Is buying property in Bali a good investment: the 2026 evidence on both sides.

Is buying property in Bali a good investment: the short answer for 2026.

It depends on three things you can check before you pay: the licence the property will trade under, the land it stands on, and the years left on the lease. Get one wrong and no occupancy forecast will rescue it.

Demand has rarely looked stronger. Bali received 6.95 million foreign visitors in 2025, a record and about 10% above the 6.33 million of 2024 (BPS Bali via Horwath HTL, March 2026). The rules have rarely looked tougher. Short-term rental villas had to prove full licensing by 31 March 2026, a foreign individual cannot hold that licence in a personal name, and the province has moved against nominee land deals.

So the answer has two halves. Hotels and properly licensed villas in strong locations still fill. The unlicensed villa on a crowded street, bought on a brochure yield, is the product that lost its footing.

What still works: record arrivals and hotels that fill.

Horwath HTL's March 2026 report, built on Bali Hotels Association data, puts island-wide hotel occupancy at 74% for 2025 (down 2.3% on 2024) at an average daily rate of IDR 2.35 million, about USD 150. BPS, the national statistics agency, counts all star-rated hotels and reports a lower 61.02%, still the highest of any Indonesian province.

Who comes matters as much as how many. Australia alone sent 1.63 million visitors in 2025 (Horwath HTL). BPS Bali puts foreign-visitor spending at about IDR 2.11 million (about USD 128) per night, up from IDR 2.05 million a year earlier, with accommodation first and food and drink second.

Two qualifiers. The 2024 proposal for a two-year freeze on new hotels, villas and clubs in South Bali was dropped in January 2025 (Skift), so no blanket ban on tourism property exists. And the domestic market softened: Horwath counts 9.6 million domestic arrivals in 2025 against 10.1 million in 2024.

What got harder in 2026: licences, delisting and supply.

The first change is licensing. Short-term rentals had to show a full licence set by 31 March 2026 or come off the booking platforms, and about 1,600 properties were slated for removal from August 2026 (Horwath HTL; Bisnis.com, 3 June 2026). Horwath also states that foreign individuals cannot directly hold the tourism operating licence a short-term rental needs. The legal route is a foreign-owned company (PT PMA) with a committed investment plan above IDR 10 billion (about USD 606,000).

The second is company registration. Since May 2026 the national licensing system (OSS) has rejected new foreign-owned companies in Bali for low-risk and medium-low-risk business codes, as Emerhub reported on 18 May 2026. Real-estate code 68111 is on the closed list; Bali alone held 72.1% of Indonesian projects under it. Perda Bali 4/2026, a provincial regulation signed in February 2026, is reported to prohibit nominee land ownership with criminal penalties; confirm its reach with a notary.

The third is supply. Horwath counts more than 70 hospitality-managed residential projects on sale, about 40% of them in Canggu and Berawa, and the villa share of that stock rose from 13% to 18% in a year. Bank Indonesia's Bali office recorded commercial property demand down 4.80% year on year in the last quarter of 2025, and hotel demand down 6.71% (Bali Discovery, February 2026).

Bali property investment yields: what the sources can and cannot show.

No audited, island-wide series of villa yields exists in any source we could verify. What circulates are agency views. Kibarer wrote in February 2026 that average villas struggle to hold 45–60% occupancy in the shoulder seasons and that owners discount by 10–30%. Villa Finder is reported to project occupancy falling from 66% to 56% in 2026. Neither publishes a method, so read both as opinions from interested parties.

Ask whether the yield on a sales sheet is gross. A leasehold property loses one year of its term every year, and the manager, the booking platform and the maintenance crew are paid before you are. We rebuild that sheet in Bali villa ROI: the maths after fees, vacancy and lease decay.

A restaurant share: a different risk, not a smaller one.

We build and open restaurants, so read this part knowing where we stand. Food and drink is the second-largest item in a foreign visitor's Bali budget after the room (BPS Bali); nationally it takes 18.5% of foreign-tourist spending (BPS, 2025).

The claim we are prepared to defend is narrow. A restaurant on tourism- or commercial-zoned dry land, built with a building approval and held through a PT PMA with a notarised lease, has fewer land and licensing unknowns than a villa bought through a nominee or rented out without a tourism licence. Restaurant business code KBLI 56101 is open to 100% foreign ownership and sits in the medium-high risk tier (Hukumonline, June 2026), while the May 2026 block is reported to stop at the medium-low tier. Some consultants read the block more widely, so the exact code is confirmed in OSS before any lease is signed.

What a restaurant adds is operating risk. Bali had 64,521 restaurants and eateries in 2024 (BPS via GoodStats). Published net-margin benchmarks for Indonesia run from 5–12% for casual dining to 10–20% for fine dining (Klikit, 2026), and they come from interested parties. One Uluwatu restaurant listed for sale shows USD 453,000 of yearly turnover and USD 17,000 of profit. And the productive-land ban names restaurants next to villas: 13 buildings, restaurants among them, were sealed at Jatiluwih in December 2025.

So the operator's track record and the monthly reporting matter more than the building. Our co-ownership offer is shares in the Indonesian company (PT PMA) that holds the lease and licences, with a shareholders' agreement drafted by a notary; ticket size, reporting and exit terms are set per project and sent as a project sheet on WhatsApp. We state no expected return. Read how a restaurant share works and what to ask any operator before you co-own, or ask for the current project sheet.