Take furnished for a first lease, unfurnished for a second. If you are staying a year or less, furnished wins on total cost once you count what you would otherwise buy and then sell at a loss on the way out. If you are staying longer than about eighteen months, unfurnished wins, and it wins by more than people expect — because the furnished premium is charged every month and the furniture is bought once.
The complication in Mérida, Mexico is that amueblado is not a specification. It is a word that covers a full household with linens and a corkscrew at one end, and a bed, a table and two chairs at the other. The gap between those is a five-figure peso difference in your first fortnight, and it is invisible in a listing.
What “amueblado” actually covers
There is no standard. Establish it item by item at the viewing, and get the list into the lease as an inventory annexe. The categories that matter, roughly in order of what they cost to replace:
- Air conditioning units — which rooms, how old, and whether they are serviced. This is not furniture and it is the single most expensive thing on the list. See the AC clause.
- Refrigerator, washing machine, stove, water heater. A place without a washing machine is a place with a weekly errand.
- Beds and mattresses. Ask the age of the mattress, and lie on it. This is not fussiness; it is the item you cannot live around.
- Sofa, table, chairs, wardrobes. Storage is frequently the missing one — many houses here have no built-in closets.
- Kitchen equipment, down to pans and a kettle. The gap between “kitchen” and “equipped kitchen” is a full afternoon and a real bill.
- Linens, towels, curtains. Curtains matter more here than in a cooler city: what covers a west-facing window is a cooling decision, not a decorating one.
- Fans. Ceiling fans in every room are worth listing separately, because in the shoulder months they are the difference between running the air conditioning and not.
Two words you will see and should ask about:
“Semi-amueblado” — semi-furnished — usually means white goods and not much else. Ask which goods.
“Equipado” — sometimes used for a kitchen that has appliances, sometimes for a house that has everything. It settles nothing on its own.
The price gap, and how to find yours
This site does not print a furnished premium, because it varies by colonia and by how the place was previously let — a property coming off the short-let market is furnished to a standard a long-term listing rarely matches, and priced accordingly.
Find your own figure in twenty minutes: open a listing portal, filter to one colonia and one size, and read ten furnished listings against ten unfurnished. The difference between the two medians is the monthly premium you are being asked for. Do it for the colonia you actually want, because the premium in Centro and the premium in the north are not the same number.
Then decide with arithmetic rather than preference:
Furnished total = (rent + premium) × months.
Unfurnished total = rent × months + what you must buy − what you recover when you sell it.
The last term is the one people leave out and it is large. Second-hand furniture sells here, through the same Facebook groups where you found the apartment, and it sells at a fraction of what you paid. Assume you recover a minority of your outlay, and assume selling it takes weeks you would rather spend on something else in your last month.
The break-even generally sits somewhere between a year and two years. Where exactly depends on how much you buy, which is a decision and not a fixed cost — a mattress, a fridge and a table is a different number from furnishing three bedrooms.
When unfurnished is obviously right
- You are shipping a container. If a menaje de casa is coming, furnished is money spent twice and a storage problem. Whether the container is worth it at all is a separate calculation.
- You are staying open-endedly, past two years, and you know the colonia.
- You care about the mattress and the desk. Furnished means living with someone else’s choices in exactly the two places where that is uncomfortable — where you sleep and where you work.
- You found an unfurnished place that is genuinely better. The unfurnished market is bigger here and includes houses that never appear as furnished listings.
When furnished is obviously right
- Your first lease, arriving from abroad, with no household and no idea yet which colonia suits you. The premium buys you the option to move after a year having lost nothing.
- Short residency horizon. If you are on a visitor stamp or waiting on a card, do not buy a fridge.
- You are arriving in the hot months and have no appetite for spending your first fortnight in traffic buying appliances rather than sitting somewhere cool sorting out the CURP, the bank and the phone.
- You are a couple with one person handling the logistics. Furnishing a house is a fortnight of one person’s life. Price that.
What to write into the lease either way
Furnished: an inventory annexe, itemised, signed by both parties, with the condition of each significant item noted and photographs attached. Without it, every mark on every surface is a deposit conversation in twelve months’ time. Include appliance ages if the landlord will give them, and a clause naming who repairs or replaces an appliance that fails through normal use — that is the landlord’s item, and it should say so.
Unfurnished: the state of the walls, floors and fittings at handover, again with photographs, and clarity about what you may fix to the walls. Air conditioning is the live question — if the place has none, whether you may install units, who owns them at the end of the lease, and whether the electrical supply will carry them. Ask before you sign, not after you have bought a unit.
Both, in every case: the photographs, on the day of handover, sent to the landlord through a channel with timestamps. It is the cheapest protection in this entire process, and it is in the handover sequence for that reason.
Where the furniture actually comes from
If you go unfurnished, three channels, and they price very differently:
- The Facebook groups and Marketplace, which is where departing foreigners sell a whole household at once. Timing beats searching — a listing for an entire flat’s contents appears and goes in a day.
- The furniture shops on the Periférico and in the northern retail belt, for new, with delivery. Delivery timelines are the variable; ask before you buy, particularly for appliances.
- The second-hand and usados trade in the city, for one-off items.
Budget a fortnight from keys to a house you can properly live in, not a weekend. That timeline, and the rest of month one’s costs, is what month one costs before you have lived it.
Checked on
Checked on 4 September 2026. No furnished premium, rent or furniture price is quoted here deliberately — read them live off the listing portals for the colonia you want, on the day you are deciding. The channels named above are named for what they publicly offer.