Maquiladora Transfer Pricing Safe Harbor in Mexico: the 6.9% and 6.5% Tests

Mexico's maquiladora safe harbor is a minimum taxable profit. Under Article 182 of the Ley del Impuesto sobre la Renta, your maquiladora reports at least the higher of 6.9 percent of the assets used in the operation or 6.5 percent of its operating costs. In exchange it is treated as arm's length, and your foreign company is treated as having no permanent establishment in Mexico.

Since fiscal 2025 the safe harbor is the practical route to that protection, because the last maquila advance pricing agreements expired with tax year 2024. This guide sets out the tests, the valuation rules behind them, a worked example and the filing that now decides whether the safe harbor applies at all.

If you are still choosing a structure, shelter or your own entity and the corporate tax guide for foreign companies cover the wider decision.

What is the maquiladora safe harbor?

Article 182 says a maquiladora meets the arm's length rules of Articles 179 and 180, and the foreign resident it works for has no permanent establishment, "cuando las empresas maquiladoras determinen su utilidad fiscal como la cantidad mayor" of two computations:

Test	Base	Rate
Asset test	Total value of the assets used in the maquila operation during the year, whoever owns them	6.9 percent
Cost test	Total operating costs and expenses, under Mexican financial reporting standards, with five exclusions	6.5 percent

The higher figure is the taxable profit, and Article 9 taxes it at 30 percent. On the asset leg, that is about 2.07 percent of the asset base in tax; on the cost leg, about 1.95 percent of the cost base.

The protection reaches your foreign company through Article 181. It states that a foreign resident does not have a permanent establishment because of its dealings with a maquiladora, provided a tax treaty applies and the maquiladora "cumplan con lo señalado en el artículo 182." The United States and Canada both have treaties with Mexico.

Which operations qualify as maquila?

Article 181 sets four conditions, and all of them have held since 2014:

1. Goods and program. Goods you supply under a maquila contract and an IMMEX program are imported temporarily, transformed or repaired, and returned abroad, including through virtual operations. Scrap does not need to be returned.
2. Income. All of the maquiladora's productive income comes from the maquila operation. RMF rule 3.20.2 allows related income, such as services to related parties, leasing, scrap sales or interest, up to 10 percent of maquila income, if segmented, priced at arm's length and taxed outside the safe harbor.
3. Domestic inputs. Mexican or non-temporarily imported inputs are exported or returned with the temporarily imported goods.
4. Machinery. The foreign party to the maquila contract owns at least 30 percent of the machinery and equipment used. Rule 3.20.3 measures this on the last day of the year, on customs value, and criterion 49/ISR/N excludes tools, molds and spare parts from the count.

Goods sold in Mexico without an export pedimento sit outside the regime. Article 181 states that their processing "no se considerará operación de maquila" and that Article 182 does not apply to them. A maquiladora also cannot count buy-sell income from finished goods as maquila income.

Why is the safe harbor now the only practical route?

Because the alternatives ended. The 2022 tax reform, published on 12 November 2021, repealed the Article 182 paragraph that let a maquiladora confirm arm's length pricing through an advance pricing agreement.

The Executive's explanatory memorandum gave the numbers behind the change: 567 maquiladoras chose an APA for 2019 and 456 for 2020, against "casi 700" and "poco más de 600" on the safe harbor. Its stated aim was that "todas las maquiladoras sin excepción" comply through the safe harbor.

APAs requested before 2022 ran their terms out. On the US side, the IRS's renewal of the Qualified Maquiladora Approach "applies for the Mexican taxable years ending December 31, 2020, through December 31, 2024." No public announcement extends it to 2025 or later. Holland & Knight describes a narrow bilateral APA window for groups whose 2020 to 2024 APA programs were still open.

The law itself has not moved since. The income tax law was last amended in April 2024, the 2026 economic package left it alone, and none of the 2026 modifications to the Resolución Miscelánea Fiscal touches the maquila rules in Chapter 3.20.

What goes into the 6.9 percent asset base?

Every asset in Mexico used "en su totalidad o en parte" in the maquila operation, including those owned by you or a related party and lent or leased to the maquiladora. Article 182 then sets how each class is valued:

Asset	How it is valued
Inventory you own in Mexico	Raw-material value only, even for work in progress and finished goods; the average of the 12 monthly averages
Machinery you own	Your acquisition cost, less tax depreciation at the maximum rates, counted to the middle of the year
Fully depreciated machinery	Never below 10 percent of your acquisition cost
The maquiladora's own assets	Under rule 3.20.8: average financial assets, including receivables and bank deposits, plus fixed assets at tax value
Assets leased from a Mexican related party or an unrelated foreign lessor	May be excluded, unless you or a foreign related party owned them before

Counting an asset only in proportion to its use in the maquila operation requires SAT authorization on ficha 59/ISR. Two levers are easy to miss. Inventory you leave in Mexico raises the base month by month, and a slow-paid intercompany receivable sits in the maquiladora's own financial assets.

What goes into the 6.5 percent cost base?

Operating costs and expenses incurred by the maquiladora, under Mexican financial reporting standards and at historical value, with five exclusions:

• Materials and goods the foreign principal buys on its own account.
• Depreciation of the maquiladora's own assets is taken at the tax rates rather than book rates.
• Inflation effects.
• Financial expenses.
• Extraordinary or non-recurring items.

Costs incurred abroad enter only in two cases: services directly related to the operation paid abroad for the maquiladora's own Mexican obligations, and salaries of foreign staff who spend more than 183 days in Mexico within 12 months.

A worked example

An illustrative own-entity maquiladora for fiscal 2026, in pesos. The depreciation rate is an assumption, and the plant is leased from an unrelated Mexican landlord, so the building stays out of the asset base in this illustration.

Asset base	MXN
Your inventory in Mexico, at raw-material value, average of monthly averages	45,000,000
Your production line: cost 150,000,000, bought January 2022, 10 percent a year, 54 months to June 2026	82,500,000
Your fully depreciated press: cost 20,000,000, at the 10 percent floor	2,000,000
The maquiladora's receivables, cash and own fixed assets	30,000,000
Total	159,500,000
6.9 percent	11,005,500

Cost base	MXN
Payroll, social security and benefits	120,000,000
Plant rent	9,000,000
Utilities, maintenance and consumables	14,000,000
Tax depreciation of the maquiladora's own assets	3,000,000
Seconded engineer, nine months in Mexico, paid abroad	4,000,000
Excluded: materials you bought (300,000,000), interest (1,500,000), one-off restructuring (2,000,000)	0
Total	150,000,000
6.5 percent	9,750,000

The asset test sets the floor at 11,005,500 pesos of taxable profit, and the tax at 30 percent is 3,301,650 pesos. That is a return of about 7.3 percent on the cost base.

A quick check tells you which leg binds. Because 6.5 divided by 6.9 is about 0.942, the asset test governs whenever the asset base exceeds roughly 94.2 percent of the cost base. In this example, every additional 10 million pesos of your inventory held in Mexico adds 690,000 pesos of taxable profit and 207,000 pesos of tax.

If the maquiladora's own books show a lower profit, say 6,000,000 pesos, the gap of 5,005,500 pesos has to be closed for the DIEMSE to show the safe harbor amount, usually by adjusting the intercompany fee. Confirm the mechanics with your Mexican tax adviser.

What filing decides whether the safe harbor applies?

The DIEMSE, the annual information return for manufacturing, maquila and export-service companies, filed on SAT's official form 52. Article 182 has required it since the 2022 reform, and it is a condition, not a formality:

"En caso de que no se presente dicha declaración o no refleje lo dispuesto en este párrafo, no se podrá aplicar lo establecido en este artículo."

SAT's filing sheet sets the deadline as June of the year after the fiscal year, so the return for fiscal 2026 is due by June 2027. A maquiladora that files it on time can skip the local transfer pricing file for its maquila operations under rule 3.9.12, and it is exempt from the related-party information return of Article 76 for the maquila operation.

The IMMEX program sits underneath all of this. Article 181 requires a program authorized by the Secretaría de Economía, and in 2026 Economía cancelled 189 programs for a missing annual report. Without the program, the maquila definition, and with it the safe harbor, falls away. The IMMEX IVA certification guide covers the customs side of the same calendar.

What happens if the safe harbor is missed?

It depends on how you hold the operation.

Your own entity. Article 182 cannot be applied, and Article 181's no-PE protection falls away with it. The maquiladora returns to the general transfer pricing rules: documentation, the related-party return due 15 May, and the Article 180 methods. Whether your foreign company then has a permanent establishment is decided under Articles 2 and 3 of the income tax law and the treaty, which is where the exposure from equipment and inventory you own in Mexico arises.

A shelter. Article 183-Bis is more direct. When the shelter breaches its obligations, SAT gives it 30 calendar days to cure. If it does not, the shelter is suspended from the importers' register and the foreign client is considered to have a permanent establishment in Mexico from that point.

How does it work under a shelter?

Article 183 gives a foreign company that is unrelated to its shelter the no-PE protection with no time limit since 2020, provided its home country has an information-exchange agreement with Mexico. The United States and Canada both qualify under RMF rule 2.1.2.

The shelter computes your taxable profit separately, at the higher of the two tests, counting "exclusivamente los activos fijos e inventarios de materia prima" used in your operation and the costs attributable to it. It pays the 30 percent tax and is jointly liable for it. The tax is legally yours, and in market practice it is billed to you; our shelter program cost guide covers how it appears on the invoice.

Clients are never pooled. Two clients in the same shelter, one asset-heavy and one labor-heavy, each pay on their own binding test, which can produce more taxable profit in total than one combined calculation would. Ask any shelter to show your calculation separately. Article 183 also bars you from selling machinery, tooling or inventory to the shelter before or during the arrangement.

Does the 2027 tax package change anything?

Not for the safe harbor itself. The income tax initiative of 8 September 2026 leaves Articles 181 to 183-Bis untouched. It proposes a cap on deductions and tax losses for companies with income above 50 million pesos, and its proposed Article 78-E excludes companies "que lleven a cabo operaciones de maquila en términos del artículo 182," except for income from sales in Mexico.

As of 12 October 2026 the initiative was before the Chamber of Deputies and was not law. Whether the carve-out reaches shelter clients, whose tax is computed under Article 183-Bis, is not settled by the text. Our 2027 economic package note covers the cap itself.

The bottom line

The maquila safe harbor sets your Mexican taxable profit at the higher of 6.9 percent of the assets used or 6.5 percent of operating costs, and buys your foreign company freedom from a Mexican permanent establishment. Since fiscal 2025 it is the practical route to that protection.

Three things decide the outcome: the asset base, which tends to bind for capital-intensive plants and grows with the inventory you keep in Mexico; the 30 percent machinery test at year end; and the DIEMSE, filed by June and showing the safe harbor profit.

The entity and legal structuring practice brings in the Mexican tax and legal counsel for the calculation and the filing. If you want a second read on your own numbers, a complimentary 30-minute call is available, and you will hear back within 24 hours.