Pre-professional internship agreements in Peru: your rights as a practicante

What is a pre-professional internship agreement?

In Peru, pre-professional internships are a statutory training modality (“modalidad formativa laboral”) governed by Law 28518 (Ley sobre Modalidades Formativas Laborales) and its implementing regulation, Supreme Decree 007-2005-TR. Unlike a normal employment contract, the internship agreement links three parties — the student, the company, and the training institution (university or institute) — and its stated purpose is for the student to “apply their knowledge, skills and abilities” in a real work setting, as a complement to their academic training.

This distinction matters because the law treats an intern differently from an employee: you receive a “subvención económica” (stipend), not a “salario” (salary), and you do not automatically get benefits like Compensación por Tiempo de Servicios (CTS) or the statutory bonuses that apply to the general labor regime. If you want to compare this to what a regular employee is entitled to, see bonuses, CTS and vacation in Peru.

What the law DOES guarantee you as an intern

Even though the level of protection is lower than for an employee, the law does not leave interns with no rights at all. At a minimum, you are guaranteed:

• A minimum stipend. If you work the maximum allowed hours, it cannot be lower than one current minimum wage (Remuneración Mínima Vital, RMV); if your hours are fewer, it must be paid proportionally. This minimum cannot be waived — even if the agreement says otherwise, the company cannot legally pay you less.
• A cap on hours. Under Article 44 of Law 28518, pre-professional internship hours cannot exceed six hours a day or thirty hours a week. For prácticas profesionales (post-graduate internships), the cap is eight hours a day or forty-eight a week.
• Insurance against illness and accidents. The company must enroll you in EsSalud or contract equivalent private insurance from the start of your internship, under Article 42 of the same law.
• A specific learning or training plan — not a generic job position dressed up as an “internship.”

The critical issue: when the agreement gets reclassified

The most important risk for an intern is that the agreement gets “desnaturalizado” — reclassified — meaning that, in practice, the relationship stops looking like a training arrangement and becomes disguised ordinary employment. This can happen, for example, when:

Article 51 of Law 28518 says: «Se desnaturalizan las modalidades formativas y se entiende que existe una relación laboral común en los siguientes casos» — training arrangements are reclassified and an ordinary employment relationship is deemed to exist in these cases. There are seven:

1. There is no duly signed training agreement.
2. You are not trained in the specific occupation, or you do tasks unrelated to the studies set in the agreement.
3. You keep going after the agreement’s end date or its extension, or past the legal maximum term.
4. You are signed up as an intern when you already had an employment relationship with the company, directly or through an intermediary, unless you are placed in a different activity.
5. The company filed false documents with the labor authority to obtain benefits under the law.
6. There is simulation or fraud against the law.
7. The company exceeds the legal caps on the share of interns.

We took this text from the Ministry of Labor’s reproduction on its FAQ page, not from the text published in El Peruano.

Exceeding the maximum hours (art. 44) or having no insurance (art. 42) is not on that list. Sunafil inspects both, but the law does not say that either one alone turns the agreement into employment.

When an agreement is reclassified, the consequence is significant: the law deems an ordinary employment relationship to exist. It follows that the person is an employee of the company, entitled to payroll and statutory benefits, although article 51 does not say it in those words. In a given case, Sunafil (on inspection) or a judge decides it. This mechanism is different from the reclassification of a fixed-term employment contract, even though the underlying logic — that the real facts on the ground override what a document says — is the same.

A gray area worth knowing: maximum duration

There is a genuine, unresolved legal dispute here. Article 13 of Law 28518 sets the maximum duration of prácticas profesionales (post-graduate internships) at 12 months. However, the more recent Law 31396 reportedly extended that cap to 24 months for the private sector, without expressly repealing the earlier rule — leaving legal commentators divided on which one controls in a given case. For prácticas preprofesionales (pre-graduation internships), duration is usually tied to your university or institute’s curriculum, so it is worth checking your specific agreement rather than assuming a fixed number.

What to do if you think your “internship” is really disguised employment

If you suspect your agreement has been misused, the first step is to gather evidence: the hours you actually worked, the duties you actually performed, and any communications treating you like a regular employee. With that evidence, you can file a complaint with SUNAFIL, the agency responsible for enforcing compliance with training-modality agreements, which in many cases allows anonymous complaints.

Check your case

The Intern or employee? Payroll checker tool checks whether the facts of your case match the cases in article 51, with the text of the norm and what to do.