Argentina's Supreme Court Leaves the 15 Percent Foreign Rural Land Cap Repealed

Argentina's Supreme Court on 29 September 2026 revoked the lower court ruling that had declared unconstitutional the repeal of Law 26,737, the 2011 Rural Lands Law, leaving in force the article of President Javier Milei's emergency decree that erased the 15 percent ceiling on foreign ownership of Argentine rural land. The court decided the case on standing alone and expressly declined to rule on whether the decree itself is constitutional.

What it means for a foreign buyer

If you are buying farmland, vineyard, forestry or estancia land in Argentina, the quota arithmetic that used to sit between you and a signature is gone and is now backed by the country's highest court. Under Law 26,737 a purchase could fail because of who else already owned land in that department, not because of anything about your transaction: foreign holdings could not exceed 15 percent of national, provincial or departmental territory, no single nationality could take more than 30 percent of that allowance, and an individual foreign owner was capped at 1,000 hectares in the fertile core zone. None of those tests applies. A buyer assembling a holding above 1,000 hectares in the core zone, or buying into a department already close to its foreign quota, no longer needs a workaround.

What has not changed is the security-zone regime. Decree-Law 15,385/44 still requires prior state authorisation for a foreign acquisition in a border security zone, with no hectare ceiling but a case-by-case national defence assessment, so land near a frontier remains a permissioned purchase on a separate track. The larger caveat is legal rather than administrative: because the court ruled only that the plaintiff lacked standing, the constitutionality of the repeal has never been tested on the merits, and a differently constituted claimant, or a future Congress, could put the caps back.

Holding costs are unaffected: provincial and federal property taxes apply to rural land the same way they did before. Treat the opening as real but not yet settled, and diligence the border-zone question before the price is agreed rather than after.

What changed

Law 26,737, enacted in December 2011, imposed three limits on foreign ownership and possession of rural land. Foreign-held rural land could not exceed 15 percent of the total surface of the national territory, and the same 15 percent ceiling applied at provincial and departmental level. Within that allowance, owners of any single nationality could not hold more than 30 percent. And no foreign owner could hold more than 1,000 hectares in the zona núcleo, the high-yield agricultural core.

Article 154 of Decree of Necessity and Urgency 70/2023, the omnibus deregulation decree issued in December 2023, repealed the statute outright. In March 2024 Sala III of the Federal Court of Appeals of La Plata admitted a challenge brought by the Centro de Ex Combatientes Islas Malvinas La Plata as a collective proceeding and declared Article 154 unconstitutional, which put the repeal in doubt for two and a half years. That judgment is the one now annulled.

Río Negro reported an estimate that foreign owners currently hold in the region of 13 million hectares of Argentine rural land under existing registries.

The mechanism

The ruling was signed by Justices Horacio Rosatti, Carlos Rosenkrantz and Ricardo Lorenzetti. Its reasoning is narrow. The court found that CECIM La Plata had no collective right over a collective good of the kind that would support the action, holding that "faced with the clear absence of a right of collective incidence over a collective good, it is not possible to hold that a case or controversy has been made out." It then stated that the decision "does not imply a pronouncement on the constitutional validity of DNU 70/2023," and that the judgment was limited exclusively to resolving the plaintiff's lack of standing.

The practical consequence is that the repeal stands because nothing valid is left challenging it, not because it has been upheld. Andrés Gil Domínguez, the constitutional lawyer, told Río Negro that any foreign natural or legal person can now buy as much rural land as they want, anywhere they want, border zones included, without any limit.

Context

Argentina has never restricted foreign ownership of urban residential property, and foreign buyers of apartments in Buenos Aires or houses in Mendoza have always bought on the same terms as Argentines, using a CDI tax identifier and completing before a notary. The rules governing what a foreigner may hold, and on what title, are set out in Argentina's framework for foreign ownership. The Rural Lands Law was a separate regime aimed at agricultural land, created in 2011 during a wave of concern across South America about the foreign acquisition of farmland. Its repeal by decree in December 2023 was one of the more consequential property measures in the Milei deregulation package, and until this week its survival in court was an open question.

Sources

- La Corte Suprema dejó vigente un decreto del Gobierno que permite la venta sin límites de tierras a extranjeros, Infobae, 29 September 2026

- La Corte anuló el fallo contra la derogación de la Ley de Tierras, pero no se pronunció sobre la constitucionalidad, elDiarioAR, 29 September 2026

- Ley de Tierras: qué pasa con la venta "sin límites" a extranjeros tras el fallo de la Corte Suprema, Río Negro, 29 September 2026

- Argentina Rural Land: Court Ends 15% Cap for Foreign Buyers, The Rio Times, 30 September 2026

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