Continuation of the "Proyecto de Ley 226" series, following Part 3: "The Fix, the New Rack-Rate Rule, and What Owners Should Do Now" (September 9, 2026)

We closed this series at three parts. We were going to leave it there. But before we even published Part 3, the President of the Republic had already said, in his own words, something that confirms the doubt we closed that article with — so there's a Part 4 after all, even if the series title says otherwise. And there will probably be more to say down the road.

What We Said in Part 3

On August 28, the Asamblea Nacional approved Proyecto de Ley 226 on third debate (47 votes in favor, 1 against), amending Ley 6 of 1987 on benefits for retirees, pensioners, and seniors. For lodging, numeral 3 of Article 1 keeps its structure unchanged — 50% discount Monday through Thursday, 30% Friday through Sunday — but for the first time since 1987 it explicitly names "hostales" alongside hotels, motels, and pensiones. And the new Article 6 restores the 100% tax credit against Income Tax for all the law's discounts, not just restaurants' (which have had it since 1987) — closing, on paper, the gap that had left lodging uncompensated for almost six years.

Part 3 also flagged a point that shouldn't be overlooked: the law adds "hostales" by name, but doesn't touch any other lodging category. The legislature can name a category when it wants to — and here it chose to name exactly one.

We closed that article with a note of caution, almost philosophical: that the whole concept of forcing a private business to carry a social benefit has a fundamental problem, because the law doesn't distinguish between the retiree surviving on a modest pension and the one whose pension is several times larger than the income of the owner required to give the discount — a discount that, we said, "even under the new law, will often come out of the owner's own pocket."

That caution wasn't rhetorical.

What the President Said

On September 3, President José Raúl Mulino met with representatives of retirees and the private sector, and said the following about the law — reported by La Prensa under the headline "if I veto the law I'm the villain of the movie, but it has to be made economically sustainable":

"You can't just go around passing laws without knowing where the money is going to come from."

"Because nobody asked me. And I'm sure they didn't ask our finance authorities either."

"We have to find some way to make this law economically sustainable. So it doesn't create holes a few years down the road."

Note the verb: sustainable. Mulino isn't talking about whether businesses can afford the discount — the Chamber of Commerce, Conep, and other trade groups already complained about that, asking for a veto or revision. He's talking about whether the State can sustain the fiscal cost of that discount turning, article by article, into a credit that reduces what tens of thousands of businesses owe the DGI every year — the same Article 6 tax credit Part 3 described as the piece that finally lets a hospedaje recover its lost income.

Put another way: the question Mulino admits he can't answer — where the money will come from so this law "doesn't create holes" — is, in practice, the same question that determines whether you, as an owner, can actually claim that credit against your Income Tax, instead of it staying on paper.

What This Means for Your Next Decision

The law has passed third debate, but "approved by the Asamblea" isn't the same as "law in force." The president has 30 constitutional days from approval to decide, and said he'll spend the coming week meeting with the sectors involved before resolving it. Concretely, three paths remain:

1. Sign it as is — with the Article 6 tax credit already extended to all lodging, as we described in Part 3.
2. Return it with observations (partial veto) — and Article 6 is precisely what gives the Executive a lever to adjust the fiscal cost without touching the discount itself.
3. Veto it entirely — leaving Ley 6 of 1987 in force without these reforms, while the debate returns to the Asamblea.

A second meeting at the Palacio Presidencial is confirmed, with retirees, the private sector, and the Secretaría Jurídica de la Presidencia. Minister Juan Carlos Orillac has said "there is common ground on some articles" — without specifying which. We don't know either yet, which is why we won't speculate about exactly which article might change. What we do know is that the president himself has already publicly identified the underlying problem, and that it lands directly on the mechanism Part 3 asked you to start documenting.

Our Recommendation Hasn't Changed — But the Certainty Has

Everything we recommended in Part 3 still holds: keep a detailed, dated record of every discount granted, and check with your accountant on how the credit assignment would work under Resolución 201-6051 before writing that loss off as final.

What's changed is this: don't treat the text we analyzed in Part 3 as settled. The president himself admitted, in his own words, that the piece that would let your business recover that income — the Article 6 tax credit — is the same piece whose fiscal sustainability the Government still doesn't know how to solve. Until that's resolved, we still won't know whether the mechanism we described in Part 3 will be, word for word, the one that finally takes effect.

We'll keep following this story and update as soon as there's a presidential decision.

Sources:

1. Texto Único, Proyecto de Ley 226 (merged with 225 and 227), Comisión de Trabajo, Salud y Desarrollo Social — sistemas.asamblea.gob.pa/segLegis/Documents/7759.pdf
2. "Aumento de descuentos a jubilados..." — La Prensa, Sept. 3, 2026
3. "Segunda reunión definirá el futuro..." — Infobae, Sept. 10, 2026
4. Resolución No. 201-6051 of September 9, 2024 (DGI) — fiscal credit assignment/compensation procedure