The company route to holding property in Bali. What it costs to keep, and the version of HGB almost nobody mentions.
A PT PMA is an Indonesian limited company with foreign shareholding. It is a real and lawful route to holding property, and it is the structure most often recommended to people who do not need it.
Send the question. It goes to a person, not a form, and the answer comes back with the document it sits on.
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The reason it gets recommended so freely is that it is the only route that lets a foreign buyer hold something that looks like ownership. The reason it is so often the wrong answer is that a company is a thing you have to keep, not a thing you buy once.
Two rights matter here.
Hak Guna Bangunan, the right to build. This is the right a company holds over land in order to put a building on it and use it commercially.
Hak Pakai, the right to use. Available to a foreign owned company and, separately, to a foreign individual, on different terms.
What a PT PMA cannot hold is Hak Milik, freehold. Article 21 of the Basic Agrarian Law reserves that for Indonesian citizens, and no company structure changes it. A PT PMA does not give a foreign buyer freehold through the back door. It gives a different right with a different expiry.
This is the part that rarely appears in a sales conversation.
Under Government Regulation 18 of 2021, the term of an HGB depends on what the land underneath it is.
HGB over state land or over Hak Pengelolaan runs for a maximum of thirty years, extendable by up to twenty, and renewable for up to a further thirty.
HGB over Hak Milik runs for thirty years and carries no extension right at all. It can be renewed, but only by fresh agreement with the person who holds the freehold underneath it.
Most villa land in Bali is Hak Milik held by an Indonesian owner. So a PT PMA taking HGB over that land is very often in the second category, not the first, and the thirty plus twenty plus thirty figure quoted in the brochure describes a right the buyer is not getting.
That does not make the structure bad. It makes the number wrong, and the number is what people are deciding on.
The same regulation sets the renewal window. An application for renewal has to be filed no later than two years after the right has expired, and an extension has to be applied for before expiry rather than after. Diarise those dates from the certificate, not from a count of years.
Ask your notary: is this HGB over state land or over Hak Milik, and which set of terms applies to it in writing?
Most advice online about PT PMA capital is out of date, and the out of date version is the expensive one.
BKPM Regulation 5 of 2025, issued on 2 October 2025, sets minimum paid up capital at IDR 2.5 billion, roughly USD 150,000 at the time of writing. The previous figure under BKPM Regulation 4 of 2021 was IDR 10 billion, and a great deal of published guidance still quotes it.
Separately from paid up capital there is a minimum investment value of IDR 10 billion, assessed per five digit KBLI business classification and per project location rather than per company. Those two figures get conflated constantly, including by people selling company formation.
Paid up capital also has to stay in the company account for twelve months from payment, with narrow exceptions for asset acquisition, construction and operations. That is working capital you cannot deploy for a year, which is a real cost and not an administrative detail.
These figures move. Confirm the current position with your own corporate lawyer rather than taking it from a page, this one included.
A company does not go quiet when you are not using it.
It reports. Investment realisation reporting through LKPM continues regardless of activity. It files tax returns whether or not it trades. It needs a registered address, a director and a commissioner, and at least one of those positions carries requirements about who can fill it. It needs bookkeeping, and the bookkeeping has to be good enough to survive a look.
None of that is difficult. All of it is ongoing, and all of it costs money every year for as long as the structure exists. A buyer who set the company up to hold one villa is paying an annual bill to own something a lease would have held for nothing.
The honest test is what you intend to do at the end, and what you intend to do in the meantime.
A PT PMA earns its keep when the property is a business rather than a house. If you are letting commercially and want the licensing to be clean, if you are building to sell and need to pass something transferable to a buyer, if you are running more than one property, or if you want the operation to survive being sold as a going concern, the company is doing real work.
It is overkill when you want somewhere to live, or one villa let occasionally through a manager. The structure costs more to maintain than it returns in flexibility, and the right you end up holding may expire sooner than the lease you turned down.
There is also a middle case worth naming. Some buyers set up a PT PMA because they were told a lease was risky and a company was safe. That is not the trade. A lease is contractual and a company holds a registered right, and they fail in different ways rather than one being safe and the other not. What matters is which set of failures you can live with, and that is a question about your plans rather than about which instrument is better.
The class of right the company will hold, and the land underneath it.
Which KBLI classifications the activity needs, because that drives both the investment value and whether foreign shareholding is permitted at the level you want.
What the annual cost of keeping the company is, quoted by whoever will be doing the filing, in writing, for a company that is not trading.
What happens to the right at expiry, and who has to agree to what.
And whether the same outcome is available through a lease, which is the question the person selling the company formation has no reason to ask.
This page describes publicly available law and administrative practice and is not legal, tax or corporate advice. Bali Property Sourcing is a real estate agency and buyer's agent, not a law firm. Capital thresholds, classification rules and land right terms change and are applied locally. Instruct your own notary and corporate lawyer before incorporating anything or committing money.
Every property listed here has been vetted before it went up. Ask what those documents actually say before a deposit changes hands, not after.