Alcohol Laws in Guatemala: Drinking Age, Public Drinking and Ley Seca (2026)

In short: The drinking and purchase age is 18 (Código de Salud Art. 50). Drinking in the street is prohibited nationwide — this is a national health statute, not a local by-law (Art. 126). Sale and consumption stop 01:00–06:00 every day of the week under Acuerdo Gubernativo 56-2022, and a customer caught drinking inside that window faces a Q5,000 fine of their own. Ley seca is an electoral rule: noon the day before an election until 06:00 the day after (LEPP Art. 223 lit. d). It has no fixed calendar date — it moves with the TSE’s convocatoria. This page reports published instruments; it is not legal advice.

Our customs guide answers the border question — how many litres you may bring in. This page is about what happens after that: who may buy, where you may drink it, when the taps close, and the day the country goes dry with almost no warning to visitors.

The single most useful thing to understand is that Guatemala regulates alcohol from four separate directions at once, and they do not agree with each other. A traveller who reads only one of them will be wrong.

The five instruments that actually govern this

The age is 18 — and it is written twice

Código de Salud Article 50 is the operative provision:

"ARTICULO 50. PROHIBICION DE VENTA Y CONSUMO A LOS MENORES DE 18 AÑOS DE EDAD. Se prohibe la venta de bebidas alcohólicas y tabaco en cualquiera de sus formas, a los menores de 18 años de edad, así como su consumo en cualquier establecimiento y vía pública."

Two prohibitions, not one: selling to an under-18, and the under-18 consuming — in any establishment and in the public way.

The 1948 Ley de Alcoholes goes further in one narrow respect. Article 45 prohibits the sale of liquors to minors “así como la simple concurrencia de éstos a los expendios” — the mere presence of minors in the outlets. Its penalty on the owner or administrator who does it or allows it is archaic and reads exactly as drafted in 1948: twenty days’ imprisonment, commutable at ten centavos to three quetzales per day.

The figures that matter commercially are in Article 224 of the Health Code:

Article 224 also lists as a special infraction permitting consumption by a minor in any establishment, open or closed, or in the vía pública.

What is not published: we found no national instrument requiring a retailer to check identification, and none setting out how age is to be verified. The obligation the instruments do impose is signage — Santa Catarina Pinula’s municipal acuerdo, for example, requires outlets to display “PROHIBIDA LA VENTA A MENORES DE DIECIOCHO (18) AÑOS” in legible letters. That is a municipal duty, not a national one.

Drinking in the street: a national ban, not a local one

This is the point most travel writing gets backwards. The prohibition sits in Article 126 of the Health Code, as reformed by Article 3 of Decreto 50-2000:

“Queda terminante prohibido el consumo de bebidas alcohólicas, vinos, cervezas y bebidas fermentadas, en parqueos públicos y en parqueos exclusivos de establecimientos de expendio de alimentos y/o licores, así como en la vía pública.”

Three places, absolutely: public car parks, the exclusive car parks of food or liquor establishments, and the vía pública. The same article defines an alcoholic beverage as anything over 0.5% alcohol by volume.

Now the part worth reading carefully, because it is where the instrument goes quiet. The next paragraph attaches a figure to exactly one of those three cases:

Article 224’s list of casos especiales — the list that does carry quetzal amounts — covers selling to minors and permitting minors to consume. It does not list an adult drinking in the street. That conduct therefore falls back on the Code’s general regime: Article 219 literal b) grades fines “entre el equivalente de dos a ciento cincuenta salarios mensuales mínimos vigentes para las actividades no agrícolas”, capped at 100% of the value of the good or service. The Code expresses that band in minimum-wage units, not quetzales, so its cash value moves with whatever minimum wage is in force — we are not converting it here, because the Code does not.

The honest summary: the conduct is clearly prohibited nationwide; the instrument that prohibits it names a penalty for the establishment and leaves the individual’s penalty to a general band. Anyone telling you a specific quetzal fine for drinking a beer on the street is quoting something we could not find in the statute.

The nightly window: 01:00 to 06:00, seven days a week

Guatemala’s daily closing rule is national and current. Acuerdo Gubernativo 56-2022, signed 1 March 2022 by the President in Consejo de Ministros through the Ministerio de Gobernación, reformed Article 1 of Acuerdo Gubernativo 221-2004 (itself dated 27 July 2004) to read:

“Se prohíbe el expendio y consumo de bebidas alcohólicas fermentadas o destiladas, de lunes a domingo de una (01:00) a seis (06:00) de la mañana, en los establecimientos comerciales abiertos al público, cualquiera que sea su categoría o naturaleza, incluyendo discotecas, restaurantes, comedores, centros nocturnos, cantinas, bares, expendios de dichas bebidas, hoteles, moteles o pensiones; así como supermercados, automercados, abarroterías, tiendas de conveniencia y establecimientos comerciales similares.”

Two things follow that catch visitors. First, the rule reaches the shop as well as the bar — you cannot solve a 02:00 problem at a 24-hour convenience store. Second, the customer is named, not just the venue: being found drinking inside the window in one of those establishments carries its own Q5,000 figure.

We searched for any later reform of AG 221-2004 and found none after 56-2022 as of the retrieval date. That is what our search established; it is not a guarantee that none exists.

The 1948 window that never went away

Decreto 536 Article 91 still says licence holders may keep their establishments open “de las seis a las veintiuna horas” — 06:00 to 21:00. Article 92 lets them buy additional hours at 5% of the licence value for the first extra hour and 10% for the second and each subsequent one; Article 93 allows that permit to be refused where it threatens public order and security. Articles 91 and 92 carry footnotes recording provisional suspension and recovery of force under Expediente 1882-2003 (15 November 2003).

We are not resolving the relationship between a 1948 statute and a 2022 reglamento — that is a legal question, not a factual one. What we can report is that the window enforced in practice, and the one carrying live quetzal penalties, is the 01:00–06:00 rule in AG 56-2022, and that municipalities write their own hours against it.

Ley seca: the rule that strands visitors

Ley seca in Guatemala is, at national level, an electoral rule. Ley Electoral y de Partidos Políticos (Decreto 1-85), Article 223, opens “Durante cualquier proceso electoral es terminantemente prohibido” and then, at literal d):

“El expendio o distribución de licores, bebidas alcohólicas y fermentadas o su consumo en lugares públicos, desde las doce horas del día anterior a las elecciones y hasta las seis horas del día siguiente a ésta.”

A worked example with real dates. For the 2023 presidential runoff, the state news agency AGN reported on 19 August 2023 that ley seca ran from 12:00 that Saturday until 06:00 on Monday 21 August 2023, citing Art. 223 literal d) and naming the Policía Nacional Civil as the body verifying compliance. That single case shows the rule reaching a second-round ballot, not only the first.

Why we will not print a future ley seca date

Because the instrument does not contain one, and inventing it would be worse than useless. LEPP Article 196 provides that the electoral process begins with the convocatoria, dictated by the Tribunal Supremo Electoral in the second or third week of January of the election year, and that general elections and Parlacen deputies “se efectuarán un domingo del mes de junio del mismo año” — a Sunday in June, with the specific date fixed by the TSE in the convocatoria decree. Article 197 requires that decree to state the election date and, for a presidential election, the date of the second round. Article 201 provides that where no slate wins an absolute majority, the runoff is held not more than sixty and not fewer than forty-five days later.

So the practical rule for a traveller is: the dry window is knowable only once the TSE has published the convocatoria, and it will fall on a June Sunday and, if there is a runoff, on a second date 45–60 days after. Check the TSE before booking a trip in an election year.

The municipal layer — real, but bounded

Municipalities can and do add rules. Código Municipal (Decreto 12-2002) Article 68 literal j) gives each municipality the competence to delimit the areas inside its populated perimeter that may be authorised for establishments including “expendio de alimentos y bebidas”. Article 146 adds a national setback: “Quedan prohibidos los establecimientos de bebidas alcohólicas o cantinas a una distancia menor de cien (100) metros del centro de la carretera.”

Here is what one municipality’s actual acuerdo looks like — Santa Catarina Pinula, Concejo Municipal, Punto 7º, Acta 44-2017, extraordinary session of 19 September 2017, which we read in full:

Note the drafting in Article 9: the 07:00–21:00 figure is introduced with “se exhorta” — an exhortation — while Article 14 lit. b) attaches a Q50,000 fine to breaches of that same article. We are reporting the text as written; we are not telling you how a Juzgado de Asuntos Municipales reads it.

And the ceiling. A municipality cannot simply abolish alcohol locally. Prensa Libre reported on 21 August 2020 that the Corte de Constitucionalidad declared unconstitutional numerals II and III of Santiago Atitlán’s Acuerdo Municipal 10-2019 — the order to close cantinas, bars and liquor outlets, and the authority given to the municipal court and a civil-society commission to enforce those closures — with effect from the day after publication. That is press reporting of a court ruling; we were not able to retrieve the expediente number from the Corte’s own site.

Do not generalise any of this. Santa Catarina Pinula’s 500 m radius, its camera requirement and its 07:00–21:00 exhortation bind Santa Catarina Pinula. Another municipality’s acuerdo will differ, and there is no national register where you can look them all up.

Edge cases and honest gaps

No national civic dry days were found. We searched for a national instrument imposing ley seca on Semana Santa, Independence Day or any patron-saint fair and found none. The nationally enacted dry-day rule we located is the electoral one. Where a dry day is announced for a fair or a religious week, the instrument behind it is municipal.

Our own municipality page needs checking. Our San Pedro La Laguna page states that the town banned spirits by community decision in 2016. We could not locate a municipal alcohol acuerdo for San Pedro La Laguna; the 2016 acuerdo we could find for that municipality (Acuerdo Municipal 111-2016) concerns single-use plastics. Treat that sentence as unverified until we can source it, and do not plan around it.

Drink-driving is a different instrument entirely and is not covered here — it sits in the traffic law and the Código Penal, not in the health or electoral codes. See our driving guide for the road-rules context.

Selling, not drinking. If your question is about opening a bar or a shop rather than buying a drink, the licence process is a separate trámite: see alcohol sales licence.

Private rules still apply. None of the above binds a hotel, a landlord, an employer or a private venue, each of which may set stricter conditions than the law requires.

Sources

This page reports the content of published instruments as retrieved on 2026-08-11. It is not legal advice and it does not tell you what you may do; statuses can change after the retrieval date. Where an instrument is silent we say so rather than infer a rule in either direction. En español: Leyes de alcohol en Guatemala.