Mexican (XE) amateur radio permits for foreigners

http://xe-permit.wd9ewk.net/

Updated 30 March 2026

The Mexican Congress passed legislation that eliminated several Mexican government agencies, including the Federal Telecommunications Institute (Instituto Federal de Telecomunicaciones, or IFT) - the licensing authority for amateur radio in Mexico. During 2025, a new telecommunications law was enacted, and a new agency regulating telecommunications was created in October 2025. The new agency is called the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission, or Comision Reguladora de Telecomunicaciones (CRT).

More information about the end of the IFT is available from Mexico's IARU society, the FMRE, in a bulletin (in Spanish) issued in December 2024.

On 27 March 2026, the CRT issued a public consultation on a new set of regulations for the amateur and amateur-satellite services in Mexico. The comment period for this consultation is from 30 March to 24 April 2026. No changes are official, until the new regulations are published in the Diario Oficial de la Federacion (DOF) - Mexico's equivalent to the Federal Register in the USA.

The 65-page PDF with the new regulations, along with forms for transactions related to amateur licenses, is available on the public consultation page at the link "Propuesta Regulatoria.pdf". I also have a local copy of the proposal. Please remember that this document is only a proposal. It could be changed by the CRT, before it appears in the DOF.

A quick reading through the document shows a radical change in how the amateur service will be regulated in Mexico. Instead of individual hams having to submit their requests for a new or renewed "concession", as has been the case with the IFT between 2013 and 2025, amateur licensing will return to being more of an administrative process. The PDF file above includes a series of forms that would be used for various transactions related to amateur licensing. And, unlike in the past, it appears that Mexican amateur license may be available to foreign radio amateurs using basically the same processes as a Mexican ham would for his/her amateur license.

Currently, mainland Mexico is divided into 3 zones - XE1 for central Mexico, XE2 for northern Mexico, and XE3 for southern Mexico. This is in addition to 3 other zones for Mexican islands (XF1, XF2, XF3), and another zone for the Revillagigedo archipelago (XF4). The proposal has the following zones:

XE1 - Queretaro, Hidalgo, state of Mexico, Mexico City, Morelos, Guerrero, Puebla, Tlaxcala, & Veracruz
XE2 - Baja California, Baja California Sur, Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, & Tamaulipas
XE3 - Oaxaca, Tabasco, Chiapas, Campeche, Yucatan, & Quintana Roo
XE4 - Nayarit, Jalisco, Colima, Guanajuato, & Michoacan
XE5 - Sinaloa, Durango, Zacatecas, Aguascalientes, & San Luis Potosi
XF1 - Mexican islands in the Pacific Ocean
XF2 - Mexican islands in the Gulf of Mexico
XF3 - Mexican islands in the Caribbean Sea

The Revillagigedo archipelago is not specifically mentioned in the proposal. Hams who would be in the new XE4 and XE5 zones would not be required to obtain new call signs with those prefixes. They would be permitted to keep their existing call signs, and renew their licenses with those call signs.

The proposal has timeframes for the processes related to amateur licensing, timeframes that are much more reasonable than what Mexican hams have had to experience with the IFT, and even better than what was seen under the Federal Telecommunications Commission (CoFeTel) between the mid-1990s and 2013. Time will tell if this is the case, if this proposal is adopted by the CRT.

I do not see anything in this proposal that would place limits on foreign hams operating in Mexico, as I saw in the 2000s and 2010 with the permits I previously obtained from CoFeTel:

No DXpeditions
No contesting
No operating from Mexican islands

These restrictions were written into the agreement signed by the FCC and SCT in 1991, which was the basis for US hams being able to obtain Mexican permits until 2013. On the other hand, FCC stopped requiring Mexican hams to apply for a US permit before operating from US territory back in the late 1990s. Mexican amateur licenses are automatically recognized by the FCC, even though US hams have gone at least a decade without any legal possibility of operating from Mexico on the basis of a US amateur license (other than the satellite-only permits available to foreign hams in the past couple of years).

After the comment window closes on 24 April 2026, there is no timeframe for CRT to consider the comments, and then publish the results in the DOF. We can only hope results are published sooner, rather than later...

DISCLAIMER! I am not a lawyer, nor am I a Mexican national or citizen. Anyone using information posted on this page does so at their own risk.

WD9EWK/VA7EWK