A Law Every Host in Panama Should Know — and Almost Nobody Has Actually Read

If you own or manage a short-term rental in Panama, you already know retirees and seniors get a discount on lodging — everyone in this business has heard that much. What almost nobody has done is actually read the law. Ask five hotel owners what percentage applies, which properties it covers, or what happens if they don't comply, and you'll get five different, mostly wrong, answers.

This three-part series exists to close that gap. Not because the social policy is in question — nobody seriously disputes that lower income retirees deserve a break on the ordinary costs of travel — but because the mechanics of how that policy actually reaches an ATP-registered aparthotel, hostal familiar, or cabaña have shifted more than once in the past few years, most recently in a bill that passed its third and final debate in the Asamblea Nacional on August 28, 2026, days before this article was written.

Where It Starts: Ley 6 de 1987

The foundation is Ley 6 de 16 de junio de 1987, Panama's original statute establishing discounts for jubilados, pensionados, and people classified under "tercera edad." Its Article 1 lists dozens of specific benefits — transportation, entertainment, health services, restaurants — and, in numeral 3, lodging: a minimum discount on "los precios regulares" of hoteles, moteles y pensiones, 50% Monday through Thursday, 30% Friday through Sunday.

That's the part of the law almost everyone in the industry has heard about. What's less understood is that this exact wording — "hoteles, moteles y pensiones," nothing else — is still the law in force today, nearly forty years later, for the question of which lodging categories are actually named. Hostales are not in it. Aparthotels are not in it. Cabañas are not in it. That's about to change, but as of this writing, it hasn't changed yet — a distinction that matters if you're trying to figure out your obligations right now rather than once a pending bill is finally published.

The Word the Law Uses — and the Word It Doesn't

Here's the detail that sets up the rest of this series: Panama's tourism law does not treat "hotel" as a casual, catch-all word for any place you can pay to sleep. Decreto Ley 4 de 2008 and its regulating Decreto Ejecutivo 82 de 2008 define a specific menu of lodging categories — Hotel, Motel, Apart-Hotel, Cabañas o Bungalows, Hostal Familiar, Albergue, Sitios de Acampar, and Régimen Turístico de Propiedad Horizontal among them — each with its own legal definition. A "Hotel" under that framework is a distinct category from an "Apart-Hotel" or a "Hostal Familiar," even though a guest booking any of them might casually describe the experience the same way.

Ley 6 de 1987 predates that entire regulatory framework by more than twenty years. When it was written, Panamanian tourism law hadn't yet been organized into Decreto 82's precise categories. So when the statute says "hoteles," it's a fair question whether the legislature meant the narrow, technical category Decreto 4/2008 would eventually define — or the broader, plain-language idea of "a place where the public pays to stay." The statute doesn't say. And as we'll see in Part 3, even the bill now headed for the Gaceta Oficial, which explicitly adds a new lodging category to the list for the first time since 1987, still doesn't touch this question.

Why This Isn't Just a Semantic Puzzle

This ambiguity matters more, not less, the smaller and more independent your rental operation is. A large hotel chain has legal and compliance staff to sort through exactly this kind of question. An individual owner running a registered hostal familiar or a handful of cabañas typically doesn't — and getting the answer wrong in either direction carries real cost. Assume you're exempt when the law actually reaches your category, and you risk fines and guest disputes. Assume you're covered when you're not, and you may be absorbing a cost the law never asked you to bear.

Properties listed in our directory are already committed to operating on the right side of Panama's ATP and MiCI registration requirements — which makes it worth understanding exactly what other statutes, like this one, expect of them as registered lodging providers.

Where This Series Is Headed

The classification question is only half the story, and arguably not the half that's cost hoteliers the most money. The other half is what happened to Article 6 — the part of the law that decides who actually pays for the discount. That mechanism has been rewritten twice since 1987, most consequentially in a reform that took effect in December 2020, and understanding it is the difference between seeing this as a minor compliance detail and seeing it as what it's actually been for the last five years: an unfunded mandate. That's where Part 2 picks up.