Your Bali landlord sells the land. Article 1576 says the sale does not end your lease

A Balinese family sells the plot your villa stands on. The buyer turns up with a certificate in his own name and an opinion about what he has bought, and the question underneath is the one no brochure answers: does the agreement you signed with the seller still bind the man who now owns the ground? The Civil Code answers in a single sentence, and it is not the sentence the market repeats.

What circulates instead is that a lease has to be notarised or registered to survive the sale, and that a note on the certificate stops the owner selling at all.Unverified We did not survey agents and we count nobody’s repetitions; we set the two sentences down because the documents say something else. This reads instruments, not your agreement, which we have not seen.

Does the sale of the land end your lease?

No. The article says so in the plainest terms the code uses anywhere. Pasal 1576 provides that by the sale of the rented thing a lease made earlier is not terminated, unless the contrary was agreed at the time of letting.^{Source: 1}Kejaksaan Negeri SukoharjoEstimate Two things follow, and the second is the sharp one.

The first is that the new owner inherits a tenant. He did not sign your agreement, and that does not matter: the transaction that changed the landlord does not touch the lease.

The second is a question of timing. The escape has to have been agreed pada waktu menyewakan barang, at the time of letting. An owner who decides after the fact that he would rather sell free of you cannot write himself the power to do it, and nor can a buyer negotiate one with the seller: the only agreement that counts is the one you signed. The sale does not break the lease; the clause that breaks it has to be older than the sale.

What if the lease does let the buyer put you out?

Then the code slows the eviction down rather than preventing it. Pasal 1578 obliges a buyer who wants to use that contractual power to warn the tenant as long beforehand as local adat requires for ending a lease, and then fixes a floor for one case: in the case of a land lease, the warning must be given at least one year before the premises are vacated.^{Source: 1}Kejaksaan Negeri SukoharjoEstimate A lease of the land under a villa is that case.

Money moves the other way at the same time. Where the termination clause exists, the tenant can claim no compensation unless compensation was expressly agreed; but where it was agreed, he is not obliged to leave while what is owed him remains unpaid.^{Source: 1}Kejaksaan Negeri SukoharjoEstimate So a clause promising compensation does more than price the eviction: until it is honoured, the tenant stays.

The articles on either side show the same instinct. A lease is in no way extinguished by the death of the lessor or of the tenant, under Pasal 1575, and under Pasal 1579 a lessor cannot end one by announcing that he wants the thing for himself, unless the contrary was agreed.^{Source: 1}Kejaksaan Negeri SukoharjoEstimate Across the group, what ends a lease early is a clause the tenant accepted when he took it, not an event in the owner’s life.

Is this the same question as whether you can sell the lease on?

It is the mirror image of it, and the answers point opposite ways. Pasal 1559 forbids a tenant who has not been permitted to hand his lease to another person, on pain of rescission and compensation of costs, damages and interest.^{Source: 1}Kejaksaan Negeri SukoharjoEstimate The owner’s side of the same relationship needs nobody’s permission at all: he sells, and the lease rides along.

We have written about the tenant’s side twice, and neither piece answers this one. Our explainer on whether you can sell a Bali lease early works through consent to a transfer; the piece on subletting under Article 1559 works through the narrow carve-out for part of a house the tenant occupies. Different party, different article, opposite answer.

Read against an assumed remainder of 18 years, the three articles are far apart: the whole 18 where nothing was agreed at letting, 17 where a termination clause was, and all 18 at risk where the tenant assigns without consent.Estimate None of that measures the market: it is three rules applied to one hypothetical lease.

Does the lease have to be written, notarised or registered?

The article requires none of the three, and its silence counts for more than silence usually does, because the same chapter knows how to demand a form. Pasal 1570 and Pasal 1571 split the rules for ending a lease according to whether it was made in writing: a written lease ends by operation of law when its term runs out, with no notice needed, while an unwritten one ends only after one party tells the other it wants to stop, observing the period local custom requires.^{Source: 1}Kejaksaan Negeri SukoharjoEstimate The drafter conditioned a neighbouring rule on writing and left Pasal 1576 unconditioned.

That it reaches land at all is reasoning rather than a sentence, so here are its supports. The article sits in a part of the chapter headed as rules applying equally to the letting of houses and of land, running from Pasal 1550 to Pasal 1580, and Pasal 1548 states that a person may let things of every kind, immovable as well as movable.^{Source: 1}Kejaksaan Negeri SukoharjoEstimate Pasal 1578 then legislates expressly for sewa tanah, a land lease. And the land law did not take the ground away: the revocation list of Law 5 of 1960 removes Book II of the Civil Code, and only so far as it concerns land, water and the natural riches in them, excepting the provisions on mortgage.^{Source: 3}JDIH Kementerian Perumahan dan Kawasan Permukiman, Last reviewed 14/10/2026Confidence: Verified Pasal 1576 is in Book III.

One housekeeping note on that line, because it is load-bearing and the copies disagree on its face. The land ministry’s file prints the item as Buku ke-11 where the housing ministry’s prints Buku ke-II; the first is an optical rendering of the Roman numeral, and the two copies, both read on 14 October 2026, agree on every other word.^{Source: 4}JDIH Kementerian Agraria dan Tata Ruang/Badan Pertanahan Nasional, Last reviewed 14/10/2026Confidence: Verified Within the chapter on letting, Pasal 1547, Pasal 1549 and Pasal 1568 each carry the mark Dihapus, deleted, with the Staatsblad that deleted them; Pasal 1576 carries no such mark in the copy we read.^{Source: 1}Kejaksaan Negeri SukoharjoEstimate

Does putting the lease on the certificate stop the owner selling?

It does not appear to, and the distinction the regulations draw is worth following. Start with what cannot happen: the objects of land registration are a closed list in Pasal 9(1) of Government Regulation 24 of 1997 — ownership, the two building and cultivation rights, hak pakai, management land, waqf land, strata title, security rights and state land — and hak sewa is not on it.^{Source: 5}JDIH Kementerian Agraria dan Tata Ruang/Badan Pertanahan Nasional, Last reviewed 14/10/2026Confidence: Verified A rental right gets no certificate of its own. The same regulation does, at Pasal 44(1), allow the charging of a hak sewa untuk bangunan over privately owned land to be registered where it is evidenced by a deed of a competent PPAT.^{Source: 5}JDIH Kementerian Agraria dan Tata Ruang/Badan Pertanahan Nasional, Last reviewed 14/10/2026Confidence: Verified

A lease contract is a different object again, and since 2021 it can be noted. Pasal 90 of Government Regulation 18 of 2021 lets an interested party ask the land office to record a binding sale agreement or a lease agreement over registered land, in the public register and/or on the certificate^{Source: 6}JDIH Kementerian Perumahan dan Kawasan PermukimanEstimate, and Pasal 99 sends the detail of that recording to a ministerial regulation.^{Source: 6}JDIH Kementerian Perumahan dan Kawasan PermukimanEstimate That regulation is the one our piece on who may order a certificate check already reports: an unrecorded lease is invisible to any search. What that piece does not carry is the shape of the mechanism, which is where this question is decided.

The note goes on the certificate’s page for reasons of change, in words the regulation prescribes, naming the lease deed by number and date and the Notaris who drew it; the applicant files a copy of the deed and the parties’ identities, and brings in the original certificate to be annotated.^{Source: 7}JDIH Kementerian Agraria dan Tata Ruang/Badan Pertanahan Nasional, Last reviewed 14/10/2026Confidence: Verified Once there, it is erased only after the person who asked for it asks for its erasure.^{Source: 7}JDIH Kementerian Agraria dan Tata Ruang/Badan Pertanahan Nasional, Last reviewed 14/10/2026Confidence: Verified So the owner cannot quietly take it off, and he cannot get it on without handing over his certificate — a cooperation requirement that cuts both ways.

Then the paragraph that answers the market’s sentence. Where there is a note of a binding sale agreement, the right may not be transferred otherwise than to the party named in that agreement. For a note of a lease the regulation says nothing equivalent.^{Source: 7}JDIH Kementerian Agraria dan Tata Ruang/Badan Pertanahan Nasional, Last reviewed 14/10/2026Confidence: Verified On the face of the instrument the recorded lease is notice, not a veto: it tells the next buyer what he is walking into, which is exactly what Pasal 1576 makes him walk into anyway.

Two officials appear in these documents and we cannot reconcile them. The registration route of 1997 names a PPAT; the annotation wording of 2021 names a Notaris. Whether a notarial lease deed can be registered under the first, whether a PPAT deed can be annotated under the second, and whether the two produce different protection, is not settled by anything we opened.

Where we may be wrong

The first limit is the text itself, and it applies to every Civil Code sentence above. There is no officially promulgated Indonesian version of the KUHPerdata: the authentic instrument is the Dutch colonial code, and what circulates in Indonesia are renderings of it. That is why no claim resting on Pasal 1576, 1578 or 1559 is rated verified here, however plainly the copies read.

What we can report is agreement between copies, which this desk has asked for in print. A transcription of a printed edition, published separately from the prosecutor’s file and marked validated by its proofreaders, prints Pasal 1576 and Pasal 1578 word for word as that file does, down to the compensation limb and the satu tahun clause.^{Source: 2}Wikisource IndonesiaEstimate Whether the two descend from one typesetting we cannot tell. Our earlier piece on Article 1559 said in print that it could not open a second copy and wanted one; for these two articles the second copy exists and agrees.

The maxim, on the other hand, is not in the book. A case-insensitive search of the whole text returns the Dutch words koop, breekt and huur zero times each, against 144 lines carrying the word sewa.^{Source: 1}Kejaksaan Negeri SukoharjoEstimate Koop breekt geen huur is quoted as though it were the article. It is not in the Indonesian text at all, and we did not open the Dutch original it is attributed to.

The largest hole is a search we could not run. No canvass was made for later instruments qualifying Pasal 1576, for post-colonial rent legislation, or for Supreme Court decisions applying it: we tried twice, and both times the search budget was spent before a single query could run. We report that rather than imply a canvass happened. Treat the position above as the position of the documents named, on the day they were read.

Two more, both narrower. We read Pasal 90 and Pasal 99 of the 2021 regulation as page images, because that file’s text layer is damaged — it prints Lrapus for hapus and stafiis quo for status quo — and claims resting on an image of a scan are rated an estimate here, even where the ministerial regulation made under it corroborates them. And whether a Bali land office or a Badung court applies the one-year warning as written, and what adat setempat is taken to mean where it does, is practice; we read documents.

We read the Civil Code on a prosecutor’s file server and in a validated transcription of a printed edition; the 1960 land law in both ministry copies; the 1997 and 2021 government regulations and the 2021 ministerial regulation on the portals that publish them, as those files stood on 14 October 2026.