A Month or Longer in Georgetown: What Is Actually Published

If you are looking for the going monthly rate on a serviced apartment or a long-stay hotel in Georgetown, here is the finding first: nobody publishes one. Measured on 24 October 2026, what is available is nightly platform pricing; turning that into a monthly figure would be our arithmetic, not a published rate. So this article does something more useful than quote a number nobody stands behind. It sets out what is published, and the three published rules that move the price of a month in Georgetown more than any neighborhood does.

No published monthly rate exists for serviced accommodation

Guides circulate a figure of GYD 40,000 a month for a furnished apartment, rising to GYD 200,000 for something larger. We are not repeating those as rates, because we could not find a published source for them and because they sit an order of magnitude below the only measured series we have.

The reason there is no published series is structural: extended-stay accommodation in Georgetown is a negotiated product. A monthly figure is quoted to you on enquiry, for a specific unit, for a specific length of stay, with specific utilities included or excluded. There is no regulated tariff and no register of rates. Anyone quoting you a market average for it is quoting an estimate.

What to do instead: get at least three written quotations for your actual dates, each one stating explicitly what is included. Then compare them to the published asking rents below, which are the nearest thing to a benchmark that exists.

What is published: advertised asking rents, as percentiles of one sample

Our approved reference data holds one measured series for Georgetown housing. Read it exactly as it is labeled, because the labels are doing real work:

• 25th percentile: USD 1,500 per month
• Median: USD 2,000 per month
• 75th percentile: USD 2,500 per month

Those are the quartiles and the median of 20 residential rental listings advertised by Century 21 Guyana, read on 11 October 2026, across a range of USD 574 to USD 3,500 a month. Four cautions, all of which matter:

• These are asking prices, from one agency's listings. Not agreed rents, not a market average.
• These are percentiles, not market segments. The 25th percentile is not a "basic" product and the 75th is not an "expatriate" product. They are positions in one sample of twenty.
• Twenty listings is a small sample, weighted towards whatever that agency lists.
• These are residential leases, not extended-stay rates. A furnished monthly let with services in it is a different product, usually priced above an unfurnished lease.

Used that way the series is still worth having. If a quotation for a furnished month comes in far below the 25th percentile of unfurnished asking rents, ask what is missing from it.

We are not converting these figures into Guyana dollars. The exchange rate we would need is not in our approved reference data, and inventing one to two decimal places would be exactly the kind of false precision this article exists to remove. Use the rate your own bank gives you on the day you pay.

Hotel or dwelling: the legal form of your stay changes the tax

This is the published rule that explains most of the price difference between two apparently similar places, and almost no guide mentions it.

Under the Hotel Accommodation Tax Act 14 of 1993, a hotel means a building or group of buildings together comprising not less than sixteen bedrooms for the purpose of providing hotel accommodation for reward. Where the Act applies, section 4(1) charges on payments made by guests for hotel accommodation a room tax at the rate of ten per cent thereof.

So the sixteen-bedroom threshold is a real line. A guesthouse or an apartment block below it is not a hotel for this Act, and a month there is not a hotel stay being taxed as one.

Value-added tax runs on a different distinction. The Revenue Authority's published policy on rental of land and buildings states that Schedule II, paragraph 2 (d) of the Value-Added Tax Act exempts accommodation in a residential dwelling, and that rent paid on housing for the purpose of a private dwelling is exempt. Renting a building to operate a business, by contrast, attracts VAT at the standard rate of fourteen percent (14%) where the landlord is registered to charge it.

The practical question to put in writing, then, is not "what is your monthly rate". It is: is this quoted as a residential tenancy or as serviced accommodation, and is the figure you have given me inclusive of any room tax or VAT? Two quotations that look alike can differ by a tenth or a seventh once that is answered.

A month or longer changes your permit, not just your budget

A stay of a month or more is the point at which the length of your permission to be in the country stops being automatic. Extensions run through Immigration Support Services, which operates a published eServices portal for visitor, business, employment and student categories, each with a "new" and an "extension" route.

Our approved reference data records Immigration Support Services' own published processing fees for extending a stay, measured on 21 October 2026:

• Standard extension: GYD 5,125 per application
• Extension beyond three months: GYD 28,700 per application

One honest limitation on those two figures. They are processing fees for the service itself, not an agent's charge, and the length of stay each one actually grants is not something we could read off a published page — the terms are stacked inside the application form rather than stated as a schedule. So budget the fee from the figures above and confirm the duration with the Service before you commit to a lease that outlasts your permission to be there.

Utilities: what you pay separately if they are not included

Whether utilities are in the monthly figure is usually the largest single difference between two quotations. These are the published rates you fall back on if they are not, and they are regulated tariffs rather than accommodation rates:

• Electricity, residential, up to 75 kWh a month: GYD 39.10 per kWh, plus a standing charge of GYD 341.54 a month that is billed whether or not any power is used.
• Electricity, residential, above 75 kWh a month: GYD 43.43 per kWh, plus a standing charge of GYD 351.04 a month.
• Fibre internet: from GYD 8,399 a month at 20 Mbps to GYD 20,399 a month at 1000 Mbps, with intermediate plans at 50, 200, 300, 400 and 500 Mbps.

The electricity figures are Guyana Power and Light's tariff class A for residential customers, in force since 11 April 2021. The internet figures are One Communications fibre plans as approved by the Public Utilities Commission and published in its approved telecommunications rates, recorded on 3 July 2026. Note the gap between those two dates: the electricity tariff is the older figure by some years, so confirm it on your first bill.

Choosing where to live: the questions to ask

We are not rating neighborhoods, and we are not labeling any area of Georgetown as safe or unsafe. There is no published source that would support it, and the people who live in those streets deserve better than a guide's adjective. What we can give you is the list of questions that actually decide whether a place works, which you can ask about any address:

• How long is the commute to where you will actually be working, at the hour you will actually travel it?
• What happens during a power interruption — is there a generator, does it carry the whole unit or only the lights, and who pays for its fuel?
• Is water storage on site, and is it included?
• What is the deposit, in what currency, held by whom, and on what written condition is it returned?
• What notice does either side have to give, and is that in the written agreement rather than agreed verbally?
• Is the unit metered separately for electricity, or is a share of a block meter being apportioned to you?
• Can you visit at the time of day you will normally be coming home, rather than on a viewing appointment?

Rent control exists in Guyana as a statutory framework — the Rent Restriction Act, Cap. 36:23, in its revised edition — but we are not going to tell you how it applies to your particular tenancy. Whether a given furnished monthly arrangement falls inside it is a legal question about your specific agreement, and that is a question for a Guyanese attorney, not for an article.

What expats should know

• No monthly rate for serviced accommodation in Georgetown is published. Any "typical extended stay rate" you are quoted is an estimate.
• Get three written quotations for your real dates, each stating what is included.
• The one measured series is asking rents: USD 1,500, USD 2,000 and USD 2,500 as the 25th percentile, median and 75th percentile of 20 Century 21 Guyana listings read on 11 October 2026.
• Those are percentiles, not market segments, and not extended-stay rates.
• Sixteen bedrooms is the statutory threshold for a hotel, and a 10 per cent room tax applies to hotel accommodation under Act 14 of 1993.
• Residential accommodation is VAT-exempt; commercial letting carries 14 per cent. Ask in writing which your quotation is.
• Budget the extension fee: GYD 5,125, or GYD 28,700 beyond three months, and confirm the duration it grants with Immigration Support Services.
• Settle utilities in writing. Electricity carries a monthly standing charge even in an empty month.

Where to check

The hotel definition and the room tax are in the Hotel Accommodation Tax Act 14 of 1993, as revised and reprinted by the Guyana Revenue Authority. The rent and VAT position is the Authority's VAT Policy #34 on rental and sale of land and buildings, revised 17 August 2022. Extension categories and routes are on the Immigration Support Services eServices portal. All read on 24 October 2026. The asking-rent percentiles, the extension fees and the electricity and internet tariffs are held in our own approved reference data, with the agency, source, measurement date and sample size given above. No currency conversion is applied anywhere in this article, because the rate for it is not in that reference data.

AI-Generated Content: This article was created with AI assistance and may contain inaccuracies. Please verify important information with official sources.