the demand data. Sales volume fell from 155 properties in May 2025 to 85 in May 2026, a 45 per cent decline. Average days on market ran 265. Airport traffic fell 18.7 per cent year on year in June 2026, corroborated by the listed airport operator itself. Rental revenue was down 7.7 per cent. Four independent indicators pointing the same direction is not noise.

The tension with Jalisco’s 12.56 per cent state appreciation is the most instructive thing in this dataset. A state index dominated by domestic mortgage-financed housing rose sharply while the dollar-denominated resort segment contracted. The two have decoupled, and anyone quoting the state figure as evidence about Puerto Vallarta condominiums is quoting the wrong market.

Lake Chapala and Ajijic

Choose Ajijic for climate stability and airport access. A year-round average near 19°C and 793 mm of rain is the mildest profile of the six, and Guadalajara International at 18.77 million passengers is 30 minutes away, an advantage rarely credited in Chapala marketing.

Two limitations. The price data is the weakest of the six markets: no MLS, AMPI or notario-based series was located, and the ranges available come from an aggregator with no stated methodology. And the rental market is tiny, 348 active listings against Tulum’s 8,386. That makes the averages statistically noisy and, more importantly, makes the resale market illiquid. Ajijic does not appear in AirROI’s ranking of the top 100 Mexican markets.

Ajijic also sits in Jalisco and therefore carries the same Level 3 advisory as Puerto Vallarta, despite the two being marketed as opposite kinds of place.

Tulum

The data does not support Tulum on rental economics. Revenue fell 15.9 per cent while supply grew 16.4 per cent, from the largest listing base of the six. Occupancy is the lowest at 29.4 per cent. That combination is the standard signature of oversupply, and it corroborates the widely reported condominium glut from an independent direction.

Quintana Roo’s 13.42 per cent state appreciation, the highest in Mexico, is the figure most often quoted about Tulum. Tulum is not in the SHF municipal series. The nearest municipal readings are Solidaridad at 13.55 per cent and Benito Juárez at 13.31 per cent, both driven by Cancún and Playa del Carmen mass-market housing. Presenting any of those three as Tulum appreciation is a category error.

Tulum’s own airport, opened in December 2023, carried about 1.23 million passengers in 2025 against a design capacity of 5.5 million, roughly 22 per cent utilisation, with ten airlines serving 28 destinations as of July 2026. Cancún, at two hours by road, remains the main gateway.

What San Miguel actually wins on

Title, without qualification: primary-source documentation that the municipality sits outside the restricted zone, direct fee-simple ownership, a single federal filing at MXN 5,252.02, and no bank, no trust and no annual trustee fee for the life of the holding.

Nightly rate: $210, second only to Puerto Vallarta, and $121 above Mérida. San Miguel’s rental problem is not what it can charge. It is how many nights it fills.

Climate: the coolest, driest and highest of the six, at 1,900 metres, a mean of 18.2°C and 632 mm of rain. No hurricane exposure and no sargassum.

Rental revenue trend: −4.0 per cent is the second-mildest decline in a set where only Oaxaca grew.

Method, and what this page does not know

Every San Miguel transaction figure here, and every San Miguel transaction figure anywhere, traces to one brokerage’s own view of the local MLS. There is no public transaction registry for the city. The data is used because it is the best that exists and because that brokerage has reported figures against its own commercial interest, notably the 45 per cent inventory increase. It is not an independent census of sales.

Appreciation figures are state-level except for Mérida. Only Mérida appears in SHF’s selected-municipality series, so five of the six cities have no government-sourced city-level appreciation figure at all. No index of the dollar-denominated foreign-buyer segment appears to exist in any Mexican market, which means the transactions this audience actually makes are measured nowhere.

Foreign-resident counts are not knowable at municipal level from published sources. Mexico’s 2020 census recorded 1,212,252 foreign-born residents nationally, a figure that includes a large share of US-born children of returning Mexican migrants rather than retirees. For San Miguel the census count is 4,312, or 2.5 per cent of a municipal population of 174,615, while estimates in circulation run from 10,000 to 25,000. Nobody has published a defensible current number, and INM residency-card data by municipality, which would settle it, is not published.

Advisory levels for Yucatán, Oaxaca and Quintana Roo come from secondary reporting of the 29 May 2026 advisory, not from the primary text. The overall Level 2 rating, Guanajuato’s Level 3 and the seven-state Level 3 list were read from the State Department page directly. Two secondary outlets reporting on the same advisory contradict each other on which states are Level 4, which is reason enough to treat all secondary advisory reporting with suspicion.

Currency figures cut two ways and are frequently conflated. The peso strengthened across 2025 on a spot basis to close the year near 18.00 MXN per USD, and stood at 17.46 on 23 July 2026 on the ECB reference rate. Annual averages are a different measure entirely: the IRS yearly average was 18.330 for 2024 and 19.212 for 2025. The SHF index is peso-denominated, the rental figures are dollar-denominated, and comparing appreciation in one currency against income in another without saying so is how misleading comparisons get built.