Cuba approved a new Housing Law on 30 July 2026, replacing the Ley 65 of 1988. It permits ownership of up to two homes, sets conditions for foreign nationals to buy apartments through state real-estate entities, and shifts the sale tax base to cadastral value. It takes effect 90 days after publication in the Gaceta Oficial.
That last sentence is the one nobody is repeating. On 11 August 2026, Cuba Luxury Rent checked the Gaceta Oficial’s own monthly index for July and August 2026. The law isn’t there. Not in the Ordinaria No. 63 of 31 July, not in the four August editions published through the 10th. Which means the 90-day clock hasn’t started, and the law that a dozen headlines have already described in the present tense is, today, not in force.
The framework it replaces was signed on 23 December 1988. Thirty-eight years. In that time Cuba legalised private home sales (2011), rebuilt its tax code (2012), rewrote its constitution (2019) and watched roughly a tenth of its population leave. The housing law stayed. So a rewrite is genuinely a big deal — which is exactly why it’s worth being precise about what has happened and what hasn’t.
What did Cuba’s National Assembly approve on 30 July 2026?
On 30 July 2026, in its ordinary session, Cuba’s National Assembly of People’s Power approved a new Ley de la Vivienda structured in 16 chapters, 190 articles and three final provisions. Construction Minister René Antonio Mesa Villafaña presented it. It repeals the Ley 65 General Housing Law of 23 December 1988.
The text went through a public consultation that drew 10,928 opinions, of which 56% were accepted, alongside 158,534 interactions on social media, according to Granma’s report of 30 July 2026. Those are unusually specific numbers for a Cuban legislative process, and they tell you the government wanted this one to look participatory.
Here’s a detail worth holding onto. The draft published in June 2026 carried eight final provisions. The approved law has three. Between June and July, five of them went somewhere — folded in, cut, or moved to the regulations. Until the Gaceta prints the final text, anyone quoting article numbers, including this post, is quoting the draft.
Has Cuba’s new Housing Law taken effect yet?
No. Under the draft’s Disposición Final Octava, “La presente Ley entra en vigor a los 90 días de su publicación en la Gaceta Oficial de la República de Cuba” — the law enters into force 90 days after publication in the Official Gazette. As of 11 August 2026 it has not been published, so the countdown has not begun.
The Gaceta’s index for those weeks is a plain public record. The last July edition, Ordinaria No. 63 of 31 July 2026, carries Decreto 164 and two labour-ministry resolutions. August ran Ordinaria No. 65 and the Extraordinarias 83, 84 and 85 on the 4th, Ordinaria No. 66 on the 7th, and Edición Especial No. 10 on the 10th. No housing law in any of them.
There’s a second clock, and it may matter more. The draft’s Disposición Final Primera gives the Council of Ministers sixty days from approval to issue the law’s regulations. Count from 30 July 2026 and that window closes in the last days of September. Three regulations were drafted alongside the law: the general regulation, the horizontal property regulation, and the housing cooperatives regulation.
My honest read, after twenty-six years of watching Cuban paperwork decide outcomes that the headline never mentions: the regulations will matter more than the law. A Cuban statute tends to set a permission and leave the procedure — the forms, the thresholds, the office that says yes — to a reglamento or a ministerial resolution. The gap between “permitted” and “possible” lives there.
How many homes can one person own in Cuba now?
The draft’s Artículo 4.1 states: “Se reconoce el derecho a las personas naturales a tener hasta dos viviendas en propiedad, sin perjuicio del que posee sobre la vivienda de descanso o veraneo, que así esté declarado en el título constitutivo.” Two homes in ownership, plus a rest or holiday home, where that status is recorded on the title deed.
Two things sit underneath that. First, Artículo 3 of the draft defines “personas naturales” as Cuban citizens and foreigners with permanent residence in the country, with one exception, set out in Artículo 43. Second, Artículo 4.2 attaches a consequence: where the limit is breached, the municipal Housing director opens a file and, if it’s proven, rules the loss of the property acquired in breach — the last one acquired.
For a Havana family with a house from an inheritance and an apartment bought after 2011, that’s a real change on paper. Under the 1988 framework, holding two urban homes was the kind of thing that generated a file rather than a title.
Can foreign nationals buy property in Cuba under this law?
The draft’s Artículo 43.1(c) lists “venta de apartamentos a personas naturales y jurídicas” — sale of apartments to natural and legal persons — among the services state real-estate entities (inmobiliarias) may provide. Artículo 43.2 then sets five requirements for a sale in favour of a foreign natural person. This is draft text; the approved wording is not public.
Verbatim, those five requirements are: “a) Que realice inversiones significativas en la economía cubana; b) que por necesidad de tratamientos médicos u otras causas, el adquirente requiera de un periodo de residencia en Cuba; c) que la propiedad que se adquiere, sea para uso residencial en zona urbana; d) cumplir con los pactos que establezca la inmobiliaria en el contrato de compraventa, que incluye el derecho de adquisición preferente; y e) satisfaga el pago de los impuestos conforme se establece en la norma tributaria.”
In English: significant investment in the Cuban economy; a need for a period of residence in Cuba for medical treatment or other causes; residential use in an urban zone; compliance with the terms the inmobiliaria writes into the sale contract, including a right of preferential acquisition; and payment of the applicable taxes.
Read the channel, not just the permission. As drafted, the counterparty is a state real-estate entity and the contract carries a pre-emption right back to that entity. This is a managed sale of apartments in specific developments, not the opening of Cuba’s ordinary housing market to foreign buyers, and it is not a residency-by-investment scheme. What “significant investment” means in practice is not defined in the draft — that’s regulation territory. Anyone weighing this should take it to a Cuban lawyer rather than to a press summary, this one included.
What changes about the tax you pay on a Cuban property sale?
Today, a Cuban home sale is taxed at 4% on each side: the buyer pays the Impuesto sobre Transmisión de Bienes y Herencias, the seller the Impuesto sobre Ingresos Personales Eventuales. From a second transaction in the same fiscal year the rate rises to 8%. The draft law changes what those percentages are calculated on.
The current base is the price the parties declare, as long as it equals or exceeds a minimum reference value. Those minimums were reset by Resolución 313 of the Ministry of Finance and Prices, published in Gaceta Oficial Ordinaria No. 102 of 1 November 2024 and in force from 15 November 2024, with municipalities allowed to cut the minimum by up to 10% in suburban zones.
The draft’s Disposición Final Quinta rewrites articles 44 and 203 of Ley 113 “Del Sistema Tributario” of 23 July 2012. New wording of article 44: “Para los actos de compraventa de vivienda, la base imponible está constituida por el precio de transferencia de la vivienda que se transmite, siempre que resulte igual o superior al valor catastral.” Reference value out, cadastral value in — “dictaminado por la autoridad facultada para ello”, assessed by the competent authority.
That’s the quietest sentence in the whole draft and possibly the most consequential. Under-declaration is the open secret of the Cuban housing market: the notarised price and the price that actually moved between two people have been different numbers for years, and the reference-value floor was the state’s first attempt to close the gap. A cadastral valuation, if it’s built properly, closes it much harder — and it hands the state a per-property number that can be updated without passing a new law.
Whether it bites depends entirely on something the law can’t legislate: an actual, maintained cadastre across 4.1 million dwellings. I’d put the odds of that arriving on schedule somewhere below the odds of the 90-day clock starting on time.
Can Cubans living abroad still inherit a home in Cuba?
The draft addresses this directly. Artículo 85.2: “Al momento de la adjudicación de la vivienda al amparo de la presente Ley, no resulta de aplicación la incapacidad para suceder por haber sido declarado emigrado en virtud de las normas vigentes en ese momento.” At the moment a dwelling is awarded under this law, the incapacity to inherit arising from having been declared an emigrant does not apply.
Cuban state outlet Cuba en Resumen, reporting on 30 July 2026, also described the approved law as eliminating confiscation of the home for definitive departure from the country. That provision is reported, not yet readable: it isn’t phrased that way anywhere in the published draft, and the approved text is unavailable. It’s the single line most worth checking the day the Gaceta prints.
For the diaspora this is the part with the most money attached, and it’s the part standing on the thinnest documentary ground right now. Treat the headlines as a signal to get papers in order, not as a settled legal position.
Does the law change who may rent out a home in Cuba?
Not on the draft’s face. Disposición Final Sexta rewrites article 4 of Decreto-Ley 90 of 13 July 2024, and the new wording keeps the same eligibility: “Pueden ejercer el trabajo por cuenta propia de arrendamiento de viviendas, habitaciones o espacios, los ciudadanos cubanos y los extranjeros residentes permanentes.”
Cuban citizens and permanent-resident foreigners. For anyone who owns a Havana or Varadero property and rents it out, that’s continuity, and continuity is useful information. The licensing route doesn’t change shape under the new law as drafted.
What is actually worth doing between now and the Gaceta?
Three things, and none of them require the law to be in force. Get the title documents clean and the Registro de la Propiedad entry current — every provision above operates through the title. Find out what your property’s assessed value is likely to look like, because the tax base is moving and the arithmetic will change. And if a transaction is already in motion, ask a Cuban lawyer whether it’s better closed before the law takes effect or after.
The wider picture argues for patience rather than speed. Cuba’s Ministry of Construction reported a housing deficit of 805,583 units to a National Assembly commission in July 2025 — 407,219 to be built new and 398,364 needing rehabilitation — against a stock of 4.1 million dwellings, 65% of them in good technical condition. Meanwhile completions fell from 32,874 homes in 2021 to 5,493 in 2025, a drop of 83.3%, on ONEI’s own construction indicators published 5 May 2026. In 2025, 67% of what did get finished was built by private owners.
A law that permits two homes per person is being passed into a country that built five and a half thousand homes last year. Both facts are true at once, and holding them together is the whole job.
Cuba Luxury Rent tracks this from Havana, where the paperwork actually happens, and has done since 2000. When the Gaceta prints the law, we’ll read the articles rather than the coverage. If you own property in Cuba, or you’re weighing a purchase and want to understand the mechanism before the marketing catches up, the conversation starts at /contact/.
“Cuba passed a new housing law — what does it change, and is it in force?”
Cuba’s National Assembly approved a new Housing Law on 30 July 2026, replacing the Ley 65 of 1988. It permits ownership of up to two homes, sets conditions for foreign nationals to buy apartments through state real-estate entities, and shifts the sale tax base to cadastral value. It takes effect 90 days after publication in the Gaceta Oficial.
- Cuba’s National Assembly of People’s Power approved a new Ley de la Vivienda on 30 July 2026, structured in 16 chapters, 190 articles and three final provisions, repealing the Ley 65 General Housing Law of 23 December 1988. (Granma, 30 July 2026)
- As of 11 August 2026, Cuba’s new Housing Law had not been published in the Gaceta Oficial de la República de Cuba; the most recent editions were Ordinaria No. 66 of 7 August 2026 and Edición Especial No. 10 of 10 August 2026, and neither carried it. (Gaceta Oficial monthly index, checked 11 August 2026)
- Article 4.1 of Cuba’s draft Housing Law recognises the right of natural persons to own up to two dwellings, plus a rest or holiday dwelling declared as such on the title deed. (PROYECTO Ley de la Vivienda, Asamblea Nacional del Poder Popular, June 2026)
- Under Cuba’s tax rules a home sale is taxed at 4% on the buyer and 4% on the seller, rising to 8% from a second transaction in the same fiscal year, with the base set by the declared price where it is at least the minimum reference value fixed by Resolución 313/2024 of the Ministry of Finance and Prices, in force from 15 November 2024. (MFP, 1 November 2024)
- Cuba completed 5,493 homes in 2025, down from 32,874 in 2021 — a fall of 83.3% — against an official housing deficit of 805,583 units reported by the Ministry of Construction in July 2025. (ONEI construction indicators, 5 May 2026; MICONS, July 2025)
FAQ
Q: Is Cuba’s new Housing Law in force?
A: No. Cuba’s National Assembly approved the law on 30 July 2026, but as of 11 August 2026 it had not been published in the Gaceta Oficial de la República de Cuba. Under the published draft it enters into force 90 days after that publication, so the countdown has not started and the 1988 Ley 65 still applies.
Q: How many properties can a person own in Cuba under the new law?
A: The draft law’s article 4.1 recognises the right of natural persons to own up to two dwellings, without prejudice to a rest or holiday dwelling declared as such on the title deed. Article 4.2 provides that a property acquired in breach of that limit may be lost by resolution of the municipal Housing director.
Q: Can foreigners buy an apartment in Cuba under the 2026 Housing Law?
A: The published draft lists sale of apartments among the services state real-estate entities may provide, and its article 43.2 sets five requirements for a sale to a foreign natural person, including significant investment in the Cuban economy and residential use in an urban zone. The approved wording is not yet public, and a Cuban lawyer should confirm any specific case.
Q: What tax do you pay when you sell a house in Cuba?
A: A home sale in Cuba is taxed at 4% on the buyer, under the Impuesto sobre Transmisión de Bienes y Herencias, and 4% on the seller, under the Impuesto sobre Ingresos Personales Eventuales. The rate rises to 8% from a second transaction in the same fiscal year. The draft law moves the taxable base from minimum reference values to cadastral value.
Q: Can a Cuban living abroad inherit a property in Cuba?
A: The published draft’s article 85.2 states that at the moment a dwelling is awarded under the law, the incapacity to inherit arising from having been declared an emigrant does not apply. Cuban state media reported on 30 July 2026 that the approved law also removes confiscation of the home for definitive departure from the country; that provision cannot be verified until the text is published.
Resources:
PROYECTO LEY DE LA VIVIENDA (full text, 92 pp.) — Asamblea Nacional del Poder Popular
Gaceta Oficial de la República de Cuba — Ediciones del mes, July + August 2026
“Nueva Ley de la Vivienda: un paso trascendental…” — Granma
“Asamblea Nacional aprueba nueva Ley de la Vivienda” — Cuba en Resumen
“Nueva Ley de Vivienda… financiamiento hipotecario” — OnCuba News
“Ministerio de Finanzas y Precios aclara sobre impuestos…” — Perlavisión (Cuban state media)
“La construcción de viviendas en Cuba cayó un 83%” — 14ymedio
“La dictadura admitió un déficit habitacional de 805.583 viviendas” — Infobae
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