A furnished apartment and an empty one are two different tax bills in Tulum

Rental income tax in Mexico is levied on a foreign owner at one of two very different rates, and which one applies has nothing to do with how many days the owner spends in the country.

A Mexican tax resident who rents out a property pays on net income, after deductions, on the same progressive personal schedule as any other resident. A non-resident pays 25 percent of the gross rent, with no deductions. The first can write off the property tax, the water bill, and the mortgage interest. The second writes off nothing.

That gap matters more in Tulum this year than it has before. The Sistema de Informacion Turistica del Estado, the state tourism data system run by Quintana Roo's tourism secretariat, counted 4,162 active vacation rental units in the municipality as of September 4. Occupancy in Tulum stood at 46 percent, below Playa del Carmen at 57 and Cancun at 55. Revenue is thinner and paperwork heavier because the state added three new lodging tax requirements for 2026.

Mexico has no 183-day rule

The single most common error in expat-facing guidance is the claim that spending 183 days in Mexico makes a person a Mexican tax resident. Article 9 of the Código Fiscal de la Federación contains no day count.

It contains a home test. A person is a Mexican tax resident when they have established their casa habitacion in Mexico. If they also maintain a home in another country, residency turns on where their centro de intereses vitales is located, and the statute deems it to be Mexico when either more than half of the person's total annual income has its source in Mexico, or the main center of their professional activities is here.

Read that against a typical Tulum owner. Someone who lives in Denver, works in Denver, and owns one rental condo in Aldea Zama is not a Mexican tax resident, regardless of how many weeks a year they visit. Someone who has moved here on a residency card and earns most of their income from a second unit probably is. The 183-day figure belongs to treaty tie-breaker rules, and it decides nothing here.

What a non-resident keeps after the 25 percent withholding

Article 158 of the Ley del Impuesto sobre la Renta is blunt. For income from granting temporary use of real property located in Mexico, the tax is determined by applying a 25 percent rate to the income obtained, sin deduccion alguna, without any deduction. The person making the payment withholds it. Where the payer is also a foreign resident, the taxpayer files directly within 15 days.

No deduction means no deduction. Not the predial, not the condo fees, not the cleaner, not the depreciation. A unit grossing 30,000 pesos a month hands over 7,500 before any expenses are counted.

There is one documented route out, and it is a treaty route rather than a statutory one. Tax practitioners describe an election available to U.S. residents under Article 6(5) of the Mexico-United States tax treaty, implemented through a Miscellaneous Tax Resolution rule, that allows a non-resident to be taxed on a net basis instead. The requirements described are heavy: a written election, a U.S. tax residency certificate, a notarized power of attorney for a Mexican legal representative, and an RFC. The Tulum Times confirmed the rule text for the 2022 and 2024 resolutions but could not verify that it survives unchanged into the 2026 resolution, because the federal tax authority's document server refused every request during reporting. An owner considering it should have a Mexican accountant confirm the current rule number before relying on it.

The 35 percent deduction that needs only a predial receipt

A resident landlord has a choice under Article 115. They can itemize deductions for property tax, maintenance and water, real interest on acquisition or improvement loans, salaries and professional fees, insurance premiums, and 5 percent annual depreciation on the construction. Or they can take the option the statute writes in plain terms, deducting 35 percent of gross income plus the property tax paid.

That second path is known in Mexican practice as the deduccion ciega, the blind deduction, and its appeal is administrative rather than arithmetic. Itemizing requires a CFDI for every peso claimed and formal accounting records. The blind deduction requires only the predial receipt. The election is binding for the entire fiscal year, so it cannot be switched in December once the numbers are known.

Provisional payments are made monthly under Article 116 and are due by the 17th of the following month. A quarterly option exists for taxpayers whose only income is rental and falls below a threshold the statute still expresses in the pre-2016 language of minimum wages. That wording now converts to the UMA, and The Tulum Times could not confirm the converted peso figure from any source, so no amount is given here.

Rental income tax in Mexico changes once the place is furnished

Income tax is only half of it. The other half is IVA, and it turns on a single line in Article 20, fraccion II of the Ley del Impuesto al Valor Agregado, which exempts property used exclusively as casa habitacion.

The same fraccion carves the exemption back out for furnished property and for property used as a hotel or casa de hospedaje. That is the whole hinge. An unfurnished long-term lease to a family in La Veleta is exempt from IVA. The identical unit, furnished and listed by the night, is not, and 16 percent applies.

Owners who bought a furnished condo and assumed the residential exemption travels with it have the arithmetic backward. The exemption attaches to the use, not to the building.

Airbnb takes 4 percent out before the money lands

Since the technology platform regime took effect, Airbnb, Booking, and Vrbo withhold tax at source on Mexican bookings. For accommodation services, income tax withholding is 4 percent of gross income under Article 113-A, with no deductions, and it remains at 4 percent through the 2026 changes, even as the rate on goods and services rose from 1 to 2.5 percent.

On the IVA side, a host who has given the platform a valid RFC has half of the IVA withheld, which amounts to 8 percent of the price under Article 18-J. A host who has not registered an RFC loses the whole 16 percent.

The income tax penalty for having no RFC on file is steeper still. The tax publication Siempre al Día puts it at 20 percent under Article 113-C, five times the registered rate. That figure appears in only one source The Tulum Times could reach, and it is given here with that attribution rather than as settled fact.

Which raises the question that decides whether any of this is workable. An RFC requires a CURP and a valid temporary or permanent residency card, so a tourist cannot obtain one. Whether an owner living abroad can hold a standalone non-resident RFC is genuinely contested among practitioners. What the sources agree on is the workaround: the non-resident operates through a Mexican legal representative holding a notarized power of attorney. That is the same representative the treaty election requires.

Sedetur counted 4,162 active rentals in Tulum on September 4

Quintana Roo charges its own lodging tax on top of everything federal. The Impuesto Sobre Hospedaje runs at 5 percent for traditional lodging and 6 percent for bookings made through digital platforms, a split that took effect in April 2023 and that the state left unchanged for 2026.

Airbnb says it has collected and remitted the tax directly to the state finance secretariat since 2017, and puts the cumulative total at more than 1,000 million pesos through the end of 2024. That figure comes from the company describing its own compliance, and it should be read as such.

It also does not settle the owner's position. Platform collection of the lodging tax is not the same thing as the host's own registration and filing obligations, and accountants working the Quintana Roo market warn hosts not to treat one as discharging the other. Monthly lodging tax declarations are filed by the 10th of the following month.

A separate levy sits alongside it. The Derecho de Saneamiento Ambiental is charged per room, per night, in UMA, at 30 percent of a UMA for Tulum, versus 70 percent for Cancun and Playa del Carmen. Whether it reaches vacation rentals as well as hotels is not documented in any source reached here. Visitax is a third thing again, paid by the visitor rather than the owner.

A certificate for every property

The compliance additions for 2026 are where the burden actually moved. According to the tax publication El Contribuyente, in a February 2 report, Quintana Roo kept its rates flat but attached three new obligations: formal receipts for lodging tax payments, registration in the Registro Estatal de Contribuyentes for each provider, and an individual certificate of tax obligations for every property rather than one covering the operator.

That last item is the one that stings an owner with several units. The state registry is the same one that, since January 2026, has been gating vehicle paperwork in Quintana Roo, so owners who have bought a car here have already met it.

Registration obligations stack further. Article 48 of the Ley General de Turismo makes enrollment in the federal Registro Nacional de Turismo mandatory for tourism service providers, within 30 days of beginning operations. At the state level, Bernardo Cueto Riestra, Quintana Roo's tourism secretary, described the state tourism registry in March as a preventive filter and said platforms cooperate to verify hosts so that operators without current registration cannot operate on them.

The Tulum Times has tracked the cost side of owning here since August, in its guide to the cost of living in Tulum, and the pattern holds on the revenue side too. Readers weighing whether the numbers still work should also read the market's own correction, covered in Tulum real estate enters a new adjustment phase, and the broader purchase picture in the guide to the Tulum real estate market.

The unresolved question is the one an owner most needs answered, and no source reached for this guide answers cleanly. When a platform remits the lodging tax to the state, does that extinguish the host's own liability or merely sit alongside it? The sources split. Until the state finance secretariat says so in writing, an owner filing nothing because Airbnb filed something is relying on an assumption, not a rule.

Are you renting out a property in Tulum, and did the 2026 registration requirements catch you by surprise? Join the conversation and share your perspective with us on Instagram and Facebook at @thetulumtimes.