Can a Foreigner Own Land or Property in Bali?

No, and the rule is not ambiguous. Article 21 of Law No. 5 of 1960, the Basic Agrarian Law, reserves hak milik to Indonesian citizens. Hak milik is the strongest title in Indonesian land law and the closest equivalent to freehold. A foreign national cannot hold it, in Bali or anywhere else in Indonesia.

The same law says what happens if someone tries. Article 26 paragraph (2) provides that a transfer of hak milik intended to pass ownership to a foreigner is null and void by operation of law, and that the land falls to the state. That is not a penalty applied at someone's discretion. It is the stated consequence.

The text of the Basic Agrarian Law is published by the state, and you can read Law No. 5 of 1960 in full. It is in Indonesian, and Articles 20 to 27 are the ones that matter here.

Why this comes up so often. A great deal of writing about Bali blurs the line between owning and holding a long lease, because the two feel similar to someone who just wants a house to live in. They are not similar in law, and the difference decides what happens when the term ends, when the holder dies, and when a dispute reaches a court.

Three routes exist, and they are genuinely different from each other. Which one applies depends on whether you hold an Indonesian residence permit and whether you are acting personally or through a company.

The hak pakai and hak guna bangunan durations above come from Government Regulation No. 18 of 2021 on management rights, land rights, strata units and land registration. You can read PP 18/2021 in full. Terms and the conditions attached to them have changed more than once in the past decade, so check the current position rather than relying on this page or any other written before your transaction.

Apartments are a different case. A foreigner may hold a strata title over an apartment unit built on land held under hak pakai, which is why most of the honest "foreigners can own property in Indonesia" headlines are about apartments rather than about land and villas.

This is the arrangement where land is registered in the name of an Indonesian citizen, with a set of side agreements intended to give the foreign buyer the real control: a loan agreement, a power of attorney, a statement that the nominee holds for the buyer's benefit.

The structure has an obvious problem. The side agreements exist precisely to defeat Article 21, and Article 26 paragraph (2) of the same law voids a transfer aimed at putting hak milik in foreign hands. An agreement whose purpose is to work around a prohibition is a weak thing to rely on when the person whose name is on the certificate changes their mind, marries, divorces, or dies.

The corporate version has its own express prohibition. Article 33 of Law No. 25 of 2007 on investment forbids an agreement stating that shares in a limited company are held for and on behalf of another person, and declares such an agreement null and void. You can read Law No. 25 of 2007.

What we are not telling you. Whether a particular arrangement is enforceable, and what a court would do with it, is a question for an Indonesian notary or lawyer looking at your actual documents. We run a rental marketplace. What we can tell you is that the structure is built on agreements the law names and voids, and that anyone presenting it to you as routine should be asked to put that in writing.

For most people arriving in Bali the honest answer is that this is not really an ownership question at all. It is a question about how long you want to commit and how much you want to pay up front.

• A monthly or yearly rental. No title, no notary, no capital tied up. You can leave. This is what the large majority of long-term residents actually do.
• A long lease, hak sewa, over a villa or a plot. A contract for a fixed number of years, paid in advance. It buys certainty of occupation, not ownership, and its value falls every year as the remaining term shortens.
• Hak pakai, if you hold a residence permit and want a registrable right rather than a contract. More process, more cost, and it still is not hak milik.

The reason this matters for the question you searched is that the answer people are usually looking for, "how do I get a house in Bali", does not run through ownership at all for a foreign national. It runs through a lease.

If a year or two is what you actually need, browse long-term villas and skip the rest of this.

Whichever route you take, the checks are the same and they are yours to make. Nobody else has an interest in making them for you.

• Which right is actually being sold to you. Ask for the word: hak milik, hak pakai, hak guna bangunan or hak sewa. A seller who will not name it has told you something.
• Who is on the certificate, and whether that is the person you are dealing with.
• How many years remain, and what the extension actually requires rather than what it is described as requiring.
• What happens at the end of the term to anything you built.
• Whether the zoning permits what you intend to do there.

For the lease contract itself, its required clauses and when a notary is needed, our guide to the sewa menyewa lease agreement goes through the document clause by clause. It is the better place to start once you know which right you are dealing with.

For a rental rather than a purchase, what to check before signing a villa lease is the practical checklist.

From an Indonesian notary, specifically a PPAT for land transactions, or from a lawyer. Not from a rental platform, not from a developer's sales agent, and not from a Facebook group.

We are deliberately not publishing a table of current price thresholds, permit categories or fees. Those change, they differ by province, and a confident-looking table on a rental site is exactly the kind of thing that is right the day it is written and quietly wrong two years later. Every figure you read about Indonesian land rules should carry a date, and most do not.

This page carries one: the law cited here was checked against the state register on 10 September 2026, and the three instruments are linked above so you can read them rather than take our word for it.