A Series About How Panama Got Here

If you've ever been trying to understand what Panamanian law says aboutshort-term rentals in Panama, you've probably run into a tangle of laws, decrees, and acronyms that don't seem to fit together neatly: MiVIOT, ATP, MiCI, Ley 80, Decreto 82, and now a new bill called Proyecto de Ley 301. It looks messy because it is messy — but it's messy for a reason, and that reason is a story worth telling properly.

This is the first post in a series that traces how Panama's legal treatment of short-term rentals evolved — or, for long stretches, failed to evolve — from the 1970s to today's ongoing legislative overhaul. We'll go chapter by chapter, roughly one per week, ending with a close look at Proyecto de Ley 301, the bill that could finally give this industry clear, modern rules.

Where the Story Begins: Ley 93 of 1974

Our starting point is Ley No. 93, enacted October 4, 1974. Its job was straightforward: regulate residential and commercial leases in Panama, primarily to protect tenants in stable, long-term housing arrangements. It set out rules for lease terms, renewals, and landlord-tenant obligations for arrangements lasting more than six months.

But Article 3 of that same law drew a boundary. It explicitly excluded from its scope any property rented at a daily rate — the law names "hoteles, moteles, casas de hospedaje y pensiones" as examples — and it also excluded seasonal rentals in vacation areas, as long as the total rental term (including any renewals) didn't exceed six months.

In plain terms: Panama's main residential tenancy law looked at short-term, transient stays and said, "not our department."

A Deliberate Line, Not an Oversight

This wasn't a drafting mistake. Lawmakers in 1974 understood that renting a room by the night for travelers is a fundamentally different transaction from renting an apartment to a family for a year. One is about housing stability; the other is a commercial hospitality service. Separating them made sense.

The problem is what happened next — or rather, what didn't happen. Excluding short-term stays from housing law implicitly created a second category of activity that needed its own rulebook. And for that category, the only existing framework at the time was built for a very narrow slice of the hospitality world: hotels.

Setting Up the Rest of the Series

Over the next several posts, we'll look at how Panama tried to fill that gap using laws written with hotels, motels, and boarding houses in mind — Ley 74 of 1976 and its regulations, then the broader tourism framework created in 1994 and 2008. We'll look at why none of these laws mention anything resembling today's short-term apartment or house rentals by name, and why that absence caused so much confusion for decades. We'll also untangle a distinction that trips up almost everyone: the difference between "Airbnb" the platform and "airbnb" the type of rental, which existed long before the platform did and isn't limited to it.

Finally, the series will land on Proyecto de Ley 301, the bill currently moving through Panama's National Assembly, which explicitly aims to close the 1973 gap once and for all by creating a dedicated legal category for short-term rentals, a registration process, and a clear tax framework.

If you're a traveler trying to figure out whether a rental is operating legitimately, or an owner wondering what compliance actually requires, understanding this history helps make sense of why the rules feel unsettled — and why that's about to change. In the meantime, you can always browse properties that have already sorted through this maze in our directory.