Cancun Businesses Urge Municipality to Cut Permitting Delays

Cancún, Quintana Roo — Business leaders in Cancún are calling on the municipal government to streamline and digitize permit processes, arguing that bureaucracy remains one of the biggest obstacles for people trying to open, formalize, or expand a business in the city.

María Jovita Portillo Navarro, president of the local chapter of Coparmex, the Mexican employers’ federation, said that although the official time frame for opening a business is about 45 days, in practice the process can stretch beyond 90 days because applicants are sent from one government office to another.

“It’s supposedly 45 days, but that’s what it should be. It depends on the agencies, because they send us from one to another: now you have to go to this agency to do this procedure, now that one. That’s what sometimes makes it take more than 90 days,” she said.

Portillo said the problem is not necessarily the number of requirements, but how they are distributed across different areas of government. That means extra trips, more time, and higher costs before a business can open.

Coparmex is proposing to strengthen the city’s one-stop shop, known as Ventanilla Única, and expand the number of procedures that can be completed entirely online, so entrepreneurs do not have to travel from agency to agency.

The group also wants to eliminate duplicate requirements, unnecessary processes, and discretionary criteria, and improve coordination among municipal departments such as inspections, civil protection, urban development, and ecology, which are involved in authorizing and supervising businesses.

Portillo said better coordination would reduce inspection visits and avoid situations where entrepreneurs receive conflicting instructions depending on which agency reviews their establishment.

The business sector also called for stronger transparency and anti-corruption reporting mechanisms, as well as indicators to measure whether regulatory reform is actually working. Portillo said efficiency should be measured by how much time and money compliance costs citizens and businesses, not just by how many procedures have been digitized.

She also recalled that a citizen consultation forum was held in 2024, and said it is important to review what proposals came out of that exercise, which have been implemented, and which are still pending.

“It’s important to know what happened with those proposals, which ones were taken into account and which ones are still pending,” she said.

The push reflects a desire to move administrative simplification from rhetoric to concrete results, especially for entrepreneurs whose startup process can take more than double the time originally planned.