A Payroll Guide to INFONAVIT, Mexico's Housing Fund

INFONAVIT is Mexico's national housing fund for workers, and funding it is a mandatory payroll obligation for every formal-sector employer in the country. If you run payroll for clients with workers in Mexico, it is one of those line items that looks settled and boring right up until it isn't. It is a flat 5 percent, it has been around since 1972, and for years the hardest question about it was which entity to remit to. Then the government amended the Constitution in December 2024, rewrote the law in February 2025, and the Supreme Court handed down a binding ruling that changed how one of its two moving parts behaves during incapacity. In the space of a few months, a settled deduction became something you have to actually watch.

So let me lay out what INFONAVIT is, the two obligations it puts on an employer, how they are calculated and remitted, and then the 2024 and 2025 changes that matter for anyone processing Mexican payroll today. I will keep the legal citations in so your compliance people can check my work, but the goal is to leave you understanding the mechanism, not just the rule.

What INFONAVIT actually is

INFONAVIT is the Instituto del Fondo Nacional de la Vivienda para los Trabajadores, the national housing fund for workers. It was created under Article 123, Apartado A, fracción XII of the Constitution, which obliges employers to contribute toward worker housing. In practice it does two things at once, and keeping them straight is the single most important thing in this guide.

First, it is a savings vehicle. Every formal-sector worker has a housing subaccount (the subcuenta de vivienda) that sits inside their individual retirement account alongside their AFORE. The employer feeds that subaccount, and the balance belongs to the worker as patrimony, not to the employer and not to INFONAVIT.

Second, it is a mortgage lender. Workers can borrow against the system to buy, build, repair, or refinance a home, on terms up to 30 years. When a worker takes one of those loans, the repayments come out of payroll.

That dual role is why INFONAVIT shows up twice on a Mexican payslip for some workers and once for everyone else. It is also, legally, an "organismo fiscal autónomo," an autonomous fiscal authority. That matters more than it sounds: INFONAVIT can determine what you owe, audit you, impose surcharges, and enforce collection with the same teeth the tax authority has. An INFONAVIT shortfall is not a billing dispute; it is a fiscal liability.

Obligation one: the 5 percent employer contribution

This is the core payroll obligation, set out in Article 29, fracción II of the INFONAVIT Law. The employer contributes 5 percent of each worker's Salario Base de Cotización into that worker's housing subaccount.

Three things about that sentence carry all the weight.

The base is the SBC, not gross pay. The Salario Base de Cotización is the same integrated wage figure you already use for IMSS. It is base salary plus the integrated value of benefits (the aguinaldo, vacation premium, and so on), which means it is usually higher than base salary and almost never equal to gross pay. If your SBC is wrong for IMSS, it is wrong for INFONAVIT by the same amount, so the two never get to disagree.

The base is capped at 25 UMA. INFONAVIT uses the same upper limit as IMSS: 25 times the Unidad de Medida y Actualización. The UMA is a daily figure that resets every February. For 2026 it is 117.31 pesos, so the ceiling on the daily SBC is 25 × 117.31 = 2,932.75 pesos. Above that, the SBC stops climbing and so does the contribution.

It is an employer cost, not a worker deduction. The 5 percent is a "gasto de previsión social," an expense the employer bears on top of wages. It never comes out of the worker's pay. This is the opposite of the loan repayment we will get to next, and confusing the two is a classic and expensive error.

Here is the arithmetic on a clean number. Take a worker with an SBC of 1,000 pesos a day. The employer owes 5 percent, or 50 pesos a day, into that worker's housing subaccount. Over a two-month contribution period of about 60 days, that is roughly 3,000 pesos, all of it employer money, none of it deducted from the worker. Now take a highly paid worker whose true daily wage would put their SBC at 4,000 pesos. The cap bites: you contribute on 2,932.75 pesos, not 4,000, so the daily contribution is 5 percent of 2,932.75, about 146.64 pesos, and not a peso more.

Obligation two: the housing loan deduction

The second obligation only applies to workers who hold an INFONAVIT mortgage, and it works in the other direction. Under Article 29, fracción III, when INFONAVIT notifies you that one of your workers has an active credit, you must withhold the repayment from that worker's wages and remit it. This is a descuento, a deduction from the worker's own pay, and it is legally distinct from the 5 percent contribution in every way that matters.

INFONAVIT tells you how much to withhold, and it comes in one of three forms: a fixed monthly peso amount, a percentage of the worker's SBC, or a number of times the minimum wage (the "veces salario mínimo" factor). You do not compute the loan balance or the interest; INFONAVIT does that and hands you the figure. Your job is to withhold exactly what they instruct, individualize it to the right worker, and remit it.

The Federal Labor Law caps how much can come out of a worker's pay. Under LFT Articles 97 and 110, ordinary housing loan repayments are limited to 20 percent of salary. The 2025 reform added a second, higher cap for the new social rental program, which I will come to, at 30 percent.

The reason to keep these two obligations mentally separated is that they behave differently in almost every edge case: caps, who bears the cost, and, as of 2025, what happens when the worker stops earning. Which brings us to the reforms.

The 2024 to 2025 reform: what changed and why

On December 2, 2024, Congress amended Article 123, fracción XII of the Constitution to expand the housing mandate toward "vivienda con orientación social," housing with a social orientation. On February 21, 2025, the implementing decree was published in the Diario Oficial de la Federación, reforming both the INFONAVIT Law and the Federal Labor Law. It took effect the next day, February 22, 2025. Several pieces of it touch payroll.

INFONAVIT became a builder and a landlord, not just a lender. The reform lets INFONAVIT construct housing through a subsidiary company (an empresa filial) and, more importantly for payroll, run a social rental program (arrendamiento social). Under the new Articles 51 Ter and 51 Quáter, when a worker rents through this program, the rent is deducted from their salary the same way a loan repayment is, capped at 30 percent under the amended LFT Articles 97 and 110. This is a genuinely new deduction type, not a relabeling of the old one. If a client has workers in the rental program, that is a new withholding category to carry.

Existing loan payments were frozen at 2024 levels. Transitorio Décimo Primero froze the monthly payment on existing credits at the December 2024 amount and set the annual "actualización," the inflation-based increase, to zero from 2025 onward. Article 44 was also reformed so that credit balances can no longer be indexed at all. The practical effect is that for pre-reform loans, the peso amount you withhold should not be creeping up each year the way it used to. If a client's legacy system is still applying an annual bump to those deductions, it is now over-withholding, and that comes out of the worker's pocket.

Death and permanent incapacity release the loan. The reformed Article 51 confirms that INFONAVIT credits carry insurance at the institute's cost. If a worker dies or is declared totally and permanently incapacitated, the outstanding loan is forgiven and the property passes to beneficiaries free of liens. For a 50 percent-or-greater partial incapacity, the worker gets a two-year interest-free deferral, and the credit is released if they do not take new employment in that window. For payroll, the signal is simple: on a death or permanent-incapacity separation, the loan deduction stops and the balance is handled through insurance, not through continued withholding.

Workers get a clearer claim on the subaccount at retirement. The amended LFT Article 141 confirms that on separation at retirement age, the worker is entitled to the full housing subaccount balance or a transfer to their AFORE. That belongs on the termination and retirement checklist.

The reform clause that actually bites: Article 29 and unpaid time

Here is the change that reached into the pay run itself. Before the reform, employers could suspend the INFONAVIT loan deduction when a worker was absent without pay or on IMSS incapacity leave. The logic was intuitive: no salary, no base to deduct from. The 2025 reform to Article 29 removed that relief for the deduction. The relevant sentence now reads that the obligation to make the fracción III deductions "no se suspenderá por ausencias o incapacidades," it shall not be suspended for absences or incapacities.

Read alongside the rest of the paragraph, the reform splits the two obligations apart during unpaid time in a way worth stating precisely:

The 5 percent employer contribution is suspended during an unpaid absence, as long as you file timely notice with INFONAVIT under Article 31, but it continues during an IMSS-issued incapacity. The loan deduction, by contrast, continues in both cases. So during an IMSS incapacity, both the contribution and the deduction keep running; during an ordinary unpaid absence with proper notice, the contribution pauses but the deduction does not.

The obvious problem is the one everyone spotted immediately: if a worker is on unpaid incapacity and earning nothing that cycle, there is no salary to deduct from, so the reform effectively pushes the worker's debt onto the employer to front. INFONAVIT granted a transition to ease the switch, ultimately extending it to the sixth bimester of 2025 (November to December), with payment due by January 17, 2026. But the underlying obligation stood, and employers challenged it.

The Supreme Court ruling: CC 120/2025

This is where it gets useful, because the Supreme Court gave employers a real lever. Two circuit courts had split on whether an employer could get a provisional suspension, through an amparo, of the new duty to keep deducting for workers with no salary. In Contradicción de Criterios 120/2025, decided November 4, 2025, the SCJN resolved the split as binding jurisprudence, meaning every federal court must now follow it.

The holding: an employer can obtain a provisional suspension of the Article 29 obligation to make housing loan deductions for absent or incapacitated workers, provided the employer posts a guarantee (a fianza or deposit) covering the deduction amounts, at the same monthly cadence INFONAVIT uses, by the 17th of each month. The Court reasoned that forcing an employer to fund a worker's personal mortgage payment out of its own pocket, when there is no salary to withhold from, likely exceeds what the employer can lawfully be made to bear.

The crucial boundary, and the reason I keep hammering the contribution-versus-deduction distinction: the ruling only reaches the descuento. The 5 percent employer aportación for an IMSS-incapacitated worker still has to be paid. Only the worker's loan deduction can be suspended, and only if you go get the suspension and keep the guarantee current.

What this means in practice for a client with a worker on unpaid incapacity who holds an INFONAVIT loan: they keep paying the 5 percent contribution regardless; they can either keep fronting the loan deduction, or file an amparo, win a provisional suspension, and post a monthly guarantee instead of remitting the deduction. If the amparo ultimately fails, the guarantee is used to cover the amounts. This is a legal proceeding, so it is a decision for the employer and their counsel, weighing the cost of fronting the deductions against the cost and effort of litigating. One caution: the ruling applies to amparo proceedings under the Amparo Law as it stood until October 16, 2025, so the procedural posture for newer filings is worth confirming with counsel.

Deadlines, filing, and the mechanics that trip people up

The 5 percent housing contribution is assessed and remitted on a bimonthly (bimestre) basis, together with the retirement, severance-at-old-age, and old-age (RCV) contributions, and is due by the 17th of the month following the close of each two-month period. The ordinary IMSS insurance quotas (the monthly cuotas obrero-patronales for the sickness, maternity, disability, and other branches) are instead determined and paid on a monthly cycle. In practice both are calculated and paid through the Sistema Único de Autodeterminación (SUA) and settled in a single transaction, since INFONAVIT and IMSS collection are coordinated. The 17th is a hard deadline: because INFONAVIT determines and collects as a fiscal authority, a late or short remittance accrues actualización (inflation indexing) and recargos (surcharges) under the Código Fiscal, not a simple late fee.

Registration movements have a 5-business-day filing deadline under Article 31. Altas (new hires), bajas (terminations), and modificaciones salariales (SBC changes) must be reported within 5 business days of the triggering event, and an SBC change takes legal effect from the date the change occurred, not the date the movement is filed, so a late filing does not shift the period from which the new contribution base applies. Registration is unified with IMSS: the same movement filed through IMSS updates the worker's status for housing purposes, so the two are not filed separately.

A few edge cases worth having a settled answer for, because they recur:

A new hire is included from the first day worked; a termination through the last day worked. During an IMSS incapacity, both the contribution and the loan deduction continue (subject to the amparo route above for the deduction). During an unpaid absence with timely notice, the contribution is suspended but the deduction continues. When a loan is paid off, deductions stop only when INFONAVIT notifies you, not when you calculate that the balance should be zero, because INFONAVIT owns the amortization schedule. And on death or total permanent incapacity, deductions stop and the insurance mechanism takes over.

Enforcement, penalties, and shared liability

Because INFONAVIT can act as a fiscal authority, the penalty regime has real range. Administrative fines run from 3 to 350 UMA per violation, which at the 2026 UMA of 117.31 pesos is roughly 352 to 41,059 pesos per violation. The most punishing one is for failing to provide the information INFONAVIT needs to individualize contributions to each worker's subaccount: that penalty is the greater of 50 percent of the unindividualized amount or the maximum UMA fine. Employers who self-correct and pay voluntarily before an audit are typically spared the fines.

Two liability traps are worth flagging for clients with more complex structures. On an employer substitution (an acquisition or restructuring), the old employer stays jointly liable with the new one for obligations that arose before the change, but only for three months; after those three months, full responsibility for all INFONAVIT obligations sits with the new employer. And under Article 29 Bis, companies that use REPSE-registered specialized service providers are jointly liable if the provider fails to pay INFONAVIT for those workers, so the outsourcing arrangement does not move the risk off the client's books.

The takeaway

The whole of INFONAVIT comes down to two obligations that behave differently: a 5 percent employer contribution, capped at 25 UMA, that the employer pays out of its own pocket, and a loan deduction that comes out of the worker's pay in the amount INFONAVIT specifies. Keep those two straight and most of the complexity resolves. The 2025 reform then changed three things on top: it froze the monthly amount on existing loans, added a social-rental deduction, and, most importantly, required the loan deduction to continue through unpaid absences and incapacities, which the Supreme Court softened by letting employers suspend it if they post a guarantee. None of these rules is complicated on its own, but all of them have to be right, and they have to stay right as the UMA resets each February and INFONAVIT reissues the loan figures.

That is the real challenge for anyone processing Mexican payroll: the rules are knowable, but they change on their own schedule, and a spreadsheet or an older provider applies whatever figures were entered into it last. An employer still applying the annual increase to a frozen loan payment is over-withholding from the worker; one still suspending deductions during incapacity without an amparo is out of compliance with the 2025 reform. Both are following a version of the law that no longer applies. Flux updates the contribution base, the 25 UMA ceiling, the loan instructions, and the incapacity treatment as those rules change, so the employer applies the current figures each period rather than discovering the gap in an INFONAVIT audit.