Guides on legal short-term rentals and travel in Panama.
A new EU law forces booking platforms to police sustainability claims worldwide, raising the question: can Panama actually make platforms enforce its own rental law?
Read more →Panama has roughly 13,000 short-term rentals online but only about 1,220 are legally registered — and someone always pays for that gap.
Read more →The first chapter in a series on Panama's short-term rental laws: how a 1973 housing statute created a legal vacuum that lasted decades.
Read more →Fifty years after the legal vacuum opened, Proyecto de Ley 301 finally names short-term rentals in law — but a close read of its actual text shows it mainly solves the state's tax problem, not the fairness or safety problem.
Read more →Ley 80 de 2012 tried to draw a hard line around short-term rentals in Panama City, but it mostly set off years of jurisdictional confusion instead.
Read more →How a 2008 air-mattress startup gave its brand name to a rental category that Panama's law had already been quietly describing for decades.
Read more →Between 1994 and 2008, Panama's tourism laws quietly built a vocabulary wide enough to describe short-term rentals — without ever naming them.
Read more →Panama's first legal answer to the 1973 rental gap only regulated hotels — never touching the short-term home rentals that already existed.
Read more →Panama's 1973 tenancy law explicitly excluded short-term rentals from its scope — creating a 50-year regulatory gap nobody filled.
Read more →ATP and MiCI both regulate Panama rentals, and both have different functions
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