Owners are quoted IDR 100,000 and IDR 2,500,000 a month for the same banjar levy, and no tariff is published

Every other line in a Bali villa’s budget has a document behind it with a figure on it. Land tax has a published rate and a published valuation. The regency levy on short lets has a percentage set by a regency regulation. Staff pay has a provincial minimum and a statutory bonus. One line has none of that, and a new owner usually hears about it from a neighbour rather than from a notary.

That line is the contribution to the banjar. The power to charge it is written down, in two provincial instruments we read in full. The amount is written down nowhere.

Who is obliged to pay the banjar, and under what instrument?

A person recorded with the local adat village is obliged, and that includes a foreigner and a tenant. The instrument is the village’s own rule, not the province’s.

The provincial regulation sorts everyone in an adat village’s territory into three categories. Krama Desa Adat are Hindu Balinese residents who have gone through Mipil and are recorded as members; Krama Tamiu are Hindu Balinese residents who have not; Tamiu is everybody else present temporarily or living there and recorded with the village.^{Source: 1}JDIH Provinsi Bali (Biro Hukum dan HAM Setda Provinsi Bali), Last reviewed 10/10/2026Confidence: Verified A Dutch lessee, an Australian tenant and an Indonesian from Java all fall in the third category.

The regulation then defines awig-awig as a rule made by the adat village and/or the banjar adat, and says in the definition itself that it applies to Krama Desa Adat, Krama Tamiu and Tamiu.^{Source: 1}JDIH Provinsi Bali (Biro Hukum dan HAM Setda Provinsi Bali), Last reviewed 10/10/2026Confidence: Verified That clause is the whole legal basis for a banjar rule reaching someone who is not a member of anything. The banjar adat is defined as a part of the adat village^{Source: 1}JDIH Provinsi Bali (Biro Hukum dan HAM Setda Provinsi Bali), Last reviewed 10/10/2026Confidence: Verified, so a rule made at banjar level carries the village’s authority, not a neighbourhood committee’s.

Underneath sits the status the province granted in 2019: an adat village is a legal subject in the governance system of Bali Province, which the elucidation glosses as having the same rights and obligations as any other legal subject.^{Source: 1}JDIH Provinsi Bali (Biro Hukum dan HAM Setda Provinsi Bali), Last reviewed 10/10/2026Confidence: Verified That is not a cultural courtesy. It is a legal person with rule-making power over people who did not join it.

Does either instrument set an amount, a ceiling or a tariff?

No. Neither states a rate, a ceiling or a floor for anything the village collects.

The provincial regulation lists seven revenue sources for the village budget. Letter (a) is own revenue, letter (g) other lawful income. It then splits the rulebook: letters (a), (b) and (f) are managed by agreement in the village assembly, letters (d), (e) and (g) by the Governor’s Regulation.^{Source: 1}JDIH Provinsi Bali (Biro Hukum dan HAM Setda Provinsi Bali), Last reviewed 10/10/2026Confidence: Verified Letter (g) is the one that matters, and the province sent it upward. The Governor’s Regulation on village finances, issued four months later, sent it straight back down. Letter (g), it provides, consists of dudukan from Krama Tamiu and Tamiu plus proceeds of cooperation with third parties, and the procedure for collecting and using dudukan is regulated by a pararem of the adat village.^{Source: 2}JDIH Provinsi Bali (Biro Hukum dan HAM Setda Provinsi Bali), Last reviewed 10/10/2026Confidence: Verified

And it names the thing. Dudukan is defined, in the definitions article, as a compulsory contribution from Krama Tamiu and Tamiu. The word does not appear in the provincial regulation at all.^{Source: 2}JDIH Provinsi Bali (Biro Hukum dan HAM Setda Provinsi Bali), Last reviewed 10/10/2026Confidence: Verified The levy on non-members exists by name in a governor’s implementing rule, and not in the regulation the province passed.

The only ceiling in either document is an adjective.

Why can nobody show a published figure?

Because both instruments that could have published one handed the amount to the village assembly, whose document is registered rather than published.

A pararem must be written, and comes in three named kinds: one to implement the awig-awig, one to cover what it does not yet reach, one to settle a dispute. The village’s officers register a written pararem, and a written awig-awig, with the provincial agency for adat affairs.^{Source: 1}JDIH Provinsi Bali (Biro Hukum dan HAM Setda Provinsi Bali), Last reviewed 10/10/2026Confidence: Verified So the figure’s document has a legal name, a required written form and a filing address. None of that makes it a published tariff.

There is a second reason, and it is sharper. Written and unwritten awig-awig have the same legal force. Every village is obliged to write its awig-awig down, and an awig-awig takes effect from the moment it is announced in the assembly.^{Source: 1}JDIH Provinsi Bali (Biro Hukum dan HAM Setda Provinsi Bali), Last reviewed 10/10/2026Confidence: Verified A duty can be fully binding and genuinely unwritten at once — not an enforcement gap but a design. It is also why “show me where it says that” can be answered honestly with nothing on paper, the same difficulty that runs through the obligation to demolish a villa built without a PBG.

What does the uncertainty cost the owner of a Canggu villa?

At the two figures owners actually report, the same duty costs between a rounding error and a third of the year’s profit.

Owners describe being asked for anything from IDR 100,000 a month to a demand of IDR 2,500,000 a month.Unverified We record both because the gap is the story, and mark both unverified: they are statements in owner discussions, not a tariff. We did not survey villages and hold no count of how often either is quoted.

Set that against the reference case this publication already built: a two-bedroom Canggu villa bought for USD 400,000, rebuilt on measured occupancy and full owner costs, nets about USD 4,800 a year — 1.2 per cent.Estimate The method is disclosed in our rebuild of the headline yield claim; it is an editorial estimate, not a market observation.

The point is not which figure is right. It is that an owner cannot find out, and the gap is wider than most cost lines that do have a published rate.

Does the law treat a member and a non-member differently?

It does, and every difference runs the same way.

The village head holds financial-management authority over money from the provincial budget, from regency or city aid and from central government aid, and no other source; that money is accounted for to the members through the village assembly.^{Source: 1}JDIH Provinsi Bali (Biro Hukum dan HAM Setda Provinsi Bali), Last reviewed 10/10/2026Confidence: Verified Dudukan is not on that list, and the person paying it is not in the body the accounting is owed to.

External audit splits the same way: government internal auditors supervise village budget money drawn from the provincial, regency or central government, and only that. Dudukan carries one hard requirement all the same — letter (g) income must be held in the village’s account at a commercial bank or the village credit institution.^{Source: 2}JDIH Provinsi Bali (Biro Hukum dan HAM Setda Provinsi Bali), Last reviewed 10/10/2026Confidence: Verified That is the checkable question — not how much, but into which account.

Enforcement is adat, not administrative: the village’s officers may apply adat sanctions decided through the assembly, and an officer who breaks the regulation’s own prohibitions is sanctioned under the awig-awig.^{Source: 1}JDIH Provinsi Bali (Biro Hukum dan HAM Setda Provinsi Bali), Last reviewed 10/10/2026Confidence: Verified Because the regulation’s umbrella term for residents covers all three categories, that power reaches a recorded non-member on our reading. There is no monetary fine in either instrument, so the sanction has no published tariff either.

Where this reading could be wrong

Five limits bound everything above, and the first was found after the piece was drafted.

We read the 2019 text, and it has been amended twice since. The register card for Pergub 34/2019 gives its status as in force and records two amending instruments — Pergub Bali 55/2022 and Pergub Bali 2/2023, both marked as amendments.^{Source: 4}JDIH Provinsi Bali (Biro Hukum dan HAM Setda Provinsi Bali), Last reviewed 10/10/2026Confidence: Verified We could not obtain either text: the portal serves its documents only through a short-lived signed link, and the same object without that signature answers HTTP 403. Every reading above is therefore a reading of the original version, and the three articles this piece leans on are marked as estimates rather than as checked against the operative text. If an amendment sets a standard for the amount, that would change the central answer here, and we would rather say so than let the headline outrun the document we actually opened.

We read the provincial layer and no village’s own rules. The figure lives in an awig-awig or a pararem, and we read neither. We read documents, not practice: whether a given banjar asks a foreign lessee for anything, and what happens when it is refused, is not in these texts.

The two amounts are participant statements, treated here as the ends of a reported range and nothing more. The arithmetic on them inherits their status, and the reference villa is a reference, not a valuation.

Our reading that the sanctioning power reaches a non-member is an inference. The regulation grades duties by category, applies the sanction clause to the umbrella term, and defines that term to include the third category. That is a chain of two definitions, not a sentence either article writes.

The conversion is only as good as its date. The central bank’s page served a rate dated more than a month before the day we read it, and we print both dates rather than claim a current one. We also tried the national regulation portal peraturan.bpk.go.id, and it answered an HTTP 403 on 10.10.2026; nothing here rests on a copy from it.^{Source: 1}JDIH Provinsi Bali (Biro Hukum dan HAM Setda Provinsi Bali), Last reviewed 10/10/2026Confidence: Verified Both instruments were read in the copies the province’s own legal-documentation portal publishes.

What to ask for before signing

The provincial regulation was promulgated on 28.05.2019, and its portal record names Dinas Pemajuan Masyarakat Adat Provinsi Bali as the initiating agency^{Source: 1}JDIH Provinsi Bali (Biro Hukum dan HAM Setda Provinsi Bali), Last reviewed 10/10/2026Confidence: Verified; the Governor’s Regulation followed on 17.09.2019, citing three of its articles as the basis.^{Source: 2}JDIH Provinsi Bali (Biro Hukum dan HAM Setda Provinsi Bali), Last reviewed 10/10/2026Confidence: Verified Four questions get you most of the way.

Which banjar adat and which desa adat does the plot fall in, by name? The obligation attaches to the village that records you, not to the address.

Which pararem sets the dudukan, and can you have it in writing? A pararem must be written and must be registered with the provincial agency for adat affairs, so “there is nothing on paper” is a statement about this village rather than about the law — and a useful answer in itself.

Which account is it paid into, and over what period? Letter (g) income belongs in the village’s account at a commercial bank or the village credit institution — the one part of this the regulation does speak to. The reported figures were monthly, and nothing obliges a village to keep that basis.

What is the sanction for non-payment, and where is it recorded? Expect an adat sanction decided in the assembly rather than a fine, because neither instrument contains a monetary penalty. If you hold the villa on a lease and sublet it, the same answer matters to your tenant, which is where this meets the sublease and licence questions and what a purchase does and does not let you do here.

Nothing in the two instruments entitles you to a number before you commit. That the number is discretionary, lawfully so, and set by a body you are not a member of is the part that belongs in the budget.