Can Americans Adopt From Guatemala in 2026? No — and the Closure Dates to 2007, Not 2008

In short: You cannot adopt a child from Guatemala to the United States in 2026. The US Department of State says it in its own words — “Intercountry adoptions are not currently possible between Guatemala and the United States” — and adds that USCIS may not approve a Form I-800 for a Guatemalan child. The closure dates to the 2007 moratorium, not 2008: the Ley de Adopciones (Decreto 77-2007) took effect 31 December 2007. Guatemala is a Hague Convention country (in force for Guatemala since 1 March 2003) — membership was never the obstacle. What Guatemala’s Consejo Nacional de Adopciones does still run is domestic adoption, plus the separate stepchild and adult routes, and its own statistics show more than 250 children in priority-adoption profiles. This is general information, not legal advice.

Almost every English-language page about Guatemalan adoption was written for an audience that no longer exists: the audience that existed while a Guatemala-to-US adoption route still did. That route is closed, and it has been closed for long enough that the people arriving at this question today usually arrive with the wrong assumption and a wrong date. How big it once was is a question this page deliberately leaves alone — no published year-by-year count of Guatemala-to-US adoptions was obtainable, because the State Department’s own chart of them is populated client-side and was not in the page text we retrieved.

This page does two things. It states the closure flatly, with the instrument and the date. Then it separates the routes that are genuinely closed from the routes that are genuinely open — because they are not the same list, and no other English page seems to draw that line.

The answer, in the two governments’ own documents

Two governments, two document sets, no disagreement between them. That is unusual enough on a Guatemalan legal question to be worth saying out loud — most of the pages on this site have to name which authority governs which fact because the authorities differ. Here they do not.

Why “since 2008” is the wrong date, and why it matters

You will see 2008 everywhere. The primary sources say 2007, and the difference is not pedantry — it changes what the surviving statistics mean.

The State Department’s sequence, quoted rather than summarised: “In December 2007, Guatemala passed adoption legislation that incorporated the Hague Adoption Convention into Guatemala’s adoption system, created the Guatemalan National Adoption Council (CNA), and established a transition period for cases initiated prior to its enactment. The CNA subsequently suspended new intercountry adoption applications, and as of January 2025, intercountry adoptions between the United States and Guatemala have not resumed.”

Its FAQ gives the dates to the day: the law “was approved on December 11, 2007 and went in effect on December 31, 2007.” Decreto 77-2007’s own signature block matches — emitted “EL ONCE DE DICIEMBRE DE DOS MIL SIETE”, sanctioned at the Palacio Nacional on “veinte de diciembre del año dos mil siete”, in force 31 December 2007 by Article 68.

So what happened in 2008? Deadlines, not closure. “Notarial adoption cases that were in process before December 31, 2007 would be permitted to continue but only if the cases were registered with the CNA by spring 2008. Cases that were registered with the CNA would be considered ‘grandfathered’ and allowed to continue their notarial adoption process under Guatemala’s previous law. For relinquishment adoption cases to continue, the CNA and PGN were also required to interview the birth mother by August 2008.” And that status was revocable: “any irregularities found in the notarial process of a particular case could negate the ‘grandfathered’ status and prevent the case from being able to proceed.”

The Guatemalan statute has the matching transitional rule. Article 56 of Decreto 77-2007: “Todos los procedimientos notariales y judiciales de adopción que se encuentren en trámite al momento de la vigencia de la presente ley, deben ser registrados ante la Autoridad Central, en un plazo no mayor de treinta días… éstos continuarán el trámite de conformidad con la ley vigente al tiempo de su iniciación.” Cases in the pipeline finished under the old law. New cases did not start.

The number that makes the closure legible: CNA’s own table

This is the part no English-language page seems to have looked up. The Consejo Nacional de Adopciones publishes a historical table on its statistics page, titled “Procesos Administrativos de Adopción Finalizados por Año” and described by CNA as “Información histórica de los procesos administrativos de adopción concluidos satisfactoriamente.” When we retrieved it, the page header read “Sistema de Monitoreo CNA - Información al 08 de enero de 2026”.

Four things about this table, because a number without its handling rules is a trap:

1. The 2026 row is not a year. The dataset is stamped 8 January 2026. Eight days. It is not evidence of anything about 2026, and the 2025 figures are the values carried in a snapshot dated eight days into the following year rather than an audited year-end total.
2. “Internacionales” is not “to the United States.” It counts international administrative adoption processes finalised in Guatemala, all receiving countries together. Reading a US figure out of it would be inventing one.
3. The tail matches the grandfathering story. Completions continue to 2017 (one case) and then read zero from 2018 onward. That is exactly the shape you would expect from a pipeline emptying under Article 56 rather than a new intake, and it is why “closed since 2008” misdescribes the record even though the intake did stop.
4. The domestic column never stopped. Read the column, not a headline: Nacionales runs from 46 to 156 completions a year across 2009-2025, with 22 in 2008, the first full year under the new law (it took effect 31 December 2007). The low year is 2010 (46) and the high year is 2011 (156); the 57 in the 2025 column is that snapshot’s figure, not the floor of the series. Guatemala did not stop doing adoptions. It stopped doing new intercountry ones.

What is actually still open

Here is the distinction the closed-door headline hides. Decreto 77-2007 defines two types of adoption in Article 9 — “a. Nacional; b. Internacional” — and then subordinates one to the other: “La adopción nacional tendrá siempre derecho preferente, la adopción internacional procederá subsidiariamente, sólo después de haberse constatado y examinado adecuadamente las posibilidades de una adopción nacional.” CNA restates that as an institutional principle in its own words: “Primicia de la adopción nacional sobre la internacional, que solo procederá cuando no sea posible la nacional.”

The definitions in Article 2 are what decide which box a case falls in, and they turn on residence, not passport:

• “b. Adopción internacional: Aquella en la que un niño con residencia legal en Guatemala va a ser trasladado a un país de recepción.”
• “c. Adopción nacional: Aquella en la que adoptante y adoptado son residentes legales habituales en Guatemala.”

The statute still spells out the closed route in full, which is worth reading as a measure of what is not currently reachable. Article 42 sets out eleven requirements (a–k) for foreign applicants, among them “b. Mandato especial judicial a favor de una persona que pueda representarlo en Guatemala” and “k. Certificado de idoneidad emitido por la Autoridad Central o su homólogo en el país de origen del o los solicitantes.” And Article 55 puts an eight-day clock on the Hague paperwork at the Guatemalan end: “la Autoridad Central deberá emitir el certificado de que la adopción ha sido realizada de acuerdo con esta ley y el Convenio de La Haya en un plazo no mayor de ocho días.” Neither step is reachable in a US case today, because the Article 47 agreement between the two Central Authorities is not there to begin the file with.

One boundary this page will not cross. That a route exists on the Guatemalan side does not tell you what the United States will do with the result. State’s own caution, quoted in full because the hedges are the substance: “Prospective adoptive parents who are stationed overseas on U.S. military orders, posted overseas on U.S. government orders, or are private citizens living abroad are cautioned that the Convention may apply to an adoption completed in the United States, in the host country, and/or involving a child from a third country. We also strongly encourage such prospective adoptive parents to consult with the Central Authority of the country where they are physically residing, and/or where the child is residing, to determine whether the Convention applies to a proposed adoption.” And on immigration: “USCIS determines who is suitable and eligible to adopt a child from another country and bring that child to live in the United States under U.S. immigration law. Additionally, a child must meet the definition of a Convention adoptee under U.S. immigration law in order to be eligible to immigrate to the United States with an IH-3 or IH-4 immigrant visa.”

Two determinations, two bodies, neither of them us. If your real question is whether a Guatemalan adoption will get a child a US immigrant visa, that question belongs to USCIS and to a licensed US immigration attorney.

Who may adopt at all under Guatemalan law

These are the statutory gates that apply regardless of nationality, quoted from Decreto 77-2007:

• Art. 13 — who may adopt. “Podrán adoptar el hombre y la mujer unidos en matrimonio o en unión de hecho declarada de conformidad con la legislación guatemalteca, siempre que los dos estén conformes en considerar como hijo al adoptado. Podrán adoptar las personas solteras cuando así lo exija el interés superior del niño.”
• Art. 14 — the age gap. Applicants “deberán tener una diferencia de edad con el adoptado no menor de veinte años” — a minimum twenty-year gap, plus the idoneidad assessment, which the article defines as a psychosocial study covering “aspectos legales, económicos, psicológicos, médicos, sociales y personales” and examining “sus motivaciones y expectativas al desear adoptar.”
• Art. 16 — impediments, including anyone “condenados por delitos que atenten contra la vida, la integridad física, sexual y la libertad de las personas”, and one spouse acting “sin el consentimiento expreso del otro”.
• Art. 7 — nationality is not lost. “El adoptado no perderá la nacionalidad guatemalteca ni los derechos inherentes a ella.”

And the prohibitions in Article 10, which read as a direct response to the era the moratorium ended:

• “a. La obtención de beneficios indebidos, materiales o de otra clase, para las personas, instituciones y autoridades involucradas en el proceso de adopción”
• “b. A los padres biológicos o representantes legales del niño, disponer expresamente quién adoptará a su hijo o hija; salvo que se trate del hijo del cónyuge o conviviente o de la familia sustituta que previamente lo ha albergado” — birth parents may not choose the adopter, with those named exceptions
• “g. Que los padres biológicos otorguen el consentimiento para la adopción antes del nacimiento del niño y que tal consentimiento sea otorgado antes de las seis semanas de nacido el niño.”

Article 10 closes by saying that a file where any of those is discovered “se suspenderán inmediatamente y no se autorizará la adopción”, with criminal referral where the act is itself an offence.

Cost: what the CNA says, and what we could not source

CNA prints a banner across every page of its site we retrieved (its home page, Adopcion.php, MarcoNormativo.php, Somos.php and Estadisticas.php): “Todos los servicios que brinda el Consejo Nacional de Adopciones son gratuitos | No es necesario el auxilio de abogados, tramitadores, entidades intermediarias o terceros con afán de lucro”. All of its services are free, and it says the help of lawyers, tramitadores, intermediary entities or profit-seeking third parties is not necessary.

The statute is slightly more layered than the banner. Article 60 provides that “En el caso de las adopciones internacionales, la Autoridad Central establecerá periódicamente el arancel por los servicios que preste y lo hará público. Las adopciones nacionales se encuentran exoneradas del pago del mencionado arancel”. So there is a fee schedule contemplated for international adoptions and an express exemption for domestic ones.

No published arancel schedule was located on cna.gob.gt as of 2026-08-12. And since intercountry adoption with the United States is not currently possible, there is no live international figure to publish even if one existed. We are not going to estimate one.

This matters because our own Guatemala lawyer fee guide carries rows for adoption work, including an international-adoption row. Read against the two sources above, that row prices a route that has been closed to the United States since the 2007 moratorium, and the “via CNA” row prices an authority that says its own services cost nothing. Treat those rows as market quotes for private legal work, not as the cost of an available adoption programme.

What CNA says it actually needs, and who it says it needs it for

CNA publishes a twelve-item requirements guide for families applying to adopt domestically, and it puts something before the paperwork. On its requirements page (cna.gob.gt/Adopcion.php) CNA calls that step “Primer paso de adopción: Taller Informativo” — a free information workshop — and prints the instruction “Reserva cupo llamando al 2415-1600 Ext. 215”. The guide itself then lists the diploma from that workshop as requirement 01, alongside the application form (Formulario A for married or unión de hecho couples, Formulario B for single applicants), birth and DPI certifications, a notarially legalised DPI copy, antecedentes penales, marriage or unión de hecho certification (“No aplica a personas solteras”), proof of employment or income, medical certification of physical and mental health for the applicants and everyone living in the household, recent photographs, a RENAS certificate from the Ministerio Público for the applicants and all adults in the household, and finally the additional requirements for foreign applicants.

Three rules that catch people out. CNA states them in two different places, so each one is tagged with the document it actually comes from:

• Six months — from CNA’s requirements page. The Notas block on cna.gob.gt/Adopcion.php reads “Todos los documentos deben ser extendidos dentro de los 6 meses anteriores a su solicitud”. The guide PDF carries its own wording of the same rule: “Todos sus documentos deben presentarse en orginal y tener una vigencia de 6 meses” — the misspelling of original is the guide’s own.
• DPI everywhere — also from the requirements page. Same Notas block on cna.gob.gt/Adopcion.php: “LOS SOLICITANTES DEBEN IDENTIFICARSE EN TODOS LOS DOCUMENTOS CON EL DPI”.
• No approximations on income — this one is in the guide itself. For the income statement, CNA instructs applicants not to use the words “promedio, aproximado o equivalente y similares” because it works with total, fixed values at the moment of the social evaluation — and where income arrives in foreign currency, a perito contador must certify it converted to national currency at the day’s rate.

For foreign applicants, requirement 12 is headed “CON RESIDENCIA PERMANTENTE” — the typo is the guide’s — and asks for a RENAP Certificación de Extranjero Domiciliado and a notarially legalised copy of the Constancia de Estatus Migratorio issued by the Instituto Guatemalteco de Migración — with CNA verifying in both cases “Que su tipo de residencia sea “Permanente”.” If residency is the gating item for you, our Guatemala residency guide covers that pathway; the police-record documents CNA asks for are covered in PNC antecedentes policiacos and the Organismo Judicial CAPE clearance, and foreign documents needing apostilles are handled in our apostille-from-the-USA guide.

The children CNA says are waiting — and the mismatch it publishes about them

CNA is unusually candid about the gap between who is available and who applicants want. In its own words: “Estudios internos revelan que el 95% de las personas interesadas en adoptar tienen la expectativa de adoptar niños y niñas recién nacidos y sanos. Los solicitantes tienen un niño imaginario, idealizado. El porcentaje de personas interesadas en una adopción prioritaria es mínimo.”

Its adopción prioritaria programme covers children and adolescents who are:

• “Mayores de 7 años”
• “Adolescentes (13 a 17 años)”
• “Grupos de hermanos”
• “Niños, niñas y adolescentes con discapacidad”
• “Niños, niñas y adolescentes con condiciones médicas especiales”

And the volume: “En la actualidad existen más de 250 NNA en condición de adopción prioritaria, susceptibles de ser adoptados por familias guatemaltecas.” CNA says it gives preferential treatment to applications from families interested in priority adoption.

On the protection-home side, the same statistics page publishes a consolidated total: 111 private and 18 public homes, 129 active, with CNA’s note that the 111 figure “corresponde a hogares con autorización o revalidación vigente y en proceso.”

The history, because the closure only makes sense with it

The 2009 attempt to reopen, and why it did not, is documented in a State Department FAQ that most people never find.

State’s stated reason for withdrawing is worth reading rather than paraphrasing: “the United States is concerned that the CNA has not yet addressed and resolved vulnerabilities that led to widespread corruption and ultimately to the 2007 moratorium on intercountry adoptions. Specifically, the United States believes that more safeguards for children should be in place before the CNA could start processing new intercountry adoptions.”

If you get this wrong

The failure mode here is not a fine. It is a family paying for a process that cannot finish.

• The Hague step cannot be completed. State cannot issue the Hague Adoption Certificate or Custody Declaration for a new Guatemalan case, and USCIS may not approve the I-800. Those are not discretionary refusals you can appeal your way around with better paperwork.
• The Guatemalan side has its own gate. Article 47 requires, in writing and in the file, “que las autoridades centrales de ambos Estados están de acuerdo en que se continúe con el procedimiento de adopción.” If one Central Authority is not agreeing, the Guatemalan file cannot proceed either.
• Foreign agencies must be registered with CNA. Article 33: “Ningún organismo extranjero acreditado podrá proveer sus servicios en un caso de adopción internacional en Guatemala si no está registrado con la Autoridad Central de Guatemala.” The request for that authorisation has to come from the accrediting state’s own Central Authority, not from the agency.
• Article 10 makes the money question a suspension trigger, not a negotiation.

If someone is offering you a Guatemala programme, the cheapest thing you can do is take the offer to the two named bodies before you take it to your bank: CNA (7a. Avenida 6-68, zona 9, Guatemala; (502) 2415 1600; cna@cna.gob.gt) and the US Embassy’s adoption mailbox, which State publishes as adoptguatemala@state.gov.

Adjacent questions this page is not

• Whether an adoption transmits Guatemalan nationality is a question this page does not answer. The only nationality rule in the Ley de Adopciones runs the other way: Article 7 says the adoptee “no perderá la nacionalidad guatemalteca ni los derechos inherentes a ella” — it addresses not losing it, not passing it on. Neither the Constitution nor Guatemala’s nationality law was retrieved for this page, so no rule on adoptive filiation and jus sanguinis is stated here either way. If your question is about registering a US-born child as Guatemalan by descent, that is a separate procedure: registering a US-born child as Guatemalan.
• The 2026 immigrant visa pause has its own page with the full notice text and the exception list: the US immigrant visa pause for Guatemalans.
• Giving birth in Guatemala is a different legal path entirely — see giving birth in Guatemala.

Sources

• Guatemala Intercountry Adoption Information — US Department of State, Bureau of Consular Affairs. Page footer stamp: “Last Updated: March 10, 2025”. https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/Intercountry-Adoption/Intercountry-Adoption-Country-Information/Guatemala.html — the live URL returns HTTP 403 to automated requests behind a bot-verification layer (bare curl, curl with a browser user-agent and referer, curl_cffi with Chrome impersonation, and the r.jina.ai proxy were all refused or served the CAPTCHA interstitial). Text retrieved 2026-08-12 from the Internet Archive capture of that exact URL dated 2026-04-30.
• FAQ: U.S. Withdrawal of Interest in Participating in Guatemala’s Pilot Adoption Program — US Department of State. https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/Intercountry-Adoption/adopt_ref/adoption-FAQs/us-withdrawal-interest-guatemala-pilot-program.html — retrieved 2026-08-12 from the Internet Archive capture dated 2026-05-19. Source of the 2007 moratorium date, the December 2007 law dates, the spring-2008 and August-2008 transition deadlines, the November 2009 pilot programme, and the US withdrawal.
• Ley de Adopciones, Decreto Número 77-2007 del Congreso de la República, published by the Consejo Nacional de Adopciones together with its Reglamento (Acuerdo Gubernativo 182-2010). Articles cited: 2, 7, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 33, 39, 42, 47, 55, 56, 60, 68. https://www.cna.gob.gt/Documentos/Ley_de_Adopciones.pdf — retrieved 2026-08-12. Reform check: the only reform annotation in this edition is a CNA footnote recording that a Corte de Constitucionalidad judgment of 9 July 2009 (expedientes acumulados 467 y 612-2008) affects the Civil Code cross-reference in Article 64; none of the articles quoted above carries a reform annotation in this edition.
• Marco Normativo — Consejo Nacional de Adopciones. https://www.cna.gob.gt/MarcoNormativo.php — retrieved 2026-08-12. Lists Decreto 77-2007, Acuerdo Gubernativo 182-2010, the Convención sobre los Derechos del Niño (1989) and the Convenio de La Haya (1993) as the framework, and publishes the Consejo Directivo acuerdos on international transition cases (CNA-CD-015-2011 of 8 August 2011 and its extensions; CNA-CD-017-2013 of 10 December 2013 and its extension). It also links Acuerdo CNA-CD-008-2026 repealing acuerdos CNA-CD-010-2010 and CNA-CD-011-2011; that file is an image-only scan with no extractable text, so nothing is stated here about its content.
• La Adopción / Requisitos de Adopción — Consejo Nacional de Adopciones. https://www.cna.gob.gt/Adopcion.php — retrieved 2026-08-12. Source of the Taller Informativo step, the priority-adoption profiles and the “more than 250” figure, the 95% expectation finding, the six-month document rule, the DPI rule, and the permanent-residence requirement for a foreign stepchild applicant.
• Guía de requisitos para las familias interesadas en adoptar — Consejo Nacional de Adopciones, 18-page PDF published on the requirements page. https://www.cna.gob.gt/Documentos/Requisitos/20251110%20REQUISITOS_DE_ADOPCI%C3%93N.pdf — retrieved 2026-08-12. Source of the twelve requirement blocks, the RENAS instruction, the guide’s own original-document and six-month-validity wording, the income-wording rule, and requirement 12 for foreign applicants. The six-month and DPI rules quoted above in the Notas wording come from Adopcion.php, not from this PDF; neither of those two strings appears in the PDF’s text layer.
• Estadísticas de Procesos del Consejo Nacional de Adopciones — CNA monitoring system, page header “Sistema de Monitoreo CNA - Información al 08 de enero de 2026”. https://www.cna.gob.gt/Estadisticas.php — retrieved 2026-08-12. Source of the Procesos Administrativos de Adopción Finalizados por Año table reproduced above and the 111 private / 18 public / 129 active protection-home consolidation. The live counters at the top of that page are populated client-side and rendered as zero in the served HTML; none of them is reproduced here.
• Somos / Misión, Visión y objetivos — Consejo Nacional de Adopciones. https://www.cna.gob.gt/Somos.php — retrieved 2026-08-12. Source of the primacía de la adopción nacional principle in CNA’s own wording.
• Status table, Convention of 29 May 1993 on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption — Hague Conference on Private International Law (HCCH). https://www.hcch.net/en/instruments/conventions/status-table/?cid=69 — retrieved 2026-08-12. Guatemala row read against the table’s own column headers: accession 26-XI-2002, entry into force 1-III-2003.

Not published / not found, as of 2026-08-12: no arancel schedule for international adoptions was located on cna.gob.gt, despite Article 60 requiring the Autoridad Central to set one and make it public; no year-by-year count of Guatemala-to-US adoptions was obtainable (the State Department’s chart is populated client-side and was not in the retrieved HTML); no resumption date has been published by either government; and the text of Acuerdo CNA-CD-008-2026 is not machine-readable in the copy CNA publishes.

General information for prospective adoptive parents and Guatemalan families, current as of 2026-08-12, reporting published rules from the instruments named above. It is not legal advice. Adoption eligibility on the Guatemalan side is determined by the Consejo Nacional de Adopciones and the courts; adoption suitability and immigrant-visa eligibility on the US side are determined by USCIS and the Department of State. Confirm with CNA at cna@cna.gob.gt and with a licensed US immigration attorney before spending money on any programme. En español: Adopción internacional en Guatemala para estadounidenses.