Visitax 2026: How Much Is the Cancun Tourist Tax and How Do You Pay It?

Visitax in 2026: the 30-second answer

Visitax is Quintana Roo’s mandatory fee for foreign visitors to Cancún, Playa del Carmen, Tulum and the rest of the state. In 2026 it costs 293 pesos per person — about US$16–17 — including children and babies. Pay it once per trip, only at visitax.gob.mx, any time before you fly home.

That is the whole thing. The reason people get it wrong is that most pages ranking for “Visitax” are out of date or selling something. Several still say 283 pesos (the 2025 price), some still say children under 15 are free (a 2021 rule), and a handful of lookalike sites charge 500 pesos or more for the same QR code.

Below: the exact 2026 amount and why it changes every February, who pays and who does not, how to pay for a whole family in one go, what really happens at the airport if you forget, and how Visitax differs from the other fees you will see on your trip.

How much is Visitax in 2026, and why the price keeps changing

The official payment form on visitax.gob.mx charges 293 pesos per person. We checked it on 25 September 2026.

The number is not arbitrary. Article 51-Octies of Quintana Roo’s fees law sets Visitax at 2.5 UMA. The UMA is Mexico’s official reference unit, used for fines and fees instead of a fixed peso amount. The 2026 UMA is 117.31 pesos, in force from 1 February 2026 to 31 January 2027. Multiply by 2.5 and you get 293.28, rounded to 293.

So the fee moves every 1 February, when the new UMA takes effect. That is why so many pages are wrong: they were written in an earlier year and never updated.

A proposal to make hotels collect Visitax from 2026 was withdrawn in December 2025 after hotelier opposition, so there is no new mechanism this year — just the automatic UMA update. If you are travelling after 1 February 2027, expect the price to tick up again by a few pesos.

Who has to pay Visitax — and who does not

The law applies to foreign visitors entering Quintana Roo. That covers Cancún, Isla Mujeres, Costa Mujeres, Puerto Morelos, Playa del Carmen, Akumal, Tulum, Holbox, Cozumel and Bacalar. It applies whichever airport you use, including Tulum.

• Children and babies pay. The official FAQ says plainly that there is no adult or child rate. Any page quoting an under-15 or under-4 exemption is describing the 2021 rules.
• Mexican citizens do not pay. The law only covers “foreign visitors”.
• Cruise passengers do not pay Visitax. Instead they pay a separate US$5 Quintana Roo fee, collected by the cruise line when the cruise is booked.
• Arrivals through the Belize border are exempt. This is the only entry route the law excludes. Older articles call it a 10% discount; the current law says full exemption.
• Temporary and permanent residents are widely reported as exempt, but we could not find official wording that says so. Carry your residency card when you fly.

How to pay Visitax step by step (and pay for your whole family at once)

The official form takes about five minutes. You need each traveller’s full name and passport number, your arrival and departure dates, and a card.

1. Type visitax.gob.mx yourself. Do not click an ad or a search result that looks official. Check that the address ends in .gob.mx.
2. Choose the number of travellers: 1 to 10. A family or small group can pay together in one transaction.
3. Enter each person’s name and passport number. The QR codes are tied to the passport, so type it exactly as printed.
4. Enter your arrival and departure dates and pay by card. The total should be exactly 293 pesos times the number of travellers.
5. Download every QR code and keep them on your phone, ideally as screenshots that work offline.

For a family of four the total in 2026 is 1,172 pesos. For a group of ten, 2,930 pesos. If you are travelling with more than ten people, simply run a second payment.

Lost the QR codes? Use Recover your receipt on the same site and search with each passport number. The official site says receipts stay downloadable for at least one year after departure.

What really happens at Cancún Airport if you have not paid

This is where most articles either scare you or shrug. Here is what the evidence actually supports.

It is mandatory. Visitax is a legal fee, not a donation, and Air Transat’s own passenger page tells travellers to show the receipt at the airport before leaving Mexico.

Checks happen, but not systematically. In 2026 travel press reported officials doing spot checks before the escalators to security in Terminals 3 and 4. Travellers who had not paid were pulled aside and made to pay on their phones.

We found no official rule on denied boarding and no published fine. Pages that say you will be refused boarding, or fined a set amount, do not cite a source for it. The real risk is losing twenty minutes at the busiest point of your departure, with a queue for security behind you.

That timing is why paying before departure day matters. Terminal 3 and Terminal 4 are the two busiest buildings at the airport, and they are exactly where the checks were reported.

Paying at the airport costs more — and fake websites cost most

Visitax help desks have operated inside Terminals 2, 3 and 4. They are a fallback, not a bargain. In December 2025 travellers reported being charged 525 pesos per person at a Terminal 2 module, against 293 online, and a July 2026 report described sellers at the airport charging nearly double.

Lookalike websites are worse, because you may pay more and still not be registered. In December 2025 Quintana Roo’s tourism authority identified around 20 fraudulent Visitax sites charging 500 pesos or more, named visitaxmex.com as one of them, and referred the cases to the state prosecutor.

One more trap: cancunairport.com is not the airport’s official website. It is a commercial site. Cancún Airport is run by ASUR, whose site is asur.com.mx. Some third-party sites use government logos and describe themselves as “authorised” while charging more than 293 pesos. None of them is necessary.

Visitax vs the other fees on your Cancún trip

Most confusion comes from the fact that three or four different charges exist, run by three different levels of government. Here they are side by side, with 2026 amounts.

Municipal fees are set as a percentage of the UMA in each municipality’s revenue law (reformed December 2025), so the peso amounts above are calculated with the 2026 UMA of 117.31 and rounded. Your hotel bill will show the exact figure. A proposal to raise the federal non-resident fee to 1,334.80 pesos in 2027 is under discussion but is not law.

Where the money goes

Visitax is administered by the Quintana Roo tax service (SATQ), under the state finance ministry. According to reporting on the trust that receives it, the money is split 10% to tourism promotion and crisis control, 40% to sargassum control, beach cleaning and ecosystem conservation, and 50% to strategic projects with tourism impact. We could not open the state’s own page to confirm the split, so treat it as reported rather than official.

Compliance has been low. When the hotel-collection plan was dropped in December 2025, the state cut its 2026 Visitax revenue projection from more than 3.2 billion pesos to about 700 million. That gap is the reason airport spot checks keep coming back.

A departure-day checklist that avoids the airport stress

Visitax is not something your transfer company sells or collects, and nobody at TT & More will ask you for it. But it lands on the same day as your ride to the airport, which is why it belongs on your departure checklist. Here is the order that works:

• The night before: confirm Visitax is paid for every traveller, including children, and that each QR code opens offline.
• The night before: confirm your pickup time, hotel lobby, passenger count and luggage with your driver.
• At check-out: check the environmental sanitation fee on your hotel bill. It is separate, and it is normal.
• At the airport: check which terminal your airline departs from before you get out of the vehicle. Our terminal guide has the full 2026 list.
• Anyone offering to “collect Visitax” in cash outside official channels: decline politely.

For every way of getting to and from the airport, with prices, see our Cancún airport transportation guide. For the arrivals side of the trip — where your driver waits and how to get past the timeshare desks — read the Cancún airport pickup guide.