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SUMMARY
Panama City rents are still rising, and the latest data suggest the increase has accelerated rather than faded.
Closed apartment leases tracked by ACOBIR reached $12.57 per square meter in the first half of 2026, up 8.9% from a year earlier. Asking rents are moving even faster, with Encuentra24 data pointing to a 13.5% annual increase.
The gap between those two numbers is important. Landlords are testing higher prices, but completed transactions show tenants are not simply accepting every increase advertised online.
The current rise is broader than one luxury neighborhood. San Francisco, Bella Vista and Juan Díaz all recorded higher rents, although the pace varied considerably between them.
Panama City has also largely completed its nominal recovery from the rental slump of the early 2020s. Closed rents have risen about 53% from their 2021 trough and are now slightly above their 2015 nominal level.
That makes the latest acceleration more interesting. The market is no longer climbing from an obviously depressed base, yet new leases are still repricing upward.
Supply is part of the explanation. Developer inventory has fallen to its lowest level in years, and completed units have been absorbed faster than the new construction pipeline can immediately replace them.
Demand is being helped by several forces at once: more foreign residents, weak home sales, relatively expensive mortgage financing and continued demand for newer, professionally managed buildings in central districts.
Still, landlords do not have unlimited pricing power. ACOBIR apartments took roughly 81 days to rent in the first half of 2026 and closed at about a 3% discount to asking prices.
Higher rents are also not automatically producing better investment returns. Property purchase prices have risen too, leaving citywide gross yields broadly stable rather than surging alongside rents.
The most likely next phase is slower rent growth rather than an abrupt reversal. More construction is being approved, affordability will eventually constrain increases, and tenants can still trade down to older buildings or cheaper neighborhoods, but there is little evidence yet that Panama City rents have actually turned lower.
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Are Panama City rents still rising right now?
Yes. Panama City rents are still rising today, and the increase is showing up in both closed leases and apartments currently being advertised.
The strongest transaction evidence comes from ACOBIR’s MLS. Apartments rented through the system averaged $12.57 per square meter during the first half of 2026, compared with $11.54 a year earlier. We calculate that as an 8.9% increase.
The trajectory is becoming more interesting than the headline number. ACOBIR recorded $11.14 per square meter in the first half of 2024, meaning rents initially rose only 3.6% over the following year. Growth then accelerated to 8.9%. Panama City has gone from a gradual rental recovery to a much stronger upward move.
Listings tell an even hotter story. Encuentra24 data analyzed by Global Property Guide put average apartment asking rents at $14.70 per square meter in June 2026, up 13.5% from a year earlier. Asking prices and completed deals measure different things, but both are now clearly moving in the same direction.
| Panama City apartment rents | H1 2024 | H1 2025 | H1 2026 | Latest change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ACOBIR closed rent per m² | $11.14 | $11.54 | $12.57 | +8.9% YoY |
| Annual growth | — | +3.6% | +8.9% | Accelerating |
| Encuentra24 asking rent per m² | — | ≈$12.95 | $14.70 | +13.5% YoY |
| Overall reading | Recovering | Rising slowly | Rising faster | Clear upswing |
Why do Panama’s official rent numbers look almost flat?
Panama’s official rent data look flat because they mostly capture what existing tenants are paying, while the sharpest increases are happening when Panama City apartments come back onto the market.
The difference is huge. Global Property Guide’s latest update of Panama’s official rent-price series shows national rents falling 0.27% in 2025 after increasing only 0.63% in 2024. Quarterly changes have generally stayed within a few tenths of a percentage point for years.
Meanwhile, new Panama City leases tracked through ACOBIR have moved much faster, and online asking rents are up by double digits.
A tenant renewing quietly in the same apartment can therefore experience almost no change while someone searching for a similar apartment today faces a very different market.
So the apparently contradictory numbers are measuring different parts of the rental market. We are seeing strong repricing of apartments that become available, not a sudden 10% increase in the rent paid by every household across Panama.
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Is this still just a rebound from the cheap pandemic years?
No longer. Panama City rents originally bounced back from unusually depressed levels, but the market has now recovered almost the entire nominal decline of the previous decade.
ACOBIR’s longer series makes the cycle unusually clear. Apartment rents averaged $12.43 per square meter in the second half of 2015. They eventually fell to $8.21 in the first half of 2021, a drop of roughly 34%.
From that trough, closed rents have climbed about 53% to $12.57 per square meter.
That puts Panama City slightly above its 2015 nominal level. Inflation changes the picture, though: a dollar today buys less than a dollar did a decade ago. In real purchasing-power terms, rents have not exploded beyond all previous historical levels.
What has changed lately is the speed. The easy part of the post-pandemic recovery has already happened, yet rents accelerated again over the latest twelve-month period. It is getting harder to call this simple normalization.
| ACOBIR apartment rent | Rent per m² | Change from 2021 trough |
|---|---|---|
| H2 2015 | $12.43 | +51% |
| H1 2021 | $8.21 | — |
| H1 2024 | $11.14 | +36% |
| H1 2025 | $11.54 | +41% |
| H1 2026 | $12.57 | +53% |
Are rents rising across Panama City or only in the expensive neighborhoods?
The rent increase is broad enough to call it a Panama City trend, although some neighborhoods are moving much faster than others.
ACOBIR’s latest closed-rental data show San Francisco rising from $11.52 to $12.73 per square meter in one year. That works out to 10.5%.
Bella Vista increased from $11.35 to $12.18, or 7.3%. Juan Díaz went from $13.49 to $14.17, roughly 5%.
Three different submarkets therefore moved upward at the same time. San Francisco is an established central neighborhood, Bella Vista covers another major central residential zone, while Juan Díaz includes newer development areas such as Costa del Este.
The variation is still too large to treat the citywide average as something every landlord can copy. A well-run apartment in San Francisco has recently had much more pricing momentum than the 5% recorded in Juan Díaz.
| Area | H1 2025 rent/m² | H1 2026 rent/m² | YoY change |
|---|---|---|---|
| San Francisco | $11.52 | $12.73 | +10.5% |
| Bella Vista | $11.35 | $12.18 | +7.3% |
| Juan Díaz | $13.49 | $14.17 | +5.0% |
| Panama City overall | $11.54 | $12.57 | +8.9% |
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Are Panama City landlords asking for more than tenants will actually pay?
Yes. Panama City landlords are currently pushing asking rents faster than completed rents are rising, so some of the hottest advertised prices will probably be negotiated down.
Encuentra24’s average asking rent increased 13.5% year over year to $14.70 per square meter. Closed MLS rents rose 8.9% over a similar period.
We cannot subtract those figures and call the difference a precise negotiation discount because the properties and methodologies differ. The direction is still useful: landlord expectations have become more aggressive than the prices visible in completed MLS transactions.
ACOBIR gives us another check. Apartments closed at an average discount of around 3% from their asking price and took roughly 81 days to rent during the first half of 2026.
An 81-day marketing period hardly resembles a market where tenants have lost all bargaining power. Well-priced apartments can move quickly, but landlords who overshoot still have to wait or negotiate.
This is why the 13.5% listing increase should not be read as “Panama City rents are rising 13.5% for everyone.” Actual market-clearing prices are moving up strongly, just at a less extreme pace.
Which Panama City neighborhoods are expensive for renters now?
Costa del Este, Punta Pacífica and other premium districts remain expensive, but today’s rent gap between neighborhoods is often smaller than the gap in property purchase prices.
Recent market data put asking rents around $13 to $14 per square meter in some premium and central districts, while other established neighborhoods remain closer to $11 to $12.
Global Property Guide’s latest Panama City dataset also puts typical asking rent at about $1,650 per month for a one-bedroom apartment, $1,650 for a two-bedroom and $2,500 for a three-bedroom. Those figures come from listing-based research, so they describe what a new renter encounters rather than what every existing tenant pays.
Apartment size changes the monthly bill dramatically. A large Punta Pacífica apartment can easily cost several thousand dollars even when its price per square meter is not radically above a smaller unit elsewhere.
Comparing apartments only by monthly rent can therefore give the wrong impression. Panama City has premium neighborhoods, but size, age, furnishings and building quality can matter almost as much as the address.
| Panama City segment | Typical current rent indication | What it tells us |
|---|---|---|
| 1-bedroom | ≈$1,650/month | High entry price in professionally listed stock |
| 2-bedroom | ≈$1,650/month | Large variation by neighborhood and size |
| 3-bedroom | ≈$2,500/month | Family market becomes much more expensive |
| 4+ bedrooms | ≈$5,500/month | Small, luxury-heavy sample |
| Average asking rent | $14.70/m² | +13.5% YoY in Encuentra24 data |
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Are newer Panama City buildings pulling rents higher?
Yes. Newer and better-managed buildings currently have much stronger pricing power, and this helps explain why renters can see very different prices on the same street.
Panama Equity has repeatedly pointed to buildings under roughly 15 years old as the strongest part of the rental market. Newer towers usually offer more modern common areas, better gyms and pools, newer mechanical systems and management that appeals to foreign professionals and higher-income local tenants.
El Cangrejo shows how wide the gap can get. Panama Equity found individual newer projects asking roughly $16.50 to $21 per square meter, while an older property such as Cangrejo Bay was closer to $10.80.
That difference cannot be explained by neighborhood alone because the apartments are competing in roughly the same part of the city.
It also means a renter searching through premium listing portals may get a distorted impression of “Panama City rent.” The apartments appearing most prominently online often belong to the segment that has risen the fastest.
For owners, there is a catch. New apartments earn higher rents, but developers are also charging much higher purchase prices. A better monthly rent does not automatically produce a better investment return.
Is Panama City actually running short of apartments?
Panama City is not running out of apartments, but the large inventory cushion that kept rents weak for years has shrunk dramatically.
This is probably one of the most important structural changes behind today’s rental market.
Panama Equity, using Galería Inmobiliaria data, reported 16,311 units in the developer pipeline at the start of 2026, including presale, under-construction and recently completed apartments. That was the lowest level recorded in nine years.
More recent figures cited by Panama Equity put available new-unit inventory around 15,500, roughly 11% lower than a year earlier. Completed move-in-ready inventory had also fallen.
Panama City entered the 2020s carrying the legacy of a very large apartment-building cycle. Developers then slowed down, existing stock kept being absorbed, and fewer new apartments arrived behind it.
Renters do not need the city to reach a literal housing shortage before prices rise. Removing enough excess inventory is enough to change negotiations between landlords and tenants.
The market appears to have crossed that point.
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Will all the new construction bring Panama City rents back down?
Probably not soon. Panama City developers are responding to better conditions, but the new pipeline is more likely to slow future rent growth than push rents down immediately.
Construction approvals have started turning upward again. Data reported for Panama district show residential units associated with approved projects increasing from 1,473 during the first five months of 2025 to 2,332 over the comparable period of 2026.
That is a rise of roughly 58%.
The response makes sense. Rents are higher, new-build sale prices have increased and years of inventory absorption have made development more attractive again.
But an approved apartment is several steps away from becoming an apartment a tenant can rent. Financing, presales, construction and delivery can take years.
The more relevant question for renters today is how many completed units are actually competing for tenants. That stock remains tighter than it was a few years ago.
If the larger pipeline keeps advancing, the balance could look different later. For now, it does little to challenge the current direction of rents.
Are more foreigners helping push Panama City rents up?
Yes. Foreign arrivals appear to be adding meaningful demand to Panama City rentals, especially in central and premium neighborhoods, although migration alone cannot explain the whole increase.
Panama processed 18,415 new residency applications during the first half of 2025, according to immigration data reviewed by Panama Equity. That was around 40% more than during the same period one year earlier.
Colombia, Venezuela, the United States, Nicaragua and China were among the largest nationalities represented.
New arrivals often enter the housing market as renters. Someone relocating for work, retirement or business usually has much less reason to buy immediately, particularly before deciding where in the city to live.
That demand is also concentrated geographically. Costa del Este, San Francisco, Bella Vista, Punta Pacífica, El Cangrejo and nearby neighborhoods attract a disproportionate share of internationally mobile households.
Tourism adds another layer, although we would give it less weight. Panama recorded strong growth in international visitors during early 2026, but Panama City restricts ordinary residential rentals shorter than 45 days unless they fall under the appropriate tourism framework. The long-term rental increase therefore cannot simply be blamed on Airbnb.
Immigration fits the evidence better because it creates households that actually need apartments for months or years.
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Are expensive mortgages keeping more Panama City residents in rentals?
Yes. Weak home sales and relatively expensive mortgages are currently keeping part of Panama City’s housing demand in the rental market.
Convivienda members recorded 4,020 home sales during 2025, down 34.4% from the previous year. The total value of sales fell around 29%.
At the same time, ordinary housing loans remain relatively expensive by Panama’s historical standards. Recent mortgage rates outside preferential programs have stayed around the 6% range rather than returning to the cheap financing conditions buyers enjoyed in earlier periods.
That changes household behavior. Someone who would normally move from renting to owning may postpone the purchase, particularly when the down payment is large or the monthly mortgage payment is unattractive.
A weak home-sales market can therefore coexist quite comfortably with a strong rental market.
Panama City currently shows exactly that pattern. New-home demand has struggled while apartment rents offered to new tenants have kept climbing.
Are Panama City rents rising faster than the rest of the cost of living?
By a wide margin. Panama City’s market rents are currently rising much faster than Panama’s general inflation rate.
Panama has had remarkably low inflation recently. Official rent inflation for existing housing contracts has also hovered close to zero, with Global Property Guide’s latest national rent-price series showing changes of -0.27% in 2025, +0.63% in 2024 and +0.27% in 2023.
Compare that with the much larger increases recorded for apartments entering the Panama City market.
Landlords are doing more than passing through higher everyday costs. Available apartments themselves have become more valuable as the balance between desirable supply and new demand has tightened.
This also creates an affordability problem that can eventually restrain the trend. Local salaries are not suddenly increasing 10% or 15% every year simply because online apartment listings are.
Rents aimed primarily at local households will hit resistance sooner than internationally oriented apartments whose tenants earn foreign or higher-end local incomes.
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Are higher Panama City rents making rental property much more profitable?
Not as much as landlords might hope. Panama City rents are higher, but purchase prices have also risen, so investment yields have barely improved and in some datasets have actually slipped.
Global Property Guide’s latest figures put the average gross residential yield in Panama City at 7.57%. The same dataset reported 7.83% about a year earlier.
That small decline is revealing. Rental income increased, but property values increased enough to absorb the gain.
The latest breakdown shows one-bedroom apartments producing an estimated gross yield of 8.43% citywide. San Francisco averages around 7.26% across apartment sizes. Individual areas and apartment types range much more widely.
Those percentages are gross. Condo fees, vacancies, repairs, insurance, management and taxes still have to come out of the rent.
Owners who bought several years ago at lower property prices are in a much better position: their purchase price is fixed while current rents are higher. Someone buying a new-build apartment today can pay a substantial premium and end up with a less impressive yield despite charging more rent.
Rising Panama City rents therefore make existing rental properties more valuable, but they do not automatically make new purchases better investments.
Could Panama City rents stop rising soon?
Yes, but we do not see convincing evidence of that turn yet. Panama City rent growth can cool from here, although today’s data still point upward.
Several forces should eventually slow the market. Developers are approving more housing. Higher rents encourage investors to offer more units. Price-sensitive tenants can move to older buildings or cheaper neighborhoods. Local incomes also put a natural ceiling on how quickly mainstream rents can rise.
We are already seeing some restraint. ACOBIR apartments took around 81 days on average to close in the first half of 2026, and landlords still gave roughly 3% discounts from asking prices.
Those numbers tell us tenants have choices. The market has tightened, but it has not reached the kind of shortage where almost any apartment rents immediately at whatever price the owner chooses.
The construction pipeline will matter more as projects move from permits to actual deliveries. If immigration slows at the same time, today’s fast rental growth could cool noticeably.
For now, expecting another automatic 10% or 15% increase would be aggressive. Expecting rents to suddenly reverse would require evidence we simply do not have yet.
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So, are Panama City rents still rising?
Yes. Panama City rents are still rising, and the evidence now supports calling this a genuine rental upswing rather than a temporary jump in advertised prices.
Closed rents rose 8.9% year over year in ACOBIR’s latest first-half data. Encuentra24 asking rents climbed 13.5%. San Francisco, Bella Vista and Juan Díaz all moved higher. Developer inventory has dropped to its lowest level in years, foreign-resident demand has increased, and weak home buying is keeping more households in rentals.
There are limits to the story. Existing tenants are seeing far smaller increases than people signing new leases. Older buildings are not behaving like newer towers. Landlords still negotiate, apartments still take time to rent, and incoming construction should eventually add competition.
The latest rise also comes after a long recovery from the unusually weak rents of the early 2020s. That historical context keeps the current market from looking as extreme as the one-year percentage changes suggest.
Our judgment is still clear: Panama City rents are rising today, and the increase has actually strengthened rather than faded. The most likely next phase is slower growth as supply reacts, not an immediate return to cheaper rents.
OUR METHODOLOGY
“Are Panama City rents still rising?” sounds like a simple question, but no single dataset captures the market well. We separated completed leases, advertised rents, existing rental contracts, neighborhood movements, housing supply and the main forces affecting rental demand instead of combining them into one headline number.
Closed MLS transactions from ACOBIR were our main reference for what tenants were actually agreeing to pay. We used asking-rent data separately to measure current landlord expectations, because an advertised rent and a completed lease are not the same thing.
We compared like-for-like periods where possible, recalculated straightforward percentage changes from the underlying figures and used rent per square meter when comparing apartments. ACOBIR’s longer series was also used to distinguish the latest acceleration from the earlier rebound out of the unusually weak 2021 market.
Neighborhood data for San Francisco, Bella Vista and Juan Díaz were used to test whether rent increases were broad or concentrated. We also looked at newer versus older buildings because building age, management and amenities can create large rental differences even within the same neighborhood.
For supply, we separated apartments available today from projects that may arrive later. Developer inventory and completed units were used to assess current conditions, while construction approvals were treated as future supply rather than apartments already competing for tenants.
Migration, tourism, housing sales and mortgage conditions were used as supporting demand evidence rather than direct measures of rent. We also looked for evidence that could weaken the bullish interpretation, including average marketing times, discounts from asking prices, affordability pressure and the returning construction pipeline.
Key sources include ACOBIR’s H1 2026 MLS report for closed rents, neighborhood comparisons, discounts and marketing times; ACOBIR’s market-data portal for the structure of its real-estate statistics; Global Property Guide’s Panama market analysis for Encuentra24-based asking rents and the national rent-price series; and Global Property Guide’s rental-yield dataset for current gross yield estimates.
For the supply and demand backdrop, we used Panama Equity’s Q1 2026 market report and July 2026 market update for developer inventory and building-level rental conditions; Servicio Nacional de Migración and its June 2025 residency statistics for migration; and Autoridad de Turismo de Panamá for tourism data.
We also used Superintendencia de Bancos de Panamá and its Q2 2026 residential mortgage reference-rate circular for financing conditions, INEC’s Consumer Price Index database for the inflation comparison, Panama Municipality’s construction reports for permit activity, and Law 80 of 2012 in the Official Gazette for the legal framework governing short residential stays in Panama District.
The final conclusion does not depend on one unusually strong rent statistic. It comes from the combination of rising completed rents, even faster asking rents, increases across several submarkets, tighter available supply and demand conditions that still favor landlords, weighed against the clear signs that tenants retain some bargaining power.
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