Mexico City's short-term-rental registration deadline arrived around 21 June with the enforcement mechanism already frozen by litigation. More than 400 amparos (constitutional injunctions that suspend a contested act for the people who file them), filed by hosts ahead of the deadline, block the 183-night annual occupancy cap, with the legal suspension running to mid-August at its outer edge1. The deadline passed mid-tournament with no published registration count and no enforcement announcement.
The Mexico City government, the Ayuntamiento CDMX (the city's elected administration), opened the registry on 22 May with a roughly 30-day window, having launched the three-property-per-host cap in late May with the registry inactive and corporate operators exempt. This fortnight the legal fire reversed direction. The residents' group Frente Aqui Somos, a Condesa-Roma housing collective, filed its own amparo, expediente 919/2025, against the city for failing to switch the registry on at all, against an original activation deadline of October 20242. The government now defends one regulatory act from both sides: hosts say it over-regulates, residents say it under-regulates.
That double bind matters because the cap was meant to slow displacement in the neighbourhoods where the World Cup is pushing nightly demand. The night limit binds individual hosts; it does not touch operators registered as companies, who hold roughly half of CDMX supply and sit outside the three-property cap entirely. The rule therefore constrains the small landlord while the corporate inventory the city worried about runs unchecked. An unbuilt registry had already left an estimated 274,000 tournament nights unregulated heading into kickoff, and the legislative proposal floated to suspend the cap for the tournament is now moot: the courts have suspended it without anyone needing to legislate it away.
Lawyers for the city make a procedural counter-case. An amparo suspends enforcement for the filer pending a merits ruling; it does not strike the cap down, and the mid-August horizon is the edge of the suspension window, not a repeal. The Ayuntamiento can still publish compliance data and pursue the corporate-operator question separately, and it has done neither so far.
