These are guides for foreign homeowners in Mexico, and they are written for the months you spend somewhere else. What separates them from anything read before a purchase is the distance: the house keeps a working year of its own — a season, a list of dates, a queue of people who can and cannot reach it — and you are not standing there while it goes by.
Written in Mexico City · Every date carries the text it came from · Not legal or tax advice.
It is for the decision that reaches you late. Everything that happens to a house owned from another country arrives as a message about something that started weeks earlier, and reading beforehand is what lets you recognise it when it does.
The work on our side of that has a name in the trade — remote property management — and the name describes the arrangement, not the reader. On your side it is not a service but a condition: you are the one who has to decide about a room you cannot walk into. What a guide can do about that is narrow, and worth saying plainly: shorten the interval, by naming the few things that begin moving before anybody writes to you.
An absentee owner is not an inattentive one. Distance simply removes the cheapest instrument there is, which is walking past the house and noticing something.
It changes who notices first, and how long it takes before you hear about it. A house abroad runs on a calendar written where it stands, and that calendar is not the one on your desk.
Part of that calendar is weather and part of it is statute. The legal part is short enough to print: the Ley Federal del Trabajo fixes the days of obligatory rest for the whole country, and it is not the list your own year is built on — the federal holidays where you are come from a different statute, 5 U.S.C. 6103.
| The date Mexican law fixes | What the article ties it to | A US federal holiday as well |
|---|---|---|
| 1 January | — | Yes — New Year's Day |
| The first Monday in February | 5 February | No |
| The third Monday in March | 21 March | No |
| 1 May | — | No |
| 16 September | — | No |
| The third Monday in November | 20 November | No |
| 1 October, every six years | the handover of the federal executive — a fraction the statute itself marks as reformed on 30 September 2024 | No |
| 25 December | — | Yes — Christmas Day |
Two dates in the year are a holiday in both countries — 1 January and 25 December — and the rest of that list is made of Mondays you have no reason to have marked. A ninth entry has no fixed date at all: the law adds the day of an ordinary election, whenever the electoral statutes call one. None of it stops work outright — the same law provides that whoever does work on one of those days is owed double pay for the service rendered, on top of the wage owed for the rest day itself. The question a date on that list raises is therefore not whether a thing can be done, but what it costs to do it then, and who agreed to that before the invoice existed.
That is a whole guide in miniature. An official text, opened once and quoted, becomes a sentence you can act on from another country.
All of it, and without asking us. The two texts behind the section above are public, each link opens where the claim is made, and the count of dates is one you can redo in an evening with two calendars in front of you.
That is also the reason these pages are signed by an office and not by a person. A name you have no way of meeting is not evidence; an article number is the same document read in Mexico City and read in another country's morning, and it is the only one of the two you can open from your side.
The method has a limit, and the limit is the useful part. Where a question has no public document behind it a guide says so and stops there, because the alternative is to fill the gap with this office's own authority — which, from where you are reading, is worth exactly what a byline is worth.
From the ones only an owner who is not there has to ask. They are set out below in the order in which they reach you: first what arrives while you are asleep, last what was settled once, years ago, and has been quiet since.
Each is a question here and nothing more. The answer is where the source is, and producing the source is what a guide is for.
Where a question is already settled elsewhere on this site, a guide sends you there instead of repeating it. What is contracted, as opposed to what is written about, is on property management services for foreign owners; what changes from one town to the next is on property management in Tulum and property management in Cancún.
By opening the document and quoting it, inside the sentence that makes the claim. There is no list of sources at the foot of these pages: a date or an article number carries its link where it stands, so that one line can be checked without reading the rest.
Two limits are worth naming, because they are the ones a reader abroad would most like us to break. The first is money: a guide will not say what a house should earn, because that is a promise, and this office publishes none — no price, no occupancy, no expected return. The second is advice: a guide can say which text governs a question and what that text says, and it stops there, because the text does not know your deed and neither do we.
There is also no calendar. Nothing on this page announces when the next guide arrives or how many are coming, because a guide appears when the reading behind it is finished, and reading does not keep to a date announced in advance.
No. These pages read public texts; they do not read your papers, and that difference is sharpest at a distance — nobody where you are can hold the deed of a house in Mexico up to the light. Where a question turns on the documents of one property it stops being a reading and becomes work for a professional who can see them.
Yes, and most of it. Letting a house can add obligations that an owner who never lets it does not have, but distance brings its own set and those do not wait for a guest: an empty house still has a year — dates, seasons and people holding keys — that goes on without you.
No, and the rule cuts the other way as well: they will not quote you what a job costs, because that price carries a date. Work done on one of the statutory rest days is owed double pay, so the same repair booked on the third Monday in November need not be the same invoice as the Tuesday after it.
Every claim carries the document it came from, and a Mexican statute prints the date of its last reform on its own first page — the labour law behind the table above reads 14 May 2026. A text can be reformed the week after a guide is written, and that printed date is how a reader catches it first.
The form below is the same one at the foot of every page on this site. Write the house rather than an introduction: where it stands, what kind of property it is and how much of the year it spends empty are enough for a first estimate to begin.