Act 60 Resident Investor Incentive — Puerto Rico's Tax-Driven Relocation Programme

Act 60 (consolidating earlier Acts 20 and 22) exempts qualifying new residents from Puerto Rico and federal capital-gains and investment income tax if they relocate to the island and meet minimum-presence and local investment requirements, aiming to attract high-net-worth individuals and export-services firms to grow the local economy after Puerto Rico's debt crisis.

A 2026 US Government Accountability Office (GAO) audit found 5,852 resident-investor decrees granted between 2012 and 2024, with 3,165 unique taxpayers filing under one across 2021–2023. Beneficiaries' average federal taxable income fell 39% after relocating (from $875,241 to $533,832), cutting their average federal tax paid by 46% and reducing federal tax revenue by an estimated 'hundreds of millions of dollars' a year in aggregate; forgone Puerto Rico tax revenue from the resident-investor and export-services incentives combined is projected at roughly $6.2 billion for 2020–2026. The GAO also found 179 recipients who could not show they met Puerto Rico's residency requirement, and traced the largest single inflow of beneficiaries — 381 of 1,917 identified — to California.

Independent reporting corroborates a mixed-to-negative local picture: Act 60 beneficiaries bought over two-thirds of the real estate they acquired between 2015 and 2019, contributing to a post-Hurricane-Maria housing price surge that residents and grassroots groups such as the #AbolishAct60 collective say has priced native Puerto Ricans out of their own neighbourhoods, since most locals do not qualify for the exemptions available to new arrivals. Puerto Rico's government continues to defend the incentives as fiscally necessary, but the IRS has since expanded audits and data-sharing to curb non-compliance.

Read the full analysis: https://files.gao.gov/reports/GAO-26-107225/index.html