Building without a license in Peru: what risk does the owner run

What the law requires, and why it matters

Any building work in Peru — building, expanding, remodeling, fencing, or demolishing — generally requires a construction license (licencia de edificación) issued by the district municipality where the property is located. This isn’t mere paperwork: Law No. 29090, whose Texto Único Ordenado (TUO) was approved by Decreto Supremo No. 006-2017-VIVIENDA, is the national law that governs urban development and construction, and its Article 5 is explicit about what happens if it isn’t followed.

Article 5 says, in the part that matters here, that noncompliance with the law, its regulations, technical standards, or any other applicable provision — which obviously includes building without the corresponding license — constitutes an infraction subject to administrative sanction. That is not a minor irregularity or a gray area: by legal definition, it is an infraction.

What “infraction subject to administrative sanction” actually means in practice

This is the point that causes the most confusion, and the reason this page cannot give you a single nationwide amount: Article 5 of Law 29090 does not itself set the sanction. Instead, it delegates the specific regulation — inspection, guarantees, the exact classification of infractions, and how sanctions are determined — to the law’s implementing regulation, approved by supreme decree, and in practice, to each municipality through its own Cuadro de Infracciones y Sanciones Administrativas (CISA, infraction and sanction table).

The current national regulation on construction licenses (the Reglamento de Licencias de Habilitación Urbana y de Edificación, approved by Decreto Supremo No. 029-2019-VIVIENDA) is the norm that fills in that framework at the national level. But the exact fine amount, its severity, and the applicable corrective measures — work stoppage, demolition, and so on — are ultimately left to each municipality, which sets them in its own CISA.

In practical terms: there is no single national fine table for building without a license. What you can count on, because Law 29090 itself says so, is that you are facing a formal administrative infraction — not something a municipality can simply choose to overlook.

A real example: Miraflores’s infraction table

To make this concrete, it helps to see how one real municipality actually handles it. The district of Miraflores, in Lima, publishes its own Cuadro de Infracciones y Sanciones Administrativas (CISA), approved by Ordenanza No. 480-MM. In that table, infraction code 01-101 covers exactly this situation: carrying out general building work (expansion, remodeling, fencing, demolition) without the corresponding construction license. The fine set is 1 UIT (currently equivalent to S/ 5,500) or 30% of the declared value of the work, the corrective measure is stoppage and/or demolition and/or restoration or compliance adjustment, and the infraction is classified as very serious.

Three things about this example matter, read carefully:

• The fine is not a fixed amount in soles: it is “1 UIT or 30% of the declared value of the work” — the table does not spell out which of the two applies in a given case or on what criterion one is chosen over the other, so it’s worth not assuming which applies to you without confirming it with the municipality itself.
• The sanction is not limited to the fine. The corrective measure — stoppage, demolition, or restoration/compliance adjustment — is a separate consequence, and the one most feared in practice: your work can literally be stopped or, in the worst case, you can be ordered to tear it down.
• The “very serious” classification is Miraflores’s own decision. Another district could classify the same conduct differently, set a different amount, or order a different corrective measure — because, as explained above, national law does not impose a common table.

This example is meant to show the kind of real consequence you can face, not to calculate your fine. If you built without a license, the required step is to check your own municipality’s CISA, not Miraflores’s.

Can you regularize a building that has no license?

Sometimes, yes — but with a date cutoff that surprises a lot of people. D.S. No. 035-2006-VIVIENDA (the implementing regulation of Law No. 27157) sets out a procedure for regularizing buildings, but that procedure, under its Article 3, applies only to buildings built or demolished before July 21, 1999, without the corresponding license and/or compliance certificate. In other words, the case it covers is precisely a building put up without a license, as long as it predates that cutoff.

This has two readings:

• If your building predates July 21, 1999, and never had a license, there is a permanent regularization route available under this rule.
• If your building is later than that date, this specific regime does not cover you. There is no permanent, always-available national mechanism to regularize construction built without a license after July 21, 1999.
• There is one exception with fixed dates: article 30 of the TUO of Ley 29090 says buildings built “desde el 01 de enero de 2017 hasta el 17 de septiembre de 2018” are regularized individually by municipalities, and those built without a license “hasta el 17 de septiembre de 2018” can also be regularized jointly. We explain it in certificate of completion with changes and regularization.

That said, some municipalities have opened, through their own ordinances, additional regularization windows for construction built after that date. These windows change over time, tend to have limited validity periods, and are neither permanently guaranteed nor uniform across the country. Before assuming you can regularize your building, check directly with your municipality whether it currently has an ordinance open that covers your case — and if there isn’t one, don’t assume there is.

What to do in practice if you built without a license

Don’t wait to be inspected: the sooner you review your situation, the more real options you have. Before the municipality opens a sanction procedure, you decide how to act; afterward, you can only react to what it decides.

Get your own municipality’s CISA, not another district’s. Every municipality publishes it — usually on its transparency portal or within its Texto Único de Procedimientos Administrativos (TUPA) — and that is where you’ll find the infraction code, amount, and corrective measure that actually apply to you.

Check whether your building qualifies for regularization: first by date (before July 21, 1999, under D.S. 035-2006-VIVIENDA), and if not, ask your municipality directly whether a special ordinance is currently open for more recent construction.

Gather all existing documentation: plans, receipts for property taxes (arbitrios) or the property itself, dated photographs, and any prior record — even an informal one — of when it was built. This can be decisive in figuring out which regime applies to you.

Consider technical and legal support before making decisions, especially if the building is already finished and occupied: an architect or engineer can help you assess whether the construction meets applicable urban planning parameters, and a lawyer can advise you on the sanction procedure if one has already started.

This is not the same as other property problems

It’s worth clearly distinguishing this risk from others it’s often confused with.

It is not the same as a declaratoria de fábrica. The construction license is the permit needed before building; the declaratoria de fábrica is the later registry recognition that the building exists and of its characteristics (built area, number of floors, etc.). You can have a license and never have registered the declaratoria de fábrica, or — the case on this page — build without a license, which can also make it harder to obtain that declaratoria de fábrica later.

It is not the same as a land invasion. Building without a license on a property that is legitimately yours is an administrative problem with your municipality. A third party occupying your land without any right is a completely different problem, with its own possessory-defense routes — see our guide on land invasion and property trafficking in Peru if that’s your situation.

It is not the same as a building’s common expenses. If your unlicensed construction sits inside a building subject to the exclusive-ownership/common-ownership regime (a building with several owners), the obligations toward the Owners’ Association are a separate matter — we cover that in our guide on owners’ association and common expenses in Peru.

The bottom line: this varies by municipality

It’s worth spelling this out clearly, because it is the central finding of this page: Peruvian law does not set a single fine amount or an identical sanction procedure nationwide for building without a license. Law 29090 sets the principle — it is an administrative infraction — but expressly delegates the exact classification and the fine amount to the implementing regulation and, in practice, to each municipality. The Miraflores example (1 UIT or 30% of the value of the work, with possible stoppage or demolition) is real and useful for understanding the scale of the risk, but it is not a national figure: your own municipality can set a different amount, severity, or corrective measure. Always check your own district’s CISA before drawing conclusions about your case.