Short-Term Rental Yields and Regulation in San Miguel de Allende

$1,066

Median listing, monthly gross

AirROI, Aug 2025 to Jul 2026, read 5 October 2026. Before every cost.

29.4-44%

Annual occupancy, three-source range

No booking-verified dataset exists for this market.

MXN 45,000

Municipal lodging permit, per fiscal year

Ley de Ingresos SMA 2026, Art. 24 fracc. XIV.

16%

IVA on a furnished letting

Ley del IVA, Arts. 1 and 20 fracc. II. Charged to the guest, as is the 4% state lodging tax.

The median short-term rental listing in San Miguel de Allende grossed USD 1,066 a month in the year to July 2026. The top decile grossed USD 5,135 or more. That is a ratio of nearly five to one, and nearly twelve to one against the bottom quartile’s USD 435, and it is the single most important fact about this market, because almost every yield figure quoted to prospective buyers describes the top of that distribution rather than its middle.

Corrected 24 September 2026: earlier versions of this page put the ratio of the top decile to the median at nearly twelve to one. It is nearly five to one; twelve to one is the ratio of the top decile to the bottom quartile.

Corrected 5 October 2026: earlier versions of this page used AirROI’s window to June 2026, in which the median listing grossed $1,096 a month, about $13,152 a year, the top decile $5,242 or more, the bottom quartile $446 and the mean listing $17,033 a year, at 29.9 per cent occupancy across 2,285 listings. Those figures are no longer on the publisher’s page. Every AirROI figure here is now from the page for August 2025 to July 2026, marked updated 12 September 2026 and read on 5 October 2026. Three statements of law were also wrong. The page deducted 16 per cent IVA and the 4 per cent state lodging tax from the host’s revenue; both are charged to the guest on a price that excludes them (Ley del IVA, Art. 1; Ley de Hacienda para el Estado de Guanajuato, Arts. 53 and 54), so the model now shows two readings. It called the MXN 11,248.64 of Article 24 fracción XIII inciso d) a change-of-use charge; that fraction is headed “Por aviso de terminación de obra y autorización de uso y ocupación”, and the change of land use is fracción XII. And it said the withholding rates came from advisory publishers; they are in Articles 113-A and 113-C of the Ley del Impuesto sobre la Renta and Article 18-J of the Ley del IVA, with a 2026 rule in Article 25 fracción IX inciso c) of the Ley de Ingresos de la Federación.

This page publishes the whole distribution, the three-way disagreement about occupancy, the full statutory cost stack, and the arithmetic of running a median listing rather than a fantasy one. Where a number is not publicly knowable, it says so.

What does a San Miguel de Allende Airbnb earn?

AirROI publishes the only quartile breakdown available for this market. The figures below are from its page for August 2025 to July 2026, updated 12 September 2026 and read on 5 October 2026. Annualised figures are simply the monthly figures multiplied by twelve.

The median sits about 23 per cent below the mean. That gap is not noise. It is the arithmetic signature of a market where a professionalised minority captures most of the revenue, and it is why quoting the average annual revenue per listing, USD 16,582, as though it described a typical outcome materially overstates what a new entrant should expect. The same page gives the spread underneath: occupancy of 67 per cent or more in the top decile, 47 or higher in the top quartile, around 27 at the median and 13 in the bottom quartile, at nightly rates of USD 429 or more, 215 or more, around 125 and around 77.

Airbtics, working from a different window of February 2025 to January 2026, reports a median of MXN 309,000. That is far above AirROI’s implied median of roughly USD 12,800 and the two cannot be reconciled from published information. Airbtics’ own page is internally inconsistent on its dollar conversions, so the peso figure is the more defensible one to cite from that source. The same source grades San Miguel in the lowest three per cent nationally for short-term rental yield, with revenue up 5.9 per cent year on year but down 11.5 per cent over three years. That grade is striking and counter-narrative, which is precisely why it deserves scrutiny rather than amplification: Airbtics does not publish the methodology behind it, and yield rankings depend entirely on the property-price denominator chosen.

Every figure above is gross. None of it nets management, tax or the municipal permit, and the source does not say whether it includes the 16 per cent IVA and the 4 per cent lodging tax charged to the guest.

Occupancy: a fourteen-point disagreement

Three scrapers, a spread of more than fourteen points on the number that determines whether a listing is viable. None of them publishes how it treats blocked calendars or dormant listings, which is almost certainly the driver: excluding unavailable nights from the denominator raises apparent occupancy. The honest position is a range of roughly 29 to 44 per cent, not a point estimate.

Corrected 5 October 2026: earlier versions of this page carried a fourth row, for AirDNA: occupancy of about 38 per cent, an average daily rate of $178 and roughly 4,004 to 4,200 listings. That page could not be read (it returned HTTP 403) and the figures came from search-result snippets, not from the source; they are withdrawn, and the page now counts three scrapers. The spread between the lowest and highest occupancy readings is unchanged, because AirDNA sat between them.

One caveat on the table. GuestFavorites publishes revenue tiers in which the median exceeds the upper quartile, which is impossible, so its revenue data is excluded here entirely and its occupancy and listing count appear only as range context.

The state government’s count of 1,843 is not measuring the same thing as the scrapers. It is a count of properties the state can identify and attribute, which is the enforcement gap rather than the market.

AirROI’s internal consistency is worth noting in its favour: it reports RevPAR of USD 63, and 29.4 per cent occupancy against a USD 211 average daily rate gives USD 62.03. The rates themselves also cluster more tightly than the raw table suggests. Converted at the 23 July 2026 reference rate of 17.46 pesos per dollar, GuestFavorites’ MXN 3,680 is about USD 211, the same as AirROI’s USD 211. Airbtics at roughly USD 110 is the outlier, and it is also the source reporting the highest occupancy, which is the opposite corner of the same trade-off.

The benchmark that makes 29 to 44 per cent look normal

SECTUR’s monitored hotel occupancy for San Miguel de Allende was 45.7 per cent in week 9 of 2024, one of the strongest weeks of the year, against a statewide average of 61.8 per cent across twelve monitored destinations. Statewide occupancy in January 2026 was reported at 33 per cent. San Miguel underperforms its own state on hotel occupancy in the data available. Short-term rental occupancy of 29 to 44 per cent is therefore structurally plausible rather than anomalous.

Corrected 5 October 2026: earlier versions of this page cited hotel occupancy rising from 90 to above 98 per cent in Día de Muertos week. Our file holds those figures only from search-result snippets of a press release we could not open, and they are withdrawn.

What decides which tier a listing lands in?

The distribution above is measured. The causes behind it are not, at least not for this market, and the published record thins out sharply here. What follows is what can actually be said about each of the three levers usually named: location, management and season.

Location

The premium on walkability is the most repeated claim in San Miguel property marketing and the least documented. No vendor publishes short-term rental performance by colonia here. AirROI names eight San Miguel neighbourhoods in its free view and keeps the metrics for all eight behind its paid tier.

So the position this page takes is narrow: location is very likely to matter, and nothing published for San Miguel de Allende quantifies how much. Anyone who hands you a per-neighbourhood daily rate or occupancy figure for this city is not reading it off any public source.

Management

Here there is a number. The most concrete published figure is 20 per cent of the rental income stream, from a named San Miguel operator, Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Colonial Homes, which is also a brokerage selling into this market. A commission-adjacent publisher gives a prevailing range of 20 to 30 per cent for short-term rentals against 8 to 12 per cent for long-term, and a narrower 18 to 25 per cent elsewhere on the same site. The 20 per cent floor is corroborated; the 30 per cent ceiling is not.

Model 20 per cent as the floor and treat anything above it as a quote to be checked rather than a market rate. On the median listing, 20 per cent is about USD 2,558 a year, one of the two largest lines in the model below.

Seasonality

AirROI’s current page, for August 2025 to July 2026, says the peak revenue month “is typically March, while June often presents the lowest”. We did not read monthly occupancy, rate or revenue for that window, so none is printed here.

Earlier versions of this page carried a monthly table from the window to June 2026, in which February was the best month and June the worst, and drew from it the conclusion that seasonality here is a matter of occupancy rather than price. Those monthly figures are no longer on the publisher’s page, so the table and the conclusion are withdrawn. GuestFavorites identifies March and April as peak and September and October as low, which now agrees with AirROI on the peak.

No source publishes a month-level average daily rate for the current window. Any December rate quoted to you is either an inference or a misread of the annual market average.

The incumbent base

A 48-day lead time, on AirROI’s page for the year to July 2026, marks San Miguel as a planned-trip destination rather than a spontaneous one, which matters for how quickly a new listing can fill a calendar. The other three rows are as read in July 2026 on the earlier window. Half the listings hold Superhost status. A new entrant is not competing against an amateur field, and should not assume it will reach market-average occupancy in year one.

The cost stack

Three separate layers of public charge apply, and they are frequently conflated with one another.

The IVA line is the one most often left out, including by every published cost stack for this market we could find. Letting a dwelling is exempt from IVA. But Article 20 fracción II of the Ley del IVA withdraws that exemption for property supplied furnished, or destined for or used as a hotel or lodging house, so a furnished short-term let is taxable at the standard 16 per cent however short or long the lease runs. That is a statutory distinction rather than an enforcement position. The tax is charged to the guest on top of the price: Article 1 of the same law says it never forms part of the value it is charged on and obliges the host to pass it on. For a host holding an RFC the platform withholds half of it at source under Article 18-J; the other half remains the host’s own to remit. Where the host has given no RFC the platform withholds all of it, and for 2026 it also withholds all of it where the host is paid into a bank account outside Mexico. Withholding changes who remits the tax, not how much is due.

The rates and the withholding mechanics are in the statute: 4 per cent ISR under Article 113-A of the Ley del Impuesto sobre la Renta, 20 per cent under Article 113-C fracción IV where the host has given no RFC, and the IVA withholding under Article 18-J. One rate sits outside the platform regime. Article 158 of the same law taxes a non-resident’s rental income from Mexican property at 25 per cent of the income obtained, with no deductions, and how a non-resident owner paid through a platform is treated in practice we have not confirmed. How the federal line sits against an owner’s home-country return is covered in rental income tax in Mexico and, for Canadian owners, Canadian taxes on Mexican property.

Management sits on top of all three layers: 20 per cent of the rental income stream, the one rate a named local operator publishes, as set out above.

Can a median listing cover its costs?

Take the median listing, USD 12,792 of scraped annual revenue, an RFC-registered host, management at 20 per cent of the scraped figure, and a property with a fiscal value of MXN 5,000,000 paying predial in January to capture the 15 per cent early-payment discount. Fiscal value is not market value, and the ratio between the two is not published for San Miguel, so read the predial line as an order of magnitude rather than a quote. That 20 per cent is the only management rate in this market published by a named operator; the wider 20 to 30 per cent range is uncorroborated, so the model uses the figure with a publisher’s name on it rather than the midpoint of a range nobody stands behind.

The 16 per cent IVA and the 4 per cent state lodging tax are charged to the guest, on the price before tax. AirROI does not say whether its revenue figures include them. So there are two readings of the same USD 12,792, and neither is offered as the answer.

Reading A: the scraped revenue includes both taxes.

Reading B: the scraped revenue excludes both taxes. The guest pays IVA of USD 2,046.72 and lodging tax of USD 511.68 on top of the price, and neither passes through the host’s revenue.

That remainder, USD 4,291 on the first reading and USD 6,338 on the second, 33.5 and 49.5 per cent of the scraped figure, has not yet paid for electricity, gas, water, internet, cleaning consumables, linen, civil liability insurance, repairs, furniture replacement, accounting, or any period the owner uses the property personally. It also assumes full compliance with a permit most operators do not hold.

Four limits sit on the arithmetic. The basis of the management fee is not published; charged on the price before tax in Reading A it would be USD 2,132.00, and the remainder USD 426.40 higher. The IVA a host pays on the management fee is creditable against the IVA collected from the guest, and is left out of both readings. The 4 per cent is the withholding for a host registered with an RFC; without one the platform withholds 20 per cent, which would leave about USD 2,586 or USD 4,291. And a non-resident’s rental income is taxed at 25 per cent of gross under Article 158, which would leave about USD 2,053 or USD 3,652; how a non-resident owner paid through a platform is treated in practice we have not confirmed.

The model is worth cross-checking against the only sourced attempt at a full cost stack. A commission-adjacent publisher puts combined operating costs at 55 to 65 per cent of gross, which would leave USD 4,477 to USD 5,756 on the same revenue. It shows no workings and appears not to deduct the municipal permit. The itemised lines above leave a remainder in or around that band while excluding utilities, cleaning and insurance entirely, so the statutory and management stack alone uses up the published allowance before a single operating expense is added.

The same source puts break-even occupancy at roughly 25 to 30 per cent, a band that contains AirROI’s measured 29.4 per cent. Read that as a hypothesis rather than a finding. It rests on an undisclosed methodology, and it comes from the publisher whose cost stack appears to omit the municipal permit, which would put the true break-even above the range it gives. It does nonetheless align with the independent assessment placing this market in the lowest three per cent nationally for yield.

The permit is regressive

Because the MXN 45,000 charge is flat rather than proportional, it lands very unevenly.

A compliant bottom-quartile listing hands nearly half its gross revenue to the municipality before it pays anyone to clean it. Run the whole stack across that tier and the position is worse than regressive. Holding the cost structure constant, the remainder is 0.60 of the scraped figure less USD 3,383.97 of permit and predial on Reading A, and 0.76 of it less the same amount on Reading B. On USD 5,220 that is a loss of USD 252 on the first reading and USD 583 left on the second, before a peso of maintenance. This is the mechanism by which the fee, whatever its intent, pushes the small and occasional operator either out of the market or into non-compliance.

Why this page publishes no net yield percentage

A yield needs a denominator, and there is no defensible one. The closed-sale prices published are citywide figures from brokerages reading the local MLS, a $480K median for the first half of 2026 and a $568,829 average for 2025, covering every kind of home in every colonia rather than the properties that let; there is no public registry of sales. Published net yield figures for this market all come from commission-adjacent sources with undisclosed methodology, and at least one of them appears not to deduct the municipal permit.

Corrected 24 September 2026: earlier versions of this page said every San Miguel transaction figure traced to a single brokerage. Other brokerages publish closed-sale figures from the same MLS, including a median public since 14 April 2026 (Rafael Mora Real Estate, Q1 2026: $480K). The argument about the denominator is unchanged.

What can be said is arithmetic. For the USD 4,291 or USD 6,338 above to represent a four per cent net return, the property would have to have cost about USD 107,300 or USD 158,400. Readers can substitute their own acquisition price and draw their own conclusion.

The regulatory position

Guanajuato has had a dedicated short-term rental statute since December 2020, the Ley de Hospedaje a través de Plataformas Digitales. Its substantive obligations are lighter than commonly assumed.

Hosts must register in the Registro de Prestación de Servicios de Hospedaje, held within the state tourism registry. Registration is free and done through online forms. Hosts must carry civil liability insurance covering the lodging risk whenever a reservation is active, and the statute permits that cover to be provided through the platform without naming any platform or setting a minimum amount. Hosts must hold an internal regulation, and where the unit sits within a condominium regime they must also exhibit the condominium’s governing instrument. That provision requires disclosure of condominium rules. It does not authorise short-term rental use, and it does not prohibit it. Whether a given building permits it is governed by its own escritura and reglamento, which are private documents.

Separately, under the state tax law, lodging providers must register with the state contributor registry within ten business days of starting operations, and file definitive monthly returns by the 22nd of the following month, including nil returns, until they formally deregister.

The statute carries no fine schedule of its own. Article 34 cross-references the state Tourism Law and its regulations for sanctions.

The clause that matters most

Platforms have been the statutory withholding agents for the 4 per cent lodging tax since a reform published on 30 December 2022. But Article 57 relieves the host of calculating and remitting only on the base collected through the platform, and only when the platform actually makes the payment. The relief is conditional, not automatic.

A June 2026 tax guide states that Guanajuato is not among the states where Airbnb handles lodging tax retention and direct payment. In July 2026 the state’s subsecretary of finance publicly asserted that platforms have not complied for three and a half years, that Airbnb refuses 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.

The practical consequence for a host is unambiguous even though the dispute is not. If the platform is not remitting, the conditional relief does not apply, and the 4 per cent is the host’s own liability. Income from direct bookings never had the relief in the first place.

Enforcement as it actually stands

The 2022 collection figure is the single best evidence that municipal enforcement has historically been weak, and it describes a calendar year that ended more than three and a half years ago. Nothing more recent is public.

The SATEG campaign is the live development, and its scope is narrower than the headlines suggest: it targets the 2021 to 2022 period, before liability shifted to platforms in December 2022. It is reported by one outlet and has not been independently confirmed.

Direction of travel

The escalation narrative is weaker than it sounds. The municipal fee went from MXN 10,000 in 2022 to MXN 45,000 in 2023, an increase of more than 300 per cent, and has not moved since. It was not increased for 2026. Guanajuato’s 4 per cent lodging tax survived the November 2025 reform of the state finance law unchanged, and sits mid-table nationally: the lowest states charge 2 per cent, the highest 5 to 6 per cent.

Pressure is coming from two directions instead. The first is collection rather than rates, visible in the SATEG campaign and the public dispute with Airbnb. The state originally projected MXN 30 to 40 million a year from taxing digital platforms when the law passed in 2020. It says that has substantially not materialised.

The second is the hotel lobby, which is an interested party and should be read as one. The president of the San Miguel hotel and motel association has said the state law “nació muerta porque no hay reglamento” and is therefore useless. He also estimates that Airbnb supply is comparable to the city’s roughly 3,500 hotel rooms, which is a judgement rather than a count from a direct commercial competitor. The underlying legal claim is independently plausible, however: the 2020 law required an implementing regulation within 120 days, and no evidence that one was ever published could be found.

An investor underwriting on rental income should model the fee as a recurring annual cost, assume the 4 per cent is their own liability until a platform statement says otherwise, and treat collection intensity, not rate changes, as the variable most likely to move.

What nobody publishes

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

• The compliance rate. No 2026 municipal count of how many properties actually hold and pay the MXN 45,000 permit. Arguably the most important regulatory number for an investor, and it does not exist publicly.
• The fine schedule. The state statute cross-references the Tourism Law for penalties. The peso amounts, and the specific penalty for operating without the municipal permit, could not be sourced.
• Whether the implementing regulation exists. The 2020 law required one within 120 days. The hotel association says it does not exist. No official source confirms either way. This is an absence of evidence, not evidence of absence.
• Any booking-verified data. Every revenue, occupancy and rate figure here comes from listing scrapers or commission-adjacent publishers. There is no AMPI, MLS, or notario-association dataset for short-term rentals in this market, and no public transaction registry for the property prices that would form a yield denominator.
• Occupancy by revenue tier. The distribution is published for revenue only. Any claim that the top decile achieves a specific occupancy rate is not sourced to a published dataset.
• Breakdown by bedroom count, property type, or neighbourhood. Airbtics gates its bedroom-count figures behind a paid dashboard. No neighbourhood-level short-term rental data is published for San Miguel.
• Whole-home versus private-room split. Unknown, which materially affects how the revenue distribution should be read.
• Verified net yield after the full cost stack. Nothing published sets out management, federal withholding, the municipal permit, predial and the treatment of the taxes charged to the guest together with a disclosed method.
• Whether the IVA is enforced against individual hosts. That a furnished letting bears 16 per cent is statutory and not in doubt. Whether SAT actually pursues it against individual owners, most of them foreign, is undocumented: no collection figure, audit count or compliance rate for it has been published for San Miguel or for Guanajuato. Statutory liability and collected tax are different quantities, and only the first of them is knowable here.
• Whether scraped revenue is quoted before or after IVA and the lodging tax. None of the three sources states it, which is why the model above carries two readings. The difference between them is USD 2,046.72 at the median. Nothing published settles which is right, and the whole net figure turns on it.
• Condominium-level restrictions. Governed by private escrituras and reglamentos. No survey of San Miguel condominium regimes exists.
• A 2026 hotel occupancy figure for San Miguel. The most recent official monitored figure is week 9 of 2024. OTEG’s monthly report downloads return a JavaScript shell rather than the document.
• Any Airbnb response to Guanajuato’s July 2026 allegations, and any independent confirmation that the platform does not withhold in this state.

All conversions on this page use 17.46 MXN per USD, the ECB reference rate for 23 July 2026. Annual average exchange rates are a different measure and are not used here. Past performance does not indicate future returns.