Restaurant business obligations in Peru: license, ITSE and sanitary rules

Before you open: license and ITSE

Opening a restaurant, bar or café in Peru starts at your district’s municipality, not a sector ministry. Two procedures cover nearly everything you need to sort out before your first customer walks in.

The operating license (licencia de funcionamiento). Art. 7 of Ley N.º 28976 (Ley Marco de Licencia de Funcionamiento) sets the maximum a municipality can require: an application in the form of a sworn declaration, your RUC details, valid power of attorney if you act as a legal entity, and a sworn declaration that your building meets safety conditions (or, if your venue is high or very-high risk, ITSE documentation). Once granted, it never expires: “la licencia de funcionamiento tiene vigencia indeterminada” (art. 12).

The ITSE (Inspección Técnica de Seguridad en Edificaciones). This is where most businesses get confused about the order of procedures. D.S. N.º 002-2018-PCM resolves it by risk level: if your venue is low or medium risk, the ITSE is after the license (you file a sworn declaration, get the license, and the inspection follows). If it’s high or very-high risk, the ITSE is before: you’re inspected before the license can be granted.

Unlike the license, the ITSE certificate does expire: two years from issuance. And its cost isn’t a separate procedure — for venues that need an operating license, the ITSE’s processing fee is bundled into the license’s own fee (art. 6.1).

What’s already verified on this site

Once the license and ITSE are sorted, the rest of your customer-facing obligations are already covered by this site’s own verified pages — we don’t repeat the detail here, just gather them:

• A price list visible from outside the venue.
• A complaints book available to any customer who asks for it.
• A receipt or invoice for every purchase.
• The service charge: capped at 13%, and only chargeable if you disclose it before the customer consumes.
• The ban on smoking or vaping in enclosed spaces, with the required signage.

What’s still open: the health card and sanitary registration

This is where honesty matters between what the law says and what still gets charged in practice.

On the food-handler health card: the restaurant sanitary norm (NTS N.º 142-MINSA/2018/DIGESA) required periodic medical exams for food handlers. In 2022, Indecopi (Resolución N.º 0555-2022/CEB-INDECOPI) ruled that requirement an illegal bureaucratic barrier, since exercising an economic activity can’t be conditioned on a health exam under art. 13 of the Ley General de Salud. In practice, though, many municipalities still include and charge for it in their own fee schedule. This page can’t tell you whether your specific district has already dropped it — worth checking your municipality’s current fee schedule before assuming either way.

On the sanitary registration for the food you prepare: we could not confirm from an official source whether DIGESA’s sanitary-registration regime applies to food prepared and served on the spot, as opposed to packaged products sold under registration. That stays an open point on this page until it can be verified directly.