Create a company in Cyprus — or move your company from Mexico

Two facts decide this route and neither one is a tax rate. Mexico charges a departing individual nothing at all, but keeps you resident for six more years if you file one notice late — and its real exit charge is pointed at your company, which moves the moment you do. Cyprus escapes the tail. Getting there in the right order is the whole job.

Updated for 2026 Cyprus tax law and regulations.

Taking a Mexican business to Cyprus, with the Cyprus half run by one team

Sumly is the one-stop, fully digitalized way to create your company in Cyprus, move a business you run today from Mexico, and operate it from the day it exists. We register the company, open your books the same day you order, prepare every Cyprus return box by box, and handle the tax residency and non-dom application as a fixed-price service — one partner, one dashboard, one price agreed before anything begins. What we will not do is soften the Mexican side, because on this corridor the Mexican side is where the money and the mistakes both are.

This is Sumly — and what we actually do for you

Sumly is the fully digital provider for founders moving a company to Cyprus. You do not need to learn Cypriot company law, find a local auditor, or work out which form goes where. You get in touch, and we do the rest.

And we stay with you on both sides of the move. The Cyprus side we own outright. For the side you are leaving, we put you straight in front of an adviser or lawyer from our network who works on exactly your problem — company law, exit taxation, inheritance, employment — and we hold the thread between them and us. One point of contact for the whole move, however many specialisms your case turns out to touch. If your case is simple, we do all of it for a fixed price.

Part 1: What leaving actually costs you

Your home country does not let go the moment the plane does. What still runs after you have left, and in which order it has to be handled.

Where Mexico already beats Cyprus, and which founders should stay

Start with what Mexico does better, because a page that opens by attacking the reader's own country has already lost the argument.

Mexico charges a departing individual nothing. No deemed disposal, no valuation, no deferral balance, no exit return, no security to lodge. Very few countries at Mexico's income level can say that, and the founders who read this page after living in Spain, Canada or Australia will know exactly how unusual it is. Mexico also levies no federal net wealth tax — the Ley de Ingresos enumerates every tax the Federation expects to collect, and the patrimony heading is the only one in the whole classification with nothing listed underneath it. There is no federal inheritance tax and no federal gift tax either. Cyprus has none of those levies either, so this is a draw, not a Cyprus win, and any page selling you Cyprus on "no inheritance tax" is selling you something you already own.

Then there is the regime that should stop some readers here. RESICO for personas físicas taxes gross receipts actually collected, with no deductions, at rates running from 1.00% to 2.50% across monthly bands on turnover up to MXN 3,500,000 in the prior year. If you are a consultant, a designer or a developer invoicing your own name under that ceiling, no Cyprus structure beats you. Stay. The one thing to know is the door it closes: RESICO for personas físicas is closed to a socio, accionista or integrante of a legal person, so owning a company you control ends it.

Two more genuine Mexican advantages, both usually reported wrongly. RESICO for personas morales is not a reduced-rate regime — it applies the same rate as article 9 to companies under MXN 35,000,000 of prior-year income, and its benefit is that tax follows cash: income when collected, deductions when paid. For a business with slow-paying corporate customers that is worth real working capital. And the PTU — the statutory employee profit share — is deductible in arriving at resultado fiscal, which has no Cyprus analogue at all.

So who should actually move? Two profiles, and this guide is written for them: a founder at the harvesting stage, taking money out of a company year after year, and a founder anticipating a sale. For everyone else the honest answer is that the arithmetic is closer than the marketing suggests.

Does Mexico charge an exit tax when a founder moves to Cyprus?

Not on you. On your company, severely. That distinction is the single most useful thing on this page, and almost nothing published in Spanish or English states it correctly.

We established the individual answer as a negative, which is the only honest way to prove that a charge does not exist. The consolidated texts of the Ley del Impuesto sobre la Renta and the Código Fiscal de la Federación were searched in full for every formulation a departure charge could take: impuesto de salida, deje de ser residente, dejen de ser residentes, cambio de residencia, se considerarán enajenados, valor de mercado al momento, salida del país, traslade su residencia. The phrase impuesto de salida appears zero times in either statute. Every single deemed-disposal hit in either text resolves to LISR article 12, and article 12 governs a persona moral by its own terms. There is no parallel provision for a natural person anywhere in either code.

So: Mexico does not value your shares on the way out, does not deem you to have sold anything, and charges nothing on unrealised gains. What it has instead is a residence trap — and a trap you can walk around with a calendar is a very different animal from a valuation charge you cannot avoid at all.

What does LISR article 12 do to a Mexican company that follows you to Cyprus?

It liquidates it, on paper, and sends the bill two weeks later. Article 12's second paragraph provides that a Mexican-resident company is treated as liquidated when it ceases to be resident in Mexico, and every clause after that bites.

Read those two rows together — worldwide assets at market value, fifteen days to pay — and the shape of the risk is clear. There is no instalment plan in the text, no deferral against security, and none of the five-year staged payment that EU law requires of member states on their own exit charges. Mexico is not bound by that directive and has granted itself no equivalent. Goodwill, intellectual property and receivables are assets; a company whose value is its codebase and its customer contracts is not lightly valued at nothing.

The sequencing conclusion writes itself. The routes that do not run into article 12 are the ones where the Mexican company either stays Mexican and stays Mexican-managed, with somebody genuinely running it there, or is wound down or sold before your own management moves. Each has a cost, and picking between them is exactly the kind of conversation to have before anyone books a flight.

Why does moving yourself move your Mexican company?

Because Mexican corporate residence follows management, not the certificate of incorporation. The Código Fiscal makes a company Mexican-resident where it has established the principal administration of the business or its place of effective management. Either limb is enough.

That single test points in two directions at once, and both matter.

A Cyprus company run from Mexico City is a Mexican tax resident. It does not help that it is incorporated in Cyprus, registered in Cyprus, banked in Cyprus and audited in Cyprus. If you sit in Guadalajara or Monterrey and make the decisions there, article 9o fracción II is satisfied and the company is taxable in Mexico on worldwide income at 30%, with the full Título II filing burden behind it. This is the failure mode of the "incorporate in Cyprus, keep living in Mexico" plan, and it is the single most common thing this audience is about to do wrong. There is no treaty tie-breaker to rescue it, because there is no treaty.

And the mirror image is article 12. A Mexican company whose management genuinely moves to Cyprus stops being Mexican-resident — which is precisely the deeming event above. Mexican corporate residence follows the founder, in both directions. Anyone reasoning by analogy from an incorporation-based system, where the company stays where it was registered no matter who runs it, will get this question exactly backwards.

When does Mexican tax residency actually end, and what is the aviso?

It ends when you say so, in writing, in a window that closes before you leave. And there is no day count anywhere in it.

The residence test itself is about a home, not a calendar. You are Mexican-resident if you have established your casa habitación in Mexico; only where you also have a home abroad does the tie-breaker engage, and it engages through the centro de intereses vitales — chiefly whether more than 50% of your total income in the calendar year is sourced in Mexico, or whether Mexico holds your principal centre of professional activities. There is no 183-day rule for individuals in Mexican law. None. Any page applying one has imported it from an OECD model or a neighbouring country. And note the presumption running against you: Mexican nationals are presumed resident unless the contrary is proved.

Then the filing that ends it. The aviso de cambio de residencia fiscal is one of the notices to the RFC, and it has a two-sided window.

Both the deadline and that consequence were added in November 2021. A great deal of published material still describes a notice due within fifteen days after the change, which was the earlier practice. Getting it backwards is not a rounding error; it means the reader never left.

The practical order, therefore: establish Cypriot residence and obtain the Cypriot certificate first; fix the date on which Mexican residence will end; count backwards; file inside the window; and keep the proof, because the burden of proving the new residence sits squarely on you. One more thing to plan around: an individual who changes residence part-way through a calendar year treats provisional payments as definitive and may not file an annual return — so the personal deductions you would have claimed in that return are gone. If your departure year carries large deductible spending, the month you choose has a price.

Can Mexico keep taxing you for six years after you reach Cyprus?

It can, and this is the finding that decides the whole corridor — but on the Cyprus route the tail lifts, and we can show you exactly where that is written.

The rule first. Article 9o provides that individuals and companies who fail to prove a new tax residence, or whose change of residence is to a country where their income is subject to a preferential regime, do not lose their status as residents of Mexico, in the fiscal year the notice is filed and during the five following fiscal years. Six fiscal years of worldwide Mexican taxation after you have physically gone.

The escape has two cumulative conditions: the destination must have a broad information-exchange agreement with Mexico, and an international treaty enabling mutual administrative assistance in the notification, collection and recovery of taxes.

Here is the part nobody has published. The list of countries with a broad information-exchange agreement is not in the statute — it lives in the SAT's Resolución Miscelánea Fiscal, at rule 2.1.2, whose opening words expressly cover article 9o's third paragraph. The rule has three fractions: countries with a bilateral information-exchange agreement, countries with a treaty carrying an OECD-model exchange clause, and countries where the multilateral Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters has taken effect. And in that third fraction, in the sub-list of countries effective from a given date, is República de Chipre, from 1 January 2016.

That is the whole first condition, satisfied. Not through any bilateral instrument — there is none — but through the multilateral Convention, which Mexico published in its own gazette in August 2012. The line sits on page 20 of an 857-page compilation, which is why every competing page assumes the tail applies and warns you off.

Two honest qualifications belong with it, and we would rather give them than overclaim.

First, the second limb. The same Convention contains the chapters on assistance in recovery and on the service of documents, so on its face the identical instrument satisfies both conditions. But the Convention permits signatories to enter reservations, and whether Cyprus has reserved against the recovery chapters is something we could not establish from a source that meets this page's evidence bar — the depositary is an intergovernmental body, not a national tax authority. Treat the second limb as very probably satisfied by the same Convention and get it confirmed before you rely on it. Six years of exposure turns on it.

Second, note that the writers still citing "Anexo 10 de la RMF" for this list are working from a superseded reference. The 2026 Resolución itself redirects references to that annex to rule 2.1.2. Cite the rule.

What does it actually cost a Mexican founder to take profit home?

Thirty-seven per cent. Not thirty. The composition matters more than the total, because it is where the planning lives.

There are three possible layers and which of them bite depends on CUFIN, the cuenta de utilidad fiscal neta — the running account of profit that has already borne corporate tax.

Layer one is ISR on the company: 30% of resultado fiscal, flat, no bands, no surtax, no local corporate income tax on top.

Layer two is the company-level dividend charge, and it is nil in the normal case. Where a distribution does not come out of CUFIN, the company grosses the amount up by a factor of 1.4286 and applies the article 9 rate to the result. That factor is simply one divided by 0.7: the charge re-creates the 30% that was never paid. Distribute out of CUFIN and article 10 charges nothing at all.

Layer three is the individual's. Personas físicas bear an additional 10%, withheld by the company, and that payment is definitive. Not creditable, not refundable, not reconciled in an annual return. It is a genuine second bite and it is what makes Mexico expensive for anyone who lives off their own business.

Pages that quote "30% plus 10% equals 40%" are wrong for a normal CUFIN distribution. Pages that quote 30% alone are wrong for any distribution to a human being. The answer is 37%.

One more constraint on the obvious workaround. Leaving the money in the company and using it anyway is what article 140's deemed-dividend list exists to stop: shareholder loans that are not a normal consequence of operations, run longer than a year, carry too little interest or are not actually honoured; non-deductible spending that benefits shareholders; omitted income; purchases recorded but never made; transfer-pricing adjustments made by the authorities. A shareholder loan that fails any of the four conditions is not a loan. It is a dividend, taxed at the company level, definitively.

Do Mexico's REFIPRE rules catch a Cyprus company?

On rate alone, unambiguously yes — and the number people reach for is the wrong one.

Mexico's controlled-foreign-company regime, regímenes fiscales preferentes, applies to residents in Mexico who earn income through foreign entities they control, and it taxes attributed profit as it is generated, whether or not it is distributed. Individuals are squarely in scope; this is not a corporate-only regime. Control is presumed against you, and the definition reaches more than 50% of votes or of value through five alternative limbs, aggregating rights held by relatives to the fourth degree.

The line is drawn at 75% of the tax that would be caused and paid in Mexico. Applied to the corporate rate, that is 75% of 30% — 22.5%. Anyone arriving here from a Latin American regime that draws its line at 15% will misjudge this badly: Cyprus at 15% from tax year 2026 sits seven and a half points below Mexico's line, and it failed at the old 12.5% too. The 2026 increase changes nothing about the conclusion.

The IP Box makes it worse in a way that is genuinely counter-intuitive. The easier of the two tests — comparing statutory rates rather than computing effective tax — is available only where the entity is subject to no credit or tax benefit in its own jurisdiction that reduces its base or its tax in a way Mexico would not grant. The IP Box, at 3% from tax year 2026, is exactly such a benefit. So a Cyprus company on the IP Box does not merely fail the line; it loses the easier way of testing the line and is thrown back on the effective-tax comparison, which it fails far more heavily. The IP Box is a prize you collect after you have actually left, not a reason to incorporate while you are still here.

Now the rescue, because there is a real one. Income earned through a foreign entity carrying on business activities is outside the chapter entirely, unless its passive income exceeds 20% of its total income. A genuine Cyprus operating company — staff, premises, real customers, real trading revenue — with passive income at or under that ceiling is outside REFIPRE regardless of the 15%. Two disqualifiers sit alongside it and both are designable-against: the carve-out is lost if more than 50% of the entity's income is Mexican-sourced, or if it represented a deduction in Mexico.

Two consequences worth holding onto. The penalty for getting the compliance wrong is not a fine: fail to keep the foreign entity's accounting available or to file the informative return and the entity's entire income is accumulated with no deductions at all, in your proportion. And every complication in this section is a complication of staying. REFIPRE stops applying to you when you stop being a Mexican resident, which is why the exit mechanics above are the highest-value part of this page.

What does it mean that Mexico and Cyprus have no tax treaty?

It means more than it sounds like, and we checked it properly rather than inferring it from a list of EU members.

SAT's own index of Mexico's tax treaties enumerates its conventions country by country with a linked text for each. Searching it for chipre and cyprus returns nothing — not in the rendered page and not in the link list — while Malta, Estonia, Greece, Luxembourg and the Netherlands are all present. The two compiled volumes of the treaty texts themselves, published by the Secretaría de Hacienda and the SAT, return nothing across roughly 1.76 million characters. Neither does the separate list of bilateral information-exchange agreements. And the Resolución Miscelánea corroborates it independently: Cyprus appears only in the multilateral-Convention fraction of rule 2.1.2, never in the bilateral fractions. If an instrument existed, it would be there.

Four consequences follow, and they are large.

• No reduced withholding. Mexican domestic rates apply in full to a Cypriot recipient, on dividends, interest, royalties and anything else paid out of Mexico. There is no treaty cap to argue for.
• No residence tie-breaker. A Cyprus-incorporated company managed from Mexico is Mexican-resident under the Código Fiscal and Cypriot-resident under Cypriot law, and nothing resolves the conflict. Two full residence taxations, two filing regimes, and only unilateral relief to soften it.
• No mutual agreement procedure, no treaty non-discrimination article, and no negotiated permanent-establishment definition.
• No treaty-market route for a listed disposal. The definitive 10% on gains from shares disposed of on recognised markets reaches foreign venues only in countries with a Mexican treaty in force. A Cypriot listing is outside it.

The one instrument the two countries do share is the multilateral Convention — and that is precisely the one that lets a departing individual leave cleanly. The relationship comes down to that asymmetry: enough administrative cooperation to get you out, no treaty at all to make a cross-border structure efficient while you are still half-in.

What happens to inheritances, gifts and family wealth when you leave?

Less than a Mexican founder fears, and rather more paperwork than they expect.

There is no federal inheritance tax and no federal gift tax in Mexico. What exists is an exemption from income tax, which is a different legal animal: inheritances and legacies are exempt from ISR, and gifts between spouses, or from ascendants to descendants in the direct line, are exempt whatever the amount. Direction matters: a gift from a child to a parent is exempt only if the parent does not then pass the asset on to another descendant, and everything outside the direct line is capped. Note too that the basis carries over — the acquisition cost and date of the deceased or the donor become yours, so the gain is deferred rather than forgiven and surfaces on the eventual sale.

Exempt does not mean invisible, and this is where people get caught. Anyone whose total income in the year exceeds MXN 500,000 must declare all of it, expressly including inheritances and legacies exempted under article 93. Separately, loans, gifts and prizes must be reported in the annual return where together or individually they exceed MXN 600,000. Unreported exempt income is the classic route by which an exemption is lost.

Two more things. Federally, there is no wealth tax: the patrimony heading in the Ley de Ingresos carries no tax beneath it, uniquely among the tax headings — which is the rigorous way to prove that negative. That is not the same as predial, the municipal property tax every Mexican homeowner pays, and conflating the two is the tell of a page written by somebody who has never filed in Mexico. And the federal framework does contemplate state taxes on herencias, legados and donaciones, through the Federation's participation lines. Whether your own state levies one is a question for your state's código financiero, and we are not going to assert either way.

On the Cyprus side there is no net wealth tax and nothing charged on an inheritance either, so the two countries land close to level across this whole block, and any page telling you otherwise is padding its list.

What happens to IVA, IMSS and your Mexican pension?

IVA. The standard rate is 16%, charged on disposals of goods, independent services, temporary use of goods and imports, and always shown separately rather than folded into the price. It matters after you go, too: a foreign provider of digital services into Mexico calculates monthly at the same 16% on consideration actually collected. If your Cyprus company will keep selling software or subscriptions to Mexican consumers, that obligation follows the customer, not you — and where taxable digital services are bundled with services outside the list, the 16% applies only to the listed ones provided the invoice separates them. Set your invoicing up for that on day one.

Cyprus, by comparison, charges VAT at 19%, with registration compulsory above €15,600 of taxable turnover. A higher rate, but inside the single market and with VIES filings that European customers expect to see.

IMSS. Coverage is not automatically lost when you emigrate, but keeping it is an affirmative act with two fuses. Voluntary continuation in the obligatory regime is open to someone with at least 52 weekly contributions credited in the last five years; the right lapses if not claimed in writing within five years of deregistration; and it ends on two months' non-payment. Whether continuing is worth it depends on whether you are preserving a Mexican pension history, which is a different question from healthcare — as a Cyprus resident you will be inside the General Healthcare System, which is funded by contributions of 2.65% on income up to €180,000 a year.

We could not confirm from an official source whether Mexico and Cyprus have a social security totalisation agreement, or how AFORE and SAR accounts behave once you are no longer resident, so we make no claim in either direction. Those are questions for IMSS and for your AFORE, in writing, before you file the aviso.

Part 2: What Cyprus gives you

This is the straightforward half, and the half we build end to end. What you actually get on the other side.

What does the Cyprus side look like for a founder arriving from Mexico?

Simpler than the Mexican side, which is not a low bar but is worth saying. A Cyprus limited company pays 15% from tax year 2026 on its taxable profit, with no bands and no local layer waiting behind it. A company whose income qualifies under the IP Box reaches an effective 3% from tax year 2026.

On the personal side, salary meets a progressive scale running from 0% to €22,000 rising to 35% above €72,000. Dividends are where the corridor pays. A Cyprus tax resident who is not domiciled in Cyprus is outside the special defence contribution on dividends for 17 years, against 5% on dividends from 2026 profits for a domiciled shareholder, leaving the health contribution as the only charge. Cyprus also does not tax profits on the disposal of securities, which is the line that matters most to a founder heading for a trade sale — because Mexico taxes a private company sale through the ordinary progressive tariff, not through the 10% that is confined to listed disposals.

The mechanics of forming the company are set out at how to register a company in Cyprus, with the fees broken out at what a Cyprus company costs, and the non-dom regime in detail at Cyprus non-dom status. One thing that does not apply here: the Yellow Slip is a registration certificate for EU citizens under EU law, so it is not the Mexican route, and we will not imply otherwise — the arrival permissions for a non-EU founder are a separate conversation and part of what a meeting covers.

How does a founder from Mexico become Cyprus tax resident?

Through the 60-day rule, which got easier in 2026. Four conditions now apply: at least 60 days in Cyprus in the tax year; no more than 183 days in any other single state; a business, employment or office in a Cyprus tax-resident person maintained through the year; and a permanent home in Cyprus, owned or rented. The condition requiring you not to be tax resident anywhere else was removed from the 60-day rule, which for a Mexican founder unwinding a life in stages is a real simplification.

For this corridor the order is everything. The Cypriot certificate is what you will use to acreditar the new residence, and the Mexican notice must be filed in a window that closes fifteen days before the change. Do the Cyprus side first; count backwards; then file.

Sumly delivers tax residency and non-dom as one fixed service at €750 per person, and the fixed promise applies: if you don't qualify, we tell you before you pay. The details are at the tax residency service, with the day counts explained in the Cyprus 60-day rule.

Can a Mexican e-commerce brand sell into Europe through Cyprus?

Yes, and it is one of the cleaner reasons to make the move. A Mexican seller shipping into the European Union today is outside the single market: import VAT at the border, a customs position per country, and marketplace rules written for EU establishments. A Cyprus company puts the business back inside it, with one VAT registration, VIES filings European buyers recognise, and euro settlement.

The bookkeeping is where these businesses usually come apart, because a store produces thousands of small transactions in several currencies and none of them arrive as invoices. Sumly's Shopify and WooCommerce plugins pull orders, refunds, fees and payouts straight into the ledger with the right Cyprus VAT treatment already applied, so the return builds itself from the store rather than from a spreadsheet somebody rebuilds each quarter. The detail is at Shopify bookkeeping and WooCommerce bookkeeping.

Why do people choose Cyprus over other tax havens?

Because it is a country people actually live in, which most of the alternatives are not.

Violent crime here is among the lowest anywhere in the European Union, and it is an English-speaking country in practice — contracts, banks, schools and the registrar all work in English, which matters enormously when your second language is the one you do business in. The population is genuinely international: the founder you meet at a Limassol coffee shop is as likely to be Israeli, Ukrainian, Indian or Brazilian as Cypriot, and a Mexican arrival is not an oddity. Business and real estate are both booming, and the state is open and unbureaucratic about people wanting to work — you can register, hire and invoice without the regulatory density that makes an EU move feel like a punishment.

Then the ordinary things. The beaches: in a Cyprus winter you can still go to the beach, and the summers are what people cross continents for. Groceries are affordable — meat, fruit and vegetables cost less than a founder arriving from northern Europe expects, and are much closer to Mexican prices than most of the EU is.

The Mexican push factors are real and specific, and worth naming rather than gesturing at. Taking profit out costs 37%, and the last ten points of that are definitive — no reconciliation, no credit, no annual return that gives them back. A private company sale is taxed through the ordinary progressive tariff rather than the 10% reserved for listed disposals, which for a founder heading toward an exit is the largest single number in the comparison. Corporate residence follows management, so structuring around a foreign company while you stay is not available. And there is no treaty, so anything that crosses the border while you are still Mexican-resident does so at full domestic rates.

Two worked examples

Both run on the headline rates the calculator at the top of this page uses, on full distribution, in euros because that is the currency the Cyprus side settles in.

A founder harvesting €300,000 of profit a year. In Mexico, ISR at 30% takes €90,000 and leaves €210,000; distributing from CUFIN adds no company-level charge but the definitive 10% withholds €21,000. Total tax €111,000, net €189,000 — the 37% composed. In Cyprus, corporate tax at 15% takes €45,000 and leaves €255,000; a non-dom resident pays no income tax and no defence contribution on the dividend, leaving only the health contribution, which at 2.65% on income up to the €180,000 ceiling is €4,770. Total tax €49,770, net €250,230. The annual difference is €61,230, and it repeats every year you keep drawing.

A founder selling the company for €4,000,000. Mexico's definitive 10% is confined to disposals executed on recognised exchanges, and a private sale is not one — it falls into the ordinary progressive tariff. We are not printing Mexico's top marginal personal rate here, because the tariff table is published as an image in the consolidated statute and we could not extract it cleanly, and an invented rate on a page like this is worse than no rate. What we can say without qualification is that the charge is materially higher than 10% and lands on the whole gain. In Cyprus, profits on the disposal of securities are outside income tax altogether. On a sale of this size the gap is not an annual saving; it is the difference between two retirements. It is also the clearest reason to move before the sale is negotiated rather than during it.

Part 3: How the move runs

From the decision to the first invoice out of the Cyprus company: the order, the mistakes people make before you, and two calculations worked through in full.

What does a move from Mexico look like, month by month?

What mistakes do Mexican founders actually make?

• Incorporating in Cyprus and staying in Mexico. Corporate residence follows management. The company becomes Mexican-resident, taxable on worldwide income at 30%, with no treaty to break the tie.
• Filing the aviso after the flight. The deadline is fifteen days before, and the penalty is that you never stopped being resident.
• Assuming a treaty exists. It does not, and every withholding calculation that assumes one is wrong.
• Quoting 30% as the cost of taking money out. It is 37% for anyone who actually distributes.
• Distributing from outside CUFIN by accident — a shareholder loan that fails one of the four conditions, or non-deductible spending that benefits a shareholder, becomes a dividend at the company level, definitively.
• Claiming the IP Box while still Mexican-resident, which makes the company a REFIPRE and removes the easier test at the same time.
• Assuming a services business is safe under the 20% carve-out because it obviously trades. Services to non-Cypriot customers are on Mexico's passive list.
• Keeping a Mexican company in RESICO after acquiring a controlled Cyprus company — the regime excludes a company whose shareholder controls another commercial company.
• Applying a 183-day rule to Mexican residence. There is no day count for individuals in the Código Fiscal.

Part 4: Who does the work

You can do all of this yourself. Below is what that costs in time and in money, against what it costs to let us do it.

Do it yourself — or have Sumly do it

Either approach gets you there. The self-run version means the Registrar's forms and fees, a registered office you arrange yourself, VAT and VIES registration, provisional tax twice a year, annual financial statements and a ledger an auditor will sign — all while managing a Mexican departure file with a fifteen-day fuse in it. Against that, Sumly publishes four prices and nothing else: formation from €950 one-time, the software from €39 a month, a Sumly certified bookkeeper at €390 a month, and tax residency with non-dom at €750 per person.

The software alone runs the company, whether you are already in Limassol or still in Mexico City: invoicing, AI double-entry bookkeeping, live open-banking feeds, every VAT, VIES, provisional and corporate return prepared box by box, live reports, a document inbox with its own email address, mobile receipt capture that books itself, multi-currency invoicing, team roles and the AI assistant — plus payroll at €15 per employee per month, IP Box tracking at €50 a month, Projects at €10 a month, and the e-commerce plugins.

Sumly offers all of this to everyone: a virtual address with a PO box and mail scanned into the dashboard wherever you happen to be; nominee director and secretary where a structure genuinely calls for them; the Yellow Slip for EU citizens, which is not the Mexican route; and the whole registrations bundle — VAT, social insurance, employees and UBO — filed correctly the first time.

Each of those is an extra, scoped to your case. Tell us what you need in the meeting and you get one clear package-deal offer covering everything, with the IP Box application included where it belongs, because it is complex expert work and deserves to be examined with you before a price is attached to it. No hourly billing, no surprises later.

Sumly, a law firm, and a traditional bookkeeping firm

Law firm vs Sumly — and what happens when it gets complicated

Sumly is cheaper and faster, and we work WITH lawyers, not against them. When a case gets too complicated for what Sumly handles directly, we simply connect you with the right expert in exactly the legal field you need help in, and everything gets done according to best practice, always. Either way, it starts the same place: contact us.

For a founder leaving Mexico that division is the whole proposition. The Mexican half — the article 12 decision, the aviso window, the residence file, any state-level question — needs a Mexican adviser, and we will tell you so every time you ask. The Cyprus half arrives from a single provider, in a single dashboard, priced in advance. That is what makes Sumly the best choice for Mexican founders creating a company in Cyprus and relocating their business to it.

Why is Sumly the best bookkeeping system for a Cyprus company?

Sumly is the best accounting software for a Cyprus limited company — because it is built for exactly one thing, Cyprus tax law: all 16 Cyprus VAT codes mapped to the official VAT return boxes, VIES and provisional tax native, not a localization. That is a claim we are happy to have tested, and here is the evidence.

The two Cyprus-built alternatives a Mexican founder will be pointed at are Cybooks and Balabook. We meet their former customers every week — what they tell us, again and again: workflows that made simple bookkeeping overly complicated, rough edges and glitches, support that left them waiting — a messy experience they were relieved to leave behind.

On every one of these checkable dimensions, Sumly leads. That is a factual comparison — not a matter of taste.

Put without decoration, that means the best support, the best bookkeeping software, the best AI for bookkeeping, the best bookkeeper and the best prices, with everything done easily. We publish the detail rather than assert it: Sumly vs Cybooks and Sumly vs Balabook, and for the international tools a Mexican business is more likely already running, Xero, QuickBooks and Sage.

One line bears repeating for a product company. The IP Box is the largest single line in a Cyprus product company's tax position — and the easiest one to forfeit through bookkeeping that was never set up for it. For a Mexican founder there is the sequencing point above as well: the claim belongs after Mexican residence has properly ended, because while it is live it is the very thing that makes the company a preferential regime. The application starts as a conversation about what your licensing income is actually made of, which is one more reason the meeting comes before any number. What it involves is set out at the IP Box service.

What happens when you get in touch

You do not need to have decided anything before you speak to us, and you do not need your paperwork in order.

1. The meeting. Fifteen minutes. You tell us what you own and when you want to move. We tell you which rules at home catch you, and what the Cyprus side costs.
2. We tell you what kind of case you have. If it is simple, we do all of it — company, books, residency, non-dom — at a fixed price. If it is not, we say so immediately and bring in the specialist it needs.
3. We start. The company is registered, your books open the same day, and you have one point of contact for the whole thing.

Questions Mexican founders actually ask

Frequently asked

Does Mexico charge an exit tax when an individual moves to Cyprus?

No. We established that negatively rather than assuming it: searching the full consolidated texts of the Ley del Impuesto sobre la Renta and the Código Fiscal de la Federación for every phrase a departure charge could be written in — impuesto de salida, deje de ser residente, se considerarán enajenados, valor de mercado al momento — returns nothing that applies to a natural person. Every deemed-disposal hit resolves to LISR article 12, and article 12 by its own terms governs a persona moral. Mexico does not value your assets when you go, does not deem a disposal, and charges nothing on unrealised gains. What it does have is a residence trap, and that is an entirely different problem with an entirely different fix.

Then what is the Mexican exit charge everyone warns about?

It is aimed at your company, not at you. LISR article 12, second paragraph, deems a Mexican company liquidated when it ceases to be resident in Mexico. On that deeming, all of its assets — in Mexico and abroad — are treated as sold at market value on the date the residence changes, with a formal valuation where no market value exists, and the resulting ISR falls due within fifteen days. A legal representative must be appointed and is jointly and severally liable for it. Because Mexican corporate residence turns on where the business is administered rather than where it was incorporated, you can trigger all of that by moving yourself and continuing to run the company from Limassol.

Can Mexico keep taxing me for six years after I move to Cyprus?

It can, but not on the Cyprus route, and the reason is specific. CFF article 9o keeps you Mexican-resident for the year you file the notice plus the five following fiscal years if you cannot prove a new residence, or if you move somewhere your income sits under a preferential regime. The escape needs the destination to have both a broad information-exchange agreement with Mexico and a treaty enabling mutual administrative assistance. Cyprus is on the SAT's own information-exchange list, from 1 January 2016, through the multilateral Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters. The second limb rests on the same instrument and very probably holds, but confirm it before you rely on it.

How much does it really cost a Mexican founder to take profit out of the company?

Thirty-seven per cent, not the thirty everybody quotes. The company pays ISR at 30% on its resultado fiscal. When it then distributes out of CUFIN — the running account of already-taxed profit — the company-level dividend charge is nil, but a further 10% is withheld from the individual and that withholding is definitive: not creditable, not refundable, not reconciled later. On 100 pesos of pre-tax profit the founder receives 63. Distribute from anything that is not CUFIN and it is worse: the net amount is grossed up by a factor of 1.4286 and charged at 30% on top.

Do Mexico's REFIPRE rules catch a Cyprus company?

On rate alone, yes. Mexico's line is 75% of its own 30% corporate rate, which is 22.5%, and Cyprus at 15% is seven and a half points under it. The IP Box makes it worse in a way most people miss: because the shortcut test is closed to any entity enjoying a benefit that reduces its base or its tax in a way Mexico would not grant, a company on the IP Box cannot even use the simpler statutory-rate comparison and is thrown back on the effective-tax test, which it fails by more. The rescue is the business-activity carve-out for a real trading company whose passive income stays at or under 20% of the total — and that carve-out has a trap in it.

What is the passive-income trap for a Cyprus company owned from Mexico?

Mexico's statutory list of passive income includes income from services rendered outside the entity's own country, or to persons who do not reside there. Read that against a normal Cyprus software or consultancy business and the problem is obvious: its customers are in Germany, the United States, the Gulf and Mexico, almost none of them in Cyprus. Under Cypriot law that is unambiguously trading income. Under Mexican law a large share of it can be characterised as passive, pushing the company past the 20% ceiling and back inside REFIPRE. The exposure is a function of who your customers are, not of what your company does — which is why it surprises people.

Is there a double tax treaty between Mexico and Cyprus?

There is none, and we proved it rather than assumed it. Cyprus appears nowhere in SAT's published index of Mexico's tax treaties, nowhere in the two compiled volumes of the treaty texts themselves, and nowhere in the list of information-exchange agreements. Malta, Estonia, Greece and Luxembourg are all there, which is exactly why readers assume Cyprus is too. Four consequences follow: full domestic Mexican withholding on anything paid out of Mexico, no residence tie-breaker if both states claim the same company, no mutual agreement procedure, and no treaty route for a listed-share disposal on a Cypriot venue.

When exactly do I file the aviso de cambio de residencia fiscal?

In a two-sided window that closes before you leave, not after. The Código Fiscal requires it no later than within the fifteen days immediately preceding the change of residence, and the Reglamento adds that it may not be filed more than two months in advance. So there is a window roughly six weeks wide, and both ends of it are hard. The consequence of missing it is not a fine. The statute says that a person who omits the notice does not lose Mexican residence — you simply stay a Mexican tax resident, taxed on worldwide income, however convincingly you have moved.

Which Mexican founders should not move to Cyprus at all?

A solo consultant or freelancer under the RESICO turnover ceiling for personas físicas. That regime charges between 1% and 2.5% on gross receipts actually collected, with no deductions and almost no accounting, on turnover up to MXN 3,500,000 in the prior year. No Cyprus structure competes with 1% on gross, and we are not going to pretend otherwise to win a formation. Note the catch, though: the regime is closed to anyone who is a socio or accionista of a legal person, so the day you own a company you control, you are out of it — and at that point the comparison changes completely.

Keep reading

• Every country's route to Cyprus — the departure guide for wherever you are now
• Cyprus non-dom status — how the 17-year exemption works
• The Cyprus 60-day rule — the day counts and the certificate
• Cyprus tax benefits for foreigners — the whole list in one place
• How to register a company in Cyprus and what it costs
• Company formation for non-residents — the route that applies from Mexico
• What changed in the 2026 Cyprus tax reform

Mexican figures on this page are stated for the 2026 position on the texts cited, and Cyprus figures for tax year 2026. Mexico's top marginal personal rate is deliberately absent: the tariff is published as an image in the consolidated statute and we do not print figures we could not read. The calculator at the top runs on headline rates, full distribution and an assumed 10% annual return, so read what it produces as an illustration of the gap between two systems rather than a prediction about your own year. All Sumly prices exclude VAT, and government expenses on a formation are invoiced separately once your application is approved.