What a garantía propietaria actually is
A garantía propietaria is a third-party guarantee secured by real property. A person who owns an unencumbered property — normally in the City of Buenos Aires or Greater Buenos Aires specifically — signs your lease as guarantor and attaches their title deed (escritura) and ID. If you stop paying, the landlord sues the guarantor and goes after that property.
What the market asks for in practice: a property registered in the Registro de la Propiedad Inmueble, free of mortgages and attachments, often with a recent informe de dominio and tax bills alongside the deed. A property in Córdoba or Salta is frequently refused, because the landlord wants something enforceable in the same jurisdiction.
Why it exists — say this, because it makes the rest make sense
Three structural reasons, all defensible:
- Eviction has historically been slow and expensive. A landlord’s real remedy for non-payment is a long civil suit, so a seizable property is worth more than a salary slip. The government’s own pending bill (below) is explicitly an attempt to fix the eviction side, which is proof the problem is real rather than folklore.
- In a high-inflation economy a salary is weak security. Income verification exists — a recibo de sueldo, a monotributo payment history — but it secures nothing.
- No law requires any guarantee at all, which cuts both ways: no legal minimum, and also no legal ceiling, no obligation on the landlord to accept an alternative, and no obligation to explain a refusal.
Why a foreigner structurally cannot produce one
The guarantor has to be an Argentine property owner willing to put their home at risk for someone with no local history. A newcomer does not have that person, and it is not solvable with money — a foreigner with a healthy foreign bank balance still has no deed in the Argentine property register. And the fallback identity chain is hard to even start, because the documents that get you a CUIL without a DNI are not documents a tourist holds. The social security agency’s own page accepts, for an applicant without a DNI, any one of three: a migration file showing the current residence type and entry to the country; a passport recording a residence type which it says “no debe ser turista o permanente”; or an entry permit issued by a consulate or under an international agreement. A visa-free tourist arrival produces none of the three. Most guarantee products need a CUIL or CUIT.
The law changed in December 2023, and almost nothing written in English reflects it
DNU 70/2023, published 2023-12-21 and in force from 2023-12-29, repealed Ley 27.551 — the Ley de Alquileres — entirely. Leases are now governed by the Civil and Commercial Code as that decree amended it.
The single most important casualty for a foreigner was article 13 of Ley 27.551, which used to say the tenant “debe proponer al locador al menos dos” guarantee options from a listed set — title deed, bank guarantee, seguro de caución, a personal guarantor, the tenant’s own personal guarantee — and the landlord had to accept one of them, capped at five months’ rent. That article no longer exists. There is now no legal right to offer surety insurance instead of a deed, and no cap on how much guarantee can be demanded.
Here is what else changed, by article:
| Article | The rule now | What it replaced |
|---|---|---|
| 1196 | The parties may set any deposit amount, in any currency, and any mechanism for returning it. Payment frequency may not be less than monthly. | Deposit capped at one month, returnable at the value of the last month’s rent. Both caps gone. |
| 1198 | The term is whatever the parties agree. If the contract is silent, permanent housing defaults to two years. | A hard three-year legal minimum. There is no minimum term any more. |
| 1199 | Rent may be set in pesos or in foreign currency, and adjusted by any index, public or private, at any frequency. | Pesos in practice, annual adjustment, mandatory ICL index. |
| 1221 | The tenant may terminate at any time by paying 10% of the remaining future rent. | A one-and-a-half or one month penalty depending on timing. |
| 1221 bis | Derogated. | A penalty-free exit in the final three months with notice. Gone. |
| 1219 inc. d) | The landlord may terminate “por cualquier causa fijada en el contrato”. | New. Read your termination clauses; they are no longer boilerplate. |
| 765 / 766 | The debtor must deliver the currency agreed, whether or not it is legal tender here. | The old right to discharge a dollar debt by paying the peso equivalent. Removed. |
A detail worth knowing because it sounds impossible: the Senate rejected DNU 70/2023 on 2024-03-14, by 42 votes to 25. It is still in force anyway. Under the law governing emergency decrees, a DNU only falls if both chambers reject it, and the Chamber of Deputies has never put it to a vote. A decree the Senate voted down is the law governing your lease.
Contracts signed before 2023-12-29 keep running under the old rules until they expire. There is no retroactivity, which is why you will still see both regimes described side by side on Argentine legal sites.
We could not verify the widely-repeated claim that the 2024 Ley Bases ratified or consolidated the repeal — we found no leasing provision in that statute’s own text. What is certain is the sentence above: DNU 70/2023 repealed Ley 27.551 and remains in force.
The routes around a garantía, assessed honestly
1. Seguro de caución — surety insurance
A policy issued by an insurer regulated by the national insurance superintendency. You are the tomador and pay for it; the landlord is the beneficiary. If you default, the insurer pays the landlord.
The part almost every English page omits: the insurer then comes after you for reimbursement, with interest and costs. It is not forgiveness of rent. It is a bond you buy against yourself.
Cost: published ranges conflict — 4% to 7% of the total contract value in one trade source, 3% to 6% of annual rent in others, and “roughly one to two months’ rent” from an insurance broker. All of those are ranges, none is a rate card, so budget roughly one to two months’ rent and get a quote. Note the percentage is of the whole contract, not of one month.
Typical underwriting, from insurer-side sources published in 2026: age 18 to 70, at least twelve months of employment history, rent not exceeding roughly half your documented monthly income, a CUIL or CUIT, a clean record in the financial system, issue within a day or two, and the option to add a co-signer’s income if yours falls short. That is a resident’s profile, which is the catch. Cover is typically unpaid rent, ordinary building charges and holdover after expiry; physical damage and pre-existing debt are usually excluded.
2. Fianza empresarial — a different product with a similar name
Several companies act as the guarantor themselves under the Civil and Commercial Code’s fianza rules rather than issuing an insurance policy. They are not insurers, are not supervised by the insurance regulator, and back the obligation with their own balance sheet. In practice that often means looser underwriting and more willingness to look at foreign income — and weaker regulatory recourse if the company fails.
So the question to ask, in Spanish, is exactly this: ¿Es un seguro de caución emitido por una aseguradora autorizada por la Superintendencia de Seguros de la Nación, o una fianza de una empresa garante? Then check the insurer against the superintendency’s own register.
We found one provider that publicly and verifiably targets foreigners, accepting a passport and reviewing local or foreign salary, freelance work, business income and bank history case by case. We are not going to list the others we found claiming the same thing, because those claims sit on commercial pages that read as machine-generated and we could not confirm any of them. Get a pre-approval before you start viewing apartments — a “yes, subject to approval” is worth nothing to a landlord on the day.
3. Temporary and furnished rentals — the route most foreigners actually take
Furnished, utilities and wifi usually included, priced in dollars, commonly three to twelve months, no garantía, minimal documentation — a passport plus some proof of work or study. The cost is the trade: roughly two to three times a comparable unfurnished local lease.
The legal layer here is subtle and nearly everyone gets it wrong. Tourist and rest rentals of up to three months are governed by hospedaje rules rather than tenancy law — you are closer to a hotel guest than a tenant. In the City of Buenos Aires, any unit offered as tourist temporary accommodation must be entered in the city’s register of temporary tourist rental properties, created by a 2019 city law, with the city tourism board as the enforcing authority; registration is free and online. (The widely-repeated claims that the registration number must appear in every platform listing, and that platforms delist non-compliant ads, we could not confirm from the tourism board itself.)
The genuinely changed nuance: before December 2023, “temporario” was partly a device to escape the mandatory three-year minimum term. There is no minimum term any more, so a landlord can legally sign a foreigner a straight six- or twelve-month furnished housing contract without dressing it up as tourism. The temporary/permanent line now matters mainly for tax treatment, city registration and consumer protections — not for how long you can stay. Most English guides still explain it the old way.
4. Paying months up front
Real, and now unambiguously legal: article 1196 lets the parties set any deposit amount in any currency, so the old one-month cap is gone. Expat accounts describe two to four months as the common foreigner workaround, though that is blog-sourced and should be read as “commonly reported” rather than as a norm.
The risks are worth stating plainly: money paid up front is unsecured; the return mechanism is whatever the contract says, because article 1196 explicitly leaves the form of return to the parties; and a large cash transfer to a stranger is the exact shape of the most common rental scam. Never transfer before seeing the unit in person, insist on a draft contract and the owner’s or representative’s ID, get a written dated receipt for every payment, and treat a demand for 100% up front by international transfer to a private account as the red flag it is.
Money: the two rules that are actually checkable
Commission. In the City of Buenos Aires, for a housing lease where the tenant is a natural person, it is prohibited to charge the tenant any real-estate commission or report-gathering fee, and the commission charged to the landlord is capped at 4.15% of the total contract value. That is Ley 5859 of 2017, amending Ley 2340, and we read it at the city legislature’s own archive: article 1 sets the cap “a cargo del locador”, article 2 prohibits requiring or receiving “comisiones inmobiliarias y/u honorarios por la intermediación o corretaje a locatarios”, and articles 4 and 5 make agencies publish that fact in listings and in their offices.
Read the scope, because it is where foreigners land. Every one of those clauses is written for “locaciones de inmuebles con destino habitacional en los que el locatario sea una persona física”. So by the statute’s own wording it does not reach offices, commercial premises, or a lease taken in a company’s name — and a short furnished tourist contract is a live question rather than a settled one. Secondary sources say 4% to 6% is freely negotiated and routinely charged to the incoming tenant in those markets; we could not verify that figure and are flagging it rather than asserting it. What the statute does settle is that if you are renting a home in the city in your own name, a commission demanded from you is unlawful.
Indexation. New contracts overwhelmingly use the consumer price index, adjusted quarterly or four-monthly rather than annually. The old mandatory index is still published daily, because pre-2024 contracts still run on it. So ask two questions before signing: which index, and how often. A four-monthly clause in a year of roughly 20% inflation is a different apartment from an annual one.
Currency. Both peso and dollar leases are legal. The trade-off now has a legal edge: as amended, articles 765 and 766 remove the right to discharge a foreign-currency debt in pesos. If the contract says dollars, dollars is what is owed, unless the contract itself sets out a peso alternative and the rate to use. A dollar lease is predictable if you earn dollars and brutal if you earn pesos.
What the market looks like, with dates. Two official-ish sources disagree and we are not going to average them. The city statistics institute, using one listings portal, put median asking rents in the second quarter of 2026 at about $565,658 for a studio, $764,485 for a one-bedroom and $1,174,304 for a two-bedroom, and reported the stock of listings at a series high. A different portal’s August 2026 index put a one-bedroom at $886,527 and noted rents rose 19.2% year-to-date against roughly 21.5% inflation — a real fall. Different portals, different methods. And on the city statistics institute’s Q2 2026 numbers 25.4% of city listings are priced in dollars, rising to about 30% of two-bedrooms and about 44% of three- and four-bedroom units, concentrated in Palermo, Belgrano, Núñez and Recoleta. Our neighbourhood guide breaks that down barrio by barrio.
Do not forget expensas — the building charges tenants pay and newcomers forget. The most recent figure we could source is La Nación’s, which put the city average at $324,404 a month in March 2026. That is six months old in a 33%-inflation economy, so read it as a floor rather than as today’s number, and ask for the last three months’ bills before you sign — those describe the building you are actually renting.
The bill that is not law yet
An executive bill on the inviolability of private property passed the Senate in early August 2026 and sits in the Chamber of Deputies. It is not law as of 2026-09-13.
What it would do to renters: move all eviction actions onto the fastest procedural track, and require a landlord to formally notify a non-paying residential tenant and allow a short cure period before suing, with extra safeguards where minors, disabled people or vulnerable elderly people are involved.
The length of that cure period is genuinely unresolved in the reporting, and we are not going to paper over it: one outlet says the original draft cut it from ten days to three, a fact-checking outlet says the approved text extended it from three to ten, and accounts differ on whether the days are calendar or business days. The best available reading is around ten days in the Senate-approved text, and the text can still change in Deputies.
Commonly repeated, and now wrong
| Still circulating | The position as of 2026-09-13 |
|---|---|
| “You offer two guarantee options and the landlord must accept one” | Wrong since 2023-12-29. That was article 13 of Ley 27.551, repealed by DNU 70/2023. |
| “The guarantee cannot exceed five months’ rent” | Same repealed article. There is no cap on guarantees or deposits. |
| “The deposit is capped at one month, returned at the last month’s value” | Wrong. Article 1196 now lets the parties set any amount, any currency, any return mechanism. |
| “Residential leases have a three-year legal minimum” | Wrong. Article 1198: the term is whatever the parties agree. Two years is only a fallback if the contract is silent. |
| “Rent can only rise once a year, using the BCRA’s ICL index” | Wrong. Any index, public or private, at any frequency. In practice IPC, quarterly or four-monthly. |
| “You can leave penalty-free in the last three months” | Wrong — article 1221 bis was derogated. Exit costs 10% of the remaining rent, at any point. |
| “A dollar lease can always be paid in pesos at the official rate” | Wrong since the decree amended articles 765 and 766. |
| “The Senate struck down the mega-decree, so the rental law is back” | Wrong. Both chambers must reject it; Deputies never voted. It remains in force. |
| “Bring cash dollars — you will get double at the blue rate” | Dead since April 2025. The gap has collapsed to a few percent. The arbitrage that funded the whole expat-rental playbook is gone. |
| “There is a 30% PAIS tax on card spending” | PAIS applied up to and including 2024-12-22 and has not applied since. A 30% perception on account of income and wealth tax remains on card purchases abroad — a different tax, and creditable against what you owe if you file. |
| “64.6% of listings only accept a city property guarantee” | Dangerous. That is an August 2018 survey, published before Ley 27.551 existed and before it was repealed. Several 2026 blog posts re-date it as current. There is no verifiable current figure — we looked. |
| “Argentina has no rental law, so there are no rules” | Misleading. The Ley de Alquileres is gone; the Civil and Commercial Code still governs leases in full. The rules changed; they did not vanish. |
Common questions
Is a garantía legally required to rent in Buenos Aires?
No. There is no law requiring any guarantee, and since 29 December 2023 no law requiring the landlord to accept any particular one either. It is market custom backed by complete contractual freedom.
Can I just offer a bigger deposit instead of a garantía?
Legally yes — article 1196 of the Civil and Commercial Code removed every cap on deposits. Practically it depends entirely on the individual landlord, and it works most often outside the agency-mediated formal market.
Can a foreigner get a seguro de caución?
Sometimes. The standard underwriting file is built for residents: a CUIL or CUIT, roughly twelve months of Argentine work history, rent under about half your documented income and a clean local credit record. Products that take a passport and foreign income do exist. Get the pre-approval before you start viewing, because a conditional yes is worth nothing to a landlord on the day.
How much does renting in Buenos Aires cost a foreigner up front?
Budget roughly one to two months of rent for the guarantee product, plus the deposit, plus the first month, plus an agency fee on temporary contracts. Add expensas, the monthly building charges tenants pay and newcomers forget — La Nación put the city average at $324,404 a month in March 2026, which is a floor rather than a current figure.
Should I sign a lease in pesos or in dollars?
Both are legal. Since the December 2023 amendment to articles 765 and 766, a dollar debt must be paid in dollars unless the contract itself provides a peso alternative and the rate to use. A dollar lease is predictable if you earn dollars and brutal if you earn pesos; a peso lease with a four-monthly inflation clause is the mirror image.
How long will my contract be and can I leave early?
Whatever you sign — there is no legal minimum term any more. You may terminate at any time by paying 10% of the rent remaining on the term, and the old penalty-free exit in the final three months no longer exists.
Can a tourist get a CUIL in Argentina?
Not on the documents the social security agency lists. Without a DNI it accepts one of three: a migration file showing your current residence type and entry to the country, a passport recording a residence type it says must not be tourist or permanent, or a consular or treaty entry permit. An ordinary visa-free tourist arrival produces none of them, so in practice no — and that breaks the chain for most guarantee products, which require a CUIL or CUIT.