Your Airbnb payout is not your income. By the time the money reaches your account, Mexican tax has already been taken out of it and sent to the SAT on your behalf. Most foreign owners find this out backwards: they look at the booking total in the app, look at the deposit that lands, see a gap, and assume the platform quietly raised its commission. Usually it did not. A chunk of that gap is tax, and it went somewhere specific.
This guide explains the mechanism. It does not print rates, and that is on purpose. Percentages, thresholds and eligibility limits move, they vary by situation, and a number copied from a blog post is the fastest way to plan around something that stopped being true. What does not move is the structure: who withholds, what the withholding is for, and which decision changes the size of every payout you will ever receive.
Fair disclosure. I host furnished monthly apartments in Roma Norte and Narvarte under StayWork CDMX, and I run the owner-side management business, Roma Norte Host, from the same desk. Same operator, two brands, and the second one is why this article exists: there are dozens of guides on this in Spanish for Mexican owners and close to nothing in English for the foreign ones.
This is not tax advice. I am an operator, not an accountant. The goal here is narrower and more useful: to make your next conversation with a Mexican accountant short, cheap and precise, because you will walk in already knowing what to ask.
Quick answer
Digital platforms in Mexico are legally obliged to act as withholding agents. Airbnb withholds both ISR (income tax) and IVA (VAT) from lodging income earned by an individual, pays it straight to the SAT, and reports the amounts to the authority. Your payout arrives already net.
How much gets withheld depends on whether your RFC (Mexican tax ID) is registered on the platform. Without a registered RFC, the platform must withhold at the highest rates in the scheme. Registering it is a short administrative step with a visible effect on every payout.
That withholding is an advance, not a final settlement. What you ultimately owe depends on your régimen fiscal, and the three an individual owner usually weighs are RESICO, Actividad empresarial and Arrendamiento. They differ mainly in whether your real costs deduct and how much bookkeeping you carry.
Why the deposit is smaller than the booking total
Mexico made the platforms responsible for collecting tax at source. When an individual earns lodging income through Airbnb, the platform withholds ISR and IVA from the payment, remits both directly to the SAT, and reports the figures under your name. You never touch that money, so there is no moment where you are expected to set it aside and hand it over later.
Two things follow, and the second matters more than the first.
The obvious one: the number in your bank account is post-tax, not pre-tax. Every yield calculation you did before buying, if it used booking totals, was measuring the wrong quantity.
The less obvious one: the authority already has your numbers. Whatever you eventually declare has to sit next to a figure the SAT is already holding. This surprises owners who assumed short-term rental income sits in a grey zone. It has not for some time. The reporting is automatic and it is not addressed to you.
Mexico City also added a host registry in 2026, which runs in parallel with all of this. Our guide to whether a Mexico City Airbnb is legal in 2026 covers it separately, since registration and taxation are different obligations enforced by different bodies.
The single highest-value thing in this article: register your RFC on the platform
The withholding rate is not one fixed number. It depends on whether your RFC, Mexico’s federal taxpayer registration, is loaded into your platform account.
With a registered RFC, you are withheld at the ordinary rates the scheme sets out. Without one, the platform is obliged to withhold at the highest rates in the scheme. That is not a fine or a punishment in any disciplinary sense. It is simply the default the law assigns to a payee the platform cannot identify to the tax authority.
I am not going to quote figures, but the direction is not in dispute and the gap is not cosmetic. A missing RFC means materially more money taken out of every payout, on every booking, for as long as that field stays empty.
What makes this worth doing this week is the effort ratio. If you already hold an RFC, adding it to a platform profile takes minutes and you see the difference in your next payout statement. Pure upside, no trade-off to weigh.
Getting the RFC in the first place is the real work, and for foreigners it runs through the CURP first. That sequence, and the ways applications get bounced, is covered in our guide to CURP and RFC for foreigners in Mexico . Budget weeks, not days.
Withholding is an advance, not the end of the story
Owners tend to relax too early here. The platform withheld something, the SAT received it, so the matter feels closed. It is not.
Platform withholding is a payment on account against your annual position. It contributes toward what you owe; it does not determine what you owe. Depending on your circumstances, the amount withheld across a year can end up higher or lower than your actual liability, and the reconciliation happens on your side.
How it credits, and what the final figure looks like, comes down to your régimen fiscal: the tax regime you are registered under with the SAT. That choice is made once and then lived with, and it moves your net return more than almost anything else in this article.
The three regimes an individual owner usually weighs
Treat the table below as a map, not a recommendation. Eligibility rules, income limits and compatibility with platform lodging income all depend on your specific activities, and some combinations that look available on paper are not available to you. Your accountant confirms which of these you can actually use.
| RESICO | Actividad empresarial | Arrendamiento | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Taxed on | Income collected | Profit after deductible costs | Rental income, with a deduction option |
| Deductions | Effectively none | Real operating costs deduct | Documented costs, or an optional blind deduction (deducción ciega) of a portion of income without receipts |
| Admin load | Lightest | Heaviest: proper bookkeeping, invoices, records | Moderate |
| Suits | Low-cost operations where expenses are genuinely small | Operations with real running costs: cleaning, management, maintenance | Owners who want simplicity and whose documented costs are modest |
| Main caveat | Low rates, but you are taxed on money that went out the door as costs | Only worth it if you keep the records to prove the costs | The classic rental regime, and its fit with platform lodging has nuances worth checking |
A little more on each.
RESICO applies low rates to income actually collected, and in exchange you give up deductions almost entirely. For an owner whose costs are genuinely thin, that trade can work well. For a furnished short-term operation with turnover cleaning, laundry and a management fee, be careful: you would be paying tax on revenue that never stayed with you.
Actividad empresarial taxes profit rather than revenue, so it recognises what short-term rentals actually cost to run. The price is administration: invoices, records and a bookkeeping habit, or the deductions you signed up for will not survive scrutiny.
Arrendamiento is the classic rental regime, and its distinctive feature is the deducción ciega, an optional blind deduction of a portion of your income that you take without producing receipts. That is attractive because it removes the paperwork burden. Whether it fits platform lodging income specifically is something to raise with your accountant rather than assume.
What actually deducts, in the regimes that allow deductions
If your regime taxes profit, these are the categories that typically come up for a furnished short-term rental. What matters as much as the category is the paper behind it: a cost you cannot document is a cost that does not exist as far as the SAT is concerned.
- Cleaning and laundry between stays, which for a high-turnover unit is often the largest single running cost
- Platform commission
- Management or co-hosting commission, if someone else runs the operation for you
- Maintenance and repairs, with invoices
- Utilities for the property
- Consumables and replacements for the unit, again with documentation
Two practical notes. Deductibility depends on the expense being properly invoiced to you, which in Mexico usually means a CFDI carrying your RFC: a cash payment to a cleaner with no receipt is a real cost to your wallet and an invisible one on your return. And an expense being deductible in principle does not make it deductible in your situation, since that depends on the regime you are actually in.
The layer the Spanish-language guides do not have to cover
Everything above applies to any individual earning lodging income in Mexico. As a foreign owner you sit on top of a second layer, and this is the part where generic advice tends to fall apart.
Resident or non-resident matters. Mexican tax residency is a legal status with its own test, and it is not the same thing as your immigration status or how many days you happen to spend in the country. Which side of that line you sit on changes how your Mexican income is treated. Establish this first, because several other answers depend on it.
Including the previous section. The three regimes above are laid out as the menu a persona física weighs, and that framing quietly assumes the reader can reach all three. A non-resident owner may not. Regime eligibility is tied to status, and the option that looks best on paper may simply not be available to you, which turns the whole comparison into an academic exercise. Ask your accountant which regimes you actually qualify for before you spend any time choosing between them.
RFC access is not automatic for foreigners. The favourable withholding lane described above assumes you have an RFC to register. Whether you can obtain one, and what kind, depends on your immigration status. Owners who assume they can simply request one and get it the same week are frequently surprised.
Your home country probably wants to know too. Income earned in Mexico is usually still reportable where you are tax resident. That is not double-charging by default: Mexico has double-taxation treaties with many countries, and tax paid in Mexico can often be credited against your home liability. Whether a treaty applies to you, and what you file to claim relief, is a question for someone who works across both jurisdictions. Getting it wrong in either direction is expensive and compounds silently for years.
CFDI invoicing will eventually reach you. Mexico’s electronic invoicing system underpins the whole documentation chain, both for the costs you deduct and, in some arrangements, for the income you receive. We wrote up how it works on the accommodation side in corporate billing and CFDI in Mexico City .
None of these four are settled answers you can lift from an article. They are what goes on the agenda before you pay anyone for an hour of their time.
Gross, net, and why the headline yield lies
Owners compare properties on gross revenue because gross revenue is the number that is easy to find. What determines whether the asset is worth owning is what remains after platform withholding, running costs, commission and your annual tax position.
That gap is wider for short-term rentals than for a traditional twelve-month lease, because short-term operations carry costs a long lease does not have: cleaning between every stay, heavier maintenance, higher utility use, more management time. It is also why the deduction question above is not a technicality. In a regime with no deductions, all of that cost sits on your side of the line unrecognised.
If you want to see the two models side by side with your own figures, Roma Norte Host has a short-term versus traditional rental calculator that compares them on net rather than headline terms. It will not compute your tax position, but it will stop you comparing a gross number against a net one, which is the most common way owners talk themselves into the wrong model.
Questions to bring to your accountant
Print this. An hour with a Mexican accountant who also understands cross-border issues is cheap; an hour spent explaining your situation from scratch is not.
- Am I a Mexican tax resident under the law, and what evidence does that determination rest on?
- Given my immigration status, can I obtain an RFC, and which type?
- Which régimen fiscal am I actually eligible for, and which do you recommend for a furnished short-term rental with these running costs?
- How does the platform’s withholding credit against my liability under that regime, and am I likely to be over or under withheld across a year?
- If I am under RESICO, run the comparison against a deduction-based regime using my real cleaning, laundry and commission costs. Which wins?
- If Arrendamiento is on the table, does the deducción ciega apply cleanly to platform lodging income in my case?
- What do I have to file, and on what calendar? Monthly, annually, or both?
- What documentation do I need to keep, and in what form, for each cost I intend to deduct?
- Do I need to issue CFDIs for this income, and if so, in which circumstances?
- Does a double-taxation treaty apply between Mexico and my country of residence, and what do I file, on each side, to claim relief?
- What happens to my position if I sell the property, and does the regime choice affect that?
- What is the cost of getting my filings prepared each year, so I can price it into the operation?
If your accountant cannot answer question 10, you need a second one who works cross-border. That is not a criticism of the first; it is a different specialism.
Where this leaves you
Three things are worth acting on. Get the RFC and register it on the platform, the only item here with a fast payoff and no trade-off. Choose the régimen fiscal deliberately rather than by default, since it quietly sets your net return for years. Keep the documentation as you go, because reconstructing a year of cleaning invoices in April is a job nobody does well.
To repeat what I said at the top: this is not tax advice, and I am not the person to give it. It is the shape of the problem, written by someone who runs the operation daily and got tired of watching foreign owners learn it in the wrong order. Take the twelve questions to a professional and the conversation will be short.
If you own an apartment in Roma Norte, Narvarte or the surrounding colonias and would rather not carry the operational half of this yourself, Roma Norte Host handles turnovers, guest communication, pricing and the documentation trail that makes the tax conversation manageable. See what the management service covers , or get in touch directly . Same team behind StayWork CDMX, viewed from the owner’s side of the ledger.
