A Fix Arrives — and a New Rule Nobody's Talking About Yet

Part 2 left hoteliers in an uncomfortable spot: obligated since 1987 to give qualifying seniors a lodging discount, and left since December 2020 without any way to recover its cost for anything other than restaurants and fast-food chains. On August 28, 2026, the Asamblea Nacional passed a fix in its third and final debate — Proyecto de Ley 226, merged with two related bills (225 and 227) into a single Texto Único from the Comisión de Trabajo, Salud y Desarrollo Social.

A note on sourcing, since this matters for a legal article: as of this writing, the bill has not yet been sanctioned by the Executive or published in the Gaceta Oficial — the two steps still standing between "passed" and "law." The text this article relies on is the most recent version published through the Asamblea's own legislative document system, and it's possible small wording changes occur before final publication. We'll update this article with a link to the official published text the moment it's available. Treat what follows as a close, sourced preview — not yet enforceable law.

What It Restores

Article 6 is rewritten again, and this time the 100% crédito fiscal applies to "los descuentos y concesiones a que se refiere esta Ley" — all of them, not just numerals 4 and 5.

Hotels, moteles, pensiones, and, as covered below, hostales are back in the same position restaurants have held since 2020: a business that grants the discount can recover it in full against its income tax bill for the period in which the discount was given, provided it keeps documentation meeting whatever standard future regulation sets. Article 6-A, the 2020 provision allowing unused credits to be transferred via cessin, isn't touched by this bill either — and now that hotels have a credit worth transferring again, that mechanism deserves its own explanation.

The Credit Doesn't Have to Go to Waste, Even If You Don't Owe Enough Tax to Use It

This is worth spelling out on its own, because it changes the practical calculus for exactly the small, independent operators this series has focused on. If your business grants the senior discount but doesn't owe enough income tax in a given year to use the resulting credit yourself, that credit isn't automatically stranded. Article 6-A lets you sell it to a business that does have enough tax liability to use it — most plausibly a larger, consistently profitable operator, in tourism or any other sector, since nothing in the law restricts who can buy. There is just one caveat: who wants to buy tax credits without making some profit from the deal?

The economics work the way you'd expect from any instrument sold before its full value can be realized: a buyer taking on a credit they didn't generate has no reason to pay full face value for it, so a seller should expect to negotiate a discount off the credit's stated amount in exchange for turning an otherwise unusable paper benefit into cash now. That's not a flaw in the mechanism — it's the same logic behind invoice factoring or selling a bond before maturity, and a discounted sale still beats a credit that just sits on your books unused.

Because here's the catch: the tax credit can be used only for the fiscal year during which the discounts were given: "Este crédito fiscal podrá ser utilizado por el contribuyente para compensar el impuesto correspondiente al periodo fiscal en que se generen."

This isn't theoretical. The DGI has a real, regulated procedure for recognizing these transfers — most recently Resolución No. 201-6051 of September 9, 2024, which governs the transfer and compensation of credits against income tax, real estate tax, dividend tax, complementary tax, and educational insurance tax (ITBMS credits follow a separate procedure).

The process requires the taxpayer to be current on their tax obligations, to file a request, and to go through a Fiscalización audit before DGI issues a technical report confirming the recognized credit amount. It's an administrative process with real steps, not a handshake deal — which is exactly why it's worth discussing with an accountant familiar with it before writing off a credit you can't use yourself as a loss. In any case, it's additional administrative burden that nobody will ever compensate.

What It Adds to the Lodging Article

Numeral 3 of Article 1 keeps its 50%/30% weekday/weekend structure unchanged, but the list of covered categories grows for the first time since 1987: "hoteles, hostales, moteles y pensiones." Hostales are now named explicitly. Apart-hoteles are not — and given that the legislature clearly can add a category by name when it chooses to, and chose to add exactly one, that's worth sitting with rather than glossing over. The classification question from Part 1 isn't resolved by this reform. If anything, a selective addition like this makes the omission look less like an oversight and more like a boundary nobody has been asked to justify yet.

The New Rule That Changes How Rate Structures Work

This is the part of the bill with the most direct, practical consequence for how you price rooms — and it has nothing to do with Article 6.

A new Article 1-A requires any business covered by the law that sells at a reduced or promotional price to post both the regular price and the promotional price side by side. That alone is a transparency requirement. The consequential part comes next: if the promotional or lower price already reflects a bigger cut than the law's own percentage would produce off the regular rate, a qualifying guest still gets a further 10% off that promotional rate. In practice — a long-stay discount, a low-season rate, or a package deal doesn't satisfy the law on its own once this takes effect; it satisfies it minus another 10%.

Under the law as it stands today — before this bill is promulgated — there's no equivalent provision. The senior discount is written around "los precios regulares," the regular, published rate, not around whatever promotional or negotiated rate a business happens to be offering at the time. A reasonable, and currently defensible, reading is that a guest chooses between an existing promotional rate and the legal discount calculated off the regular rate — not both stacked together. If you've structured pricing around that reading, it isn't a loophole; it follows from what the statute actually says today.

That reading has an expiration date. Once this bill is signed and published, the new Article 1-A closes it by name, with a specific floor written into the text. Any pricing strategy built around promotional rates standing in for the senior discount should be treated as a temporary, current-law position — not a durable one.

There's a Real Cost to the Alternative, Too

It's worth naming the tradeoff honestly, because it cuts against the property relying on a high published rate, not in its favor. Many booking platforms and metasearch engines rank and display whatever rate a property has flagged as its base or standard price. If that figure is an inflated rack rate that exists mainly to create room for discounts, rather than what most guests actually pay, it can make a property look considerably more expensive than competitors publishing their real, lower rate as the headline price — quietly pricing you out of search before a guest ever sees what you'd actually charge them. There's no version of this structure that's free of tradeoffs in either direction.

Enforcement Gets Sharper Too

The bill rewrites the penalty article as well. Fines for refusing to honor the discount run B/.500 to B/.10,000, doubling on any repeat violation, with half the proceeds going to a dedicated Fondo Especial para Jubilados y Pensionados and half to a CSS benefits program. ACODECO remains the enforcing authority, and every public-facing establishment will be required to post the applicable discounts somewhere visible — not just apply them correctly when asked.

Practical Guidance for Owners

1. Know the difference between what's owed today and what's coming. Right now, the legally named lodging categories are still just hoteles, moteles, and pensiones under the original 1987 wording — hostales and the Article 1-A promotional-price rule aren't in force until this bill is published. Don't apply provisions that aren't law yet, but don't build long-term pricing decisions around a gap that's about to close, either.
2. Keep a clear, dated record of every senior discount granted — the guest's proof of qualifying status, the rate applied, and what it was discounted from — regardless of which version of the law is in force when you grant it.
3. If you don't expect to owe enough income tax to use the full credit yourself, talk to an accountant about the Article 6-A transfer option (Resolución No. 201-6051) before treating an unused credit as a write-off — selling it, even at a negotiated discount, converts it into actual cash.
4. Don't assume silence on any other ATP category not named in the statute means exemption. It more likely means the question hasn't been tested — the safer working assumption, as this series has argued throughout, is the broader one.
5. Watch for the Gaceta Oficial publication. We'll update this series with the final citation and a direct link once it's available.

Nearly forty years after Ley 6 de 1987 first used the word 'hoteles' without defining it, the law is still catching up to a hospitality sector it didn't originally have the vocabulary to describe. The owners who come out ahead of that process are the ones who track it as it happens, document carefully, and treat every 'current' answer as good until the next reform—because with this particular law, there's reliably a next one.

And there should be, because the entire concept of charging private businesses with providing social benefits to one category of citizens—while bearing the cost fully or partially—is flawed. While the idea of helping lower-income senior citizens is undoubtedly fair and widely shared, this law does not distinguish between those who need that help and those who don't. There are retirees who just get by on a modest pension, and others whose pension can be multiples of the income of the business owner who is obliged to offer them discounts—discounts that, even under the new law, will often come out of his own pocket.

Ideally, the government would reimburse these subsidies, but more often than not, it does not. Wouldn't it be much more efficient if this money were put directly into higher pensions—preferably for those retirees who need it most?

Source (among others): https://sistemas.asamblea.gob.pa/segLegis/Documents/7759.pdf

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