Privilegios del CCyC — the Ranking Rules, arts. 2573–2586

Argentina (AR) — civil law.

Nothing on this page describes United States practice. There is no certificate sold to an investor, no administrative sale, and no post-sale redemption window in Argentina. If you arrived carrying US assumptions, read falsos-amigos first.

Privilegios — CCyC arts. 2573–2586

A privilegio is “the quality of a credit of being paid with preference to another” — CCyC art. 2573. Título II of Libro Sexto (arts. 2573–2586, in force 1 August 2015, textually unamended since sanction per the InfoLEG updated text) is the national, substantive rulebook that decides who gets paid in what order when the price of a `subasta judicial` is distributed in an individual execution. It is the statutory engine behind the `prioridad de créditos` waterfall; this page is the article-level treatment.

What this title does not do

It does not govern universal processes: art. 2579 sends concursos and quiebras to the insolvency statute’s own privilege scheme — Ley 24.522, arts. 239–250 — “exista o no cesación de pagos”. And it does not tell you how the distribution is processed in the expediente (the planilla or proyecto de distribución): that is procedure, which is provincial. Substance here, mechanics elsewhere.

Structural rules — arts. 2573–2581

• Legal origin only (art. 2574): privileges arise from statute alone; the debtor cannot create one. The list is closed.
• Not renounceable if labour (art. 2575): a creditor may renounce its privilege, but “el privilegio del crédito laboral no es renunciable, ni postergable”.
• Capital only, by default (art. 2577): the privilege does not extend to interest or costs except where a rule expressly says so (art. 2583 does, for some categories — see below).
• General privileges are locked out of individual executions (art. 2580): general privileges “sólo pueden ser invocados en los procesos universales”. In an individual `ejecución hipotecaria` or `juicio de apremio`, only special privileges — the art. 2582 list — sit on the price. A fisco’s general claims (national profits tax, VAT) have no seat at that table.
• Subrogación real (art. 2584): the privilege shifts by operation of law from the thing onto its price. This is what makes the whole title operate on auction proceeds.
• Unprivileged creditors share pro rata (art. 2581).

The closed list — art. 2582

Special privileges, each on the asset the article names. For an immovable, the incisos that can actually reach the price are:

• (a) expenses of construction, improvement or conservation of the thing — expressly including expensas comunes in propiedad horizontal. Folding the expensas credit into inciso (a) ended the debate that ran under the old Ley 13.512 regime (Constantino & Almeida, elDial DC350A).
• (b) labour credits — but on an immovable only in the special case of workers employed by the owner “en la edificación, reconstrucción o reparación de inmuebles”; otherwise the labour special privilege sits on movables in the establishment, not on the land.
• (c) impuestos, tasas and contribuciones de mejoras “que se aplican particularmente a determinados bienes” — asset-specific charges only (impuesto inmobiliario, ABL, contribución de mejoras). General taxes are excluded here and, per art. 2580, cannot enter an individual execution at all.
• (d) the retenedor (holder exercising a right of retention), on the thing retained.
• (e) credits secured by hipoteca, anticresis, prenda, warrant, and debentures/obligaciones negociables with special or floating guarantee.
• (f) privileges under special regimes (Ley de Navegación, Código Aeronáutico, Ley de Entidades Financieras, Ley de Seguros, Código de Minería), which keep their own internal ranking.

Reserva de gastos — art. 2585

Before any special privilege is paid from the price of the asset, the court must reserve the amounts for its conservation, custody, administration and realization, plus an amount for expenses and fees generated by proceedings on the asset in the creditor’s interest. Doctrine treats this as the successor of the old code’s “gastos de justicia”, applicable in individual executions (Constantino & Almeida). Operationally it overlaps what costos-de-la-subasta describes: edictos, custody, the realization apparatus come off the top.

Ranking — art. 2586, and its temporal pivot

Default rule: special privileges rank in the inciso order of art. 2582. Then the exceptions, of which inciso (c) is the one that decides most real-property contests:

• 2586(c) — the garantía real (the hipoteca) primes fiscal credits and conservation/expensas credits accrued after the guarantee was constituted. Read in reverse: taxes and expensas accrued before the hipoteca keep their inciso-order priority over it. Pure prior in tempore, potior in iure (Padilla, Academia Nacional de Derecho de Córdoba).
• 2586(a) — inciso (f) special regimes rank per their own statutes.
• 2586(b) — the retenedor prevails if retention began before the competing privileged credits arose.
• 2586(d) — fiscal and conservation/expensas credits prime labour credits born after them; 2586(e) — the garantía real primes labour credits accrued after its constitution.
• 2586(f) — same inciso, same asset: pro rata. Between successive hipotecas, rank runs by registration under Ley 17.801 (arts. 14, 19); the registration’s effects last 35 years unless renewed (CCyC art. 2210, as substituted by Ley 27.271).

Extension beyond capital (art. 2583). The privilege covers capital only, except: labour credits carry 2 years’ interest; inciso (e) credits carry interest for the 2 years before execution plus interest accruing during the suit, and costas; inciso (b) credits also carry costas; inciso (f) credits follow their own regimes. Note what is absent: expensas are not in the exception list, so the expensas privilege covers capital only (arts. 2577, 2583).

Post-2015 application of the pivot, retrieved from the court’s official publication channel: Cám. Civ. y Com. Trenque Lauquen (Buenos Aires), “Comité de Administración del Fideicomiso de Recuperación Crediticia c/ Martínez, Juan Manuel s/ ejecución hipotecaria”, 23/11/2018 — only taxes that predate both the buyer’s taking of possession and the constitution of the hipoteca prevail over the mortgage credit (art. 2586 inc. c); the costas of the ejecución hipotecaria fall within the hipoteca’s privilege via art. 2583(c).

The mortgagee is protected only forward in time.

Under the pre-2015 code, hipoteca-over-fisco and hipoteca-over-expensas were the settled outcomes (doctrine cites SCBA, “Gadi S.A. c/ Benedetti”, Ac. 53.449, 26/7/1994, among others). The CCyC codified that protection with an explicit temporal cut: debts already accrued when the hipoteca was constituted outrank it. Doctrine records the rationale — otherwise “bastaría con constituir un gravamen hipotecario sobre la unidad funcional para desarticular” the collection of prior expensas (Constantino & Almeida).

The resulting waterfall in an individual execution

For an immovable sold at subasta in an individual execution, arts. 2582/2583/2585/2586 compose into:

1. Reserva de gastos — art. 2585, off the top.
2. Expensas/conservation credits accrued before the hipoteca — 2582(a), capital only.
3. Asset-specific taxes accrued before the hipoteca — 2582(c), capital only.
4. Hipoteca — 2582(e), extended per 2583(b)–(c) to two years’ pre-execution interest, interest during the suit, and costas.
5. Expensas/conservation credits accrued after the hipoteca — subordinated by 2586(c), but still inciso (a) against later incisos.
6. Asset-specific taxes accrued after the hipoteca.
7. Embargantes in order of traba/registration — a preference, not a privilege; next section.
8. Remaining quirografarios pro rata (art. 2581); any surplus is the `remanente` and belongs to the ejecutado.

Worked example

Individual ejecución hipotecaria over a propiedad horizontal unit; price at auction ARS 100,000,000. Claims: reserva de gastos ARS 8,000,000; expensas ARS 10,000,000 (ARS 1,000,000 accrued before the hipoteca, ARS 9,000,000 after); impuesto inmobiliario/ABL ARS 6,000,000 (ARS 2,000,000 pre-hipoteca, ARS 4,000,000 post); hipoteca ARS 70,000,000 privileged per art. 2583 (capital ARS 40,000,000 + interest ARS 25,000,000 + costas ARS 5,000,000); first embargante (unsecured, embargo trabado first) ARS 15,000,000; second embargante ARS 10,000,000.

Step	Credit	Paid (ARS)	Left (ARS)
1	Reserva de gastos, art. 2585	8,000,000	92,000,000
2	Pre-hipoteca expensas (2582 a, capital only)	1,000,000	91,000,000
3	Pre-hipoteca taxes (2582 c, capital only)	2,000,000	89,000,000
4	Hipoteca + 2583(b)–(c) extension	70,000,000	19,000,000
5	Post-hipoteca expensas (subordinated by 2586 c)	9,000,000	10,000,000
6	Post-hipoteca taxes	4,000,000	6,000,000
7	First embargante (partial: 6,000,000 of 15,000,000)	6,000,000	0

Steps 2–3 outrank step 4 only because those credits pre-date the mortgage; had they accrued after, 2586(c) would put the hipoteca first, as in Trenque Lauquen 23/11/2018. The second embargante and both deficiencies (ARS 9,000,000 and ARS 10,000,000) survive as unsecured claims against the debtor’s other assets. Check: 8 + 1 + 2 + 70 + 9 + 4 + 6 = 100 (millions ARS) — every peso of the price allocated exactly once.

The primer embargante — art. 745, not a privilege

CCyC art. 745 gives the creditor who obtained an embargo the right to collect “su crédito, intereses y costas” with preference to other creditors — but this priority “sólo es oponible a los acreedores quirografarios en los procesos individuales”. Rank among competing embargantes runs by the date of the traba; later embargos reach only the surplus. The CPCCN carries the matching procedural rule for national and federal courts in art. 218 (provincial procedural codes have their own provisions — do not read art. 218 as national procedure).

Doctrine (Zalazar 2021, Biblioteca SCBA; Padilla) is emphatic that this is a procedural/temporal preference, not a privilegio: it yields to every special privilege, operates only against unsecured creditors, evaporates in concurso or quiebra, and for registrable assets runs by registration date under Ley 17.801. An `inhibición general` confers no payment priority at all.

In quiebra, this page does not apply — art. 2579

When the debtor is in a universal process, Ley 24.522 arts. 239–250 displace this title (“sólo gozarán de privilegio los créditos enumerados en este capítulo”, LCQ art. 239). The schemes are close but not congruent; the differences that bite:

• LCQ art. 241 lists the special privileges in its own order — conservation (241.1), labour (241.2), asset-specific taxes (241.3), hipoteca/prenda/warrant (241.4), retenedor (241.5), special regimes (241.6) — and LCQ art. 243 ranks them in strict inciso order with only two exceptions (incisos 4 and 6 follow their own regimes; a pre-existing retenedor primes). There is no equivalent of CCyC 2586(c): on its face, asset-specific taxes rank ahead of the hipoteca in quiebra regardless of when they accrued — the mirror image of the individual-execution rule. Whether the art. 243 remission imports the CCyC temporal rule is doctrinally debated and needs_verification.
• The reserve (LCQ art. 244) is narrower than CCyC 2585 — expenses incurred in the concurso on that asset. Extension beyond capital is governed by LCQ art. 242.
• Labour credits additionally hold a general privilege (LCQ art. 246.1), invokable only there (CCyC 2580 mirrors this), plus pronto pago; general privileges are capped by LCQ art. 247.

Full treatment: Ley 24.522.

Why the buyer should read this title

The privilege runs against the price, not against the buyer (art. 2584): the waterfall is applied in the expediente’s distribution, and what the price cannot cover generally stays behind as a claim against the debtor. The plenario `Servicios Eficientes S.A. c/ Yabra` (CNCiv. en pleno, 18/2/1999) holds that the buyer at subasta does not answer for pre-possession taxes the price could not cover — but refuses the same solution for expensas comunes, which follow the unit. That asymmetry, restated substantively by CCyC arts. 2050 and 1937 on the codigo-civil-y-comercial page, is why the deudas recited in the edictos — ABL, provincial tax, expensas — are the bidder’s economics, not background noise. See expensas-y-el-adquirente-en-subasta and, for stopping the sale before any of this happens, purga-y-el-limite-temporal.

Precision limits

• Second-publisher check. The article texts above were retrieved from InfoLEG (promulgated and updated versions of Ley 26.994, diffed: arts. 2573–2586 identical). Cross-checking against SAIJ or the Boletín Oficial PDF of 8/10/2014 could not be completed (SAIJ unreachable from the retrieval location) and is needs_verification.
• Fisco vs hipoteca in quiebra. Whether LCQ 243’s remission lets the hipoteca prime post-constitution asset-specific taxes in quiebra, or strict inciso order (241.3 before 241.4) governs, is unresolved in the sources retrieved: needs_verification.
• Continuing force of the Yabra plenario after Ley 26.853 (which abolished the binding effect of plenarios) and after the CCyC: CNCiv salas reportedly keep applying it, but no post-2015 CNCiv decision confirming this was retrieved, and the plenario text used was a secondary transcription — needs_verification.
• No CSJN holding squarely applying art. 2586(c) (tax vs hipoteca) post-2015 was located; the best retrieved authority is cámara-level (Trenque Lauquen, 23/11/2018). The pre-2015 SCBA “Gadi” line is cited here only via doctrine: needs_verification against the official collections.
• Primer embargante and amounts beyond the registered embargo — whether the art. 745 preference covers interest and costas exceeding the registered figure, with ampliaciones de embargo ranking as new embargos, is expressly identified as unsettled by the doctrine consulted (Zalazar 2021): needs_verification.
• Expensas in quiebra — treatment of pre-quiebra expensas under LCQ 241.1 and of post-quiebra expensas as gastos del concurso is taken from doctrine, not from a retrieved primary distribution ruling: needs_verification.
• Provincial fiscal codes claiming a higher rank than the CCyC order in individual executions: the doctrine consulted (and an older CSJN line on special regimes such as Ley 13.577, CSJN 21/5/2001, LL 2001-E-423, cited via Padilla) treats privilege ranking as national substantive law that provinces cannot override, but no post-2015 primary holding was retrieved: needs_verification.

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Article texts of CCyC arts. 745 and 2573–2586, LCQ arts. 239–250 and CPCCN art. 218 were retrieved verbatim from InfoLEG on 2026-08-30; the InfoLEG promulgated and updated CCyC versions were diffed and Título II is unamended since sanction, with all fourteen article numbers 2573–2586 present exactly once. Case holdings are stated only where the decision text was retrieved (Trenque Lauquen 23/11/2018 from the court’s official blog; the 1999 plenario from a secondary transcription, flagged above). Everything else carries needs_verification.