Sayulita on a budget — a real $30 a day

Nobody warns you that Sayulita is expensive. It is a small Mexican fishing village, which makes people arrive with Mexican fishing village prices in their head, and then discover that a restaurant dinner costs about what a restaurant dinner costs in Lisbon.

The good news is that the expensive version of Sayulita is entirely optional. Here is the real arithmetic.

What things actually cost

Prices in US dollars, approximate, as of 2026. Everything here shifts with the season — high season is Christmas through April, and the two weeks around Christmas and Semana Santa are their own category entirely.

	Roughly
Dorm bed, typical in town	around $18 a night
Street tacos	$1–2 each
A full comida at a local spot	$5–8
Restaurant dinner, tourist end of town	$18–30
Beer from a shop	$1.50
Beer in a bar	$3–5
Cocktail on the beach	$8–12
Coffee	$2.50–4
Surfboard, one day	$6–10
Surf lesson	$35–50
Surf trip out of town	from $25
Bus from Puerto Vallarta airport	about $3
Taxi from the airport	many, many times that

The $30 day

This is not an austerity day. This is what most people at the hostel are actually spending.

• Bed: around $18 with breakfast, which is what a dorm bed goes for here.
• Lunch: tacos or a comida, $5.
• Dinner: cooked in the hostel kitchen, $4 of ingredients.
• A beer or two in the evening: $3.

That is $30, and it includes a bed a hundred steps from the beach, three meals and a night out that is not really a night in. What it does not include is a surfboard, a trip, or a restaurant — which is why the honest number for most people is closer to $40, and why knowing where the money goes matters more than pretending it does not.

Where the money actually goes

Eating out for three meals a day. This is the whole thing. Breakfast is included where you are staying; if you also cook dinner most nights, you have halved your food budget without eating worse. The hostel kitchen is open 11am to 11pm and is busiest at ten in the evening, which tells you how many people have worked this out.

Drinking in bars rather than before them. A beer from the shop is a third of a beer in a bar. Everybody in town drinks early and goes out late, and that is not stinginess — it is when the bars fill up anyway.

The airport taxi. This is the single biggest avoidable expense of the entire trip, and it happens in your first hour. Walk out of the terminal, cross the pedestrian bridge over the highway, and take the bus for about three dollars. It takes a little over an hour. We wrote the whole thing up separately.

Bottled water. Four bottles a day for two weeks adds up to real money, and to a lot of plastic. Refill from the filtered water where you are staying.

Renting a board every single day. If you are here for two weeks and surfing daily, ask about a longer rate rather than paying by the day.

Where it is worth spending

Being cheap about the wrong things ruins a trip. Spend on:

One surf lesson. $35–50 buys you two hours with somebody watching you, which is worth about a week of self-taught guessing and considerably fewer bad habits.

At least one trip out of town. La Lancha and El Anclote are genuinely better waves than the town break and the trip is from $25. Doing this twice in a week is better value than almost anything else on the list.

One proper dinner. Sayulita has good restaurants. Go to one, once, and enjoy it rather than resenting it.

The cheapest things in town are the best ones

The beach is free. The sunset is free. The walk through the jungle to Playa de los Muertos takes ten minutes and is free. Watching the surf at seven in the morning with a coffee is nearly free.

And at the hostel, the entire week’s programme — volleyball on Monday, the bonfire on Wednesday, karaoke on Friday, everyone at one table on Sunday — costs nothing. That is not a coincidence. The best parts of a trip like this are the people, and people do not cost money.

The one-week budget

7 nights, dorm, breakfast in	$126
Food, cooking about half of it	$70
Board hire, 4 days	$30
One surf trip	$25
Drinks	$40
Bus from and to the airport	$6
Total	around $300

Add a lesson and a restaurant dinner and you are at $360 for a week in a place people pay considerably more than that to visit for three days.

Stay a second week and the daily average drops, because the fixed costs are behind you and by then you know where the good tacos are.

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Breakfast is included with every bed at La Redonda, and longer stays are priced better. We do not publish a headline rate — it moves with the season and the night of the week — so put your dates in and the booking system will show you the real number.