Limaculture & etiquette

Peru treats you as non-domiciled until you have been in the country more than 183 calendar days within any twelve-month period, and even then the change of status only takes effect from 1 January of the following year. In the meantime, Peruvian-source employment income is withheld at a flat 30% of gross with no deductions and no 7 UIT allowance. Someone arriving in March pays that rate for nearly two years before progressive rates start. Model your net pay on the non-domiciled rate for the whole first stretch, and negotiate the offer knowing that is what will actually land in your account.

Decreto Legislativo 689 caps foreign staff at 20% of a company's headcount and 30% of its total wage bill. A small Lima company with nine employees cannot lawfully make you the tenth without an exemption, however well the interview went. Exemptions exist — for people married to Peruvians or with Peruvian children, for immigrant status holders, and for specialised professional and management roles granted an exoneration — but they take work. Ask what the company's current foreign headcount is before you get emotionally committed to an offer.

Resident statuses in Peru are granted for 365 days and must be renewed through MIGRACIONES' Agencia Virtual before they expire. Let it lapse and you accrue a daily fine and complicate the three-year clock toward permanent residence — which itself also requires that you were not outside Peru for three continuous months, or six alternating months in any year, over those three years. Diary the renewal the day you receive the card, and diary your time abroad too.

Lima routinely appears near the top of global congestion rankings, and the distance between two points tells you almost nothing about the journey. Miraflores to San Isidro is a short walk or a long crawl depending on the hour. If you will work in San Isidro's financial district, living in Miraflores, Magdalena or San Borja keeps you inside a fifteen-to-thirty-minute window; living in La Molina or the northern districts can double or triple it. Test the commute at 8am on a weekday before you sign anything.

Peru sits on the Nazca subduction zone and Lima has been levelled before; know your building's evacuation route and the location of the safe zones marked with an S. Separately, Sedapal's tap water is treated but is not considered potable, and essentially nobody drinks it unboiled. Buy a filter or a bidón dispenser in your first week rather than buying bottled water daily, which is both expensive and a lot of plastic.

Lima gets a handful of millimetres of rain a year, so nothing here is built to shed water or to hold heat. From May to November the garúa produces near-total cloud, humidity above 80% and indoor temperatures in the mid-teens that no flat is equipped to fix. Locals wear coats indoors. When viewing a flat in summer, ask which way it faces and whether there is any heating at all — an oil radiator and a dehumidifier are standard first purchases here.