No date and no place agreed: when and where performance is due

It is Section One of Chapter I of Title II of Book Four of the Civil Code of 2020, Articles 1114 to 1116. These are the default rules of payment: the date, the place and who bears the expenses where the agreement did not say.

Any obligation still to be performed whose document fixes no term or place, provided a special statute imposes nothing else for that kind of debt.

• If no term was designated, paying immediately after the obligation is contracted, unless a tacit term follows from its nature and circumstances.Verified against the official source
• Paying at the place designated in the obligation; if none was stipulated and it is a determinate thing, where it existed when the obligation was constituted.Verified against the official source
• The debtor bearing the extrajudicial expenses occasioned by the payment.Verified against the official source

• The document of the obligation, because the default rules in these articles apply only where it designates no term and no place.
• Evidence of the usages or practices established between the parties, if the time of performance follows from them.

1. 1

   Step 1: If nobody set a date

   Article 1114 starts with the blunt part: if no term has been designated, payment must be made immediately after the obligation is contracted. That is the starting point, not the end of it.

2. 2

   Step 2: The term nobody wrote but that is there

   The same article saves it: without prejudice to a tacit term, if one follows from the nature and circumstances of the obligation, in which case payment must be made on the date when, according to good faith, performance is due. Ordering something that takes weeks to make is not due the next day.

3. 3

   Step 3: What the two of you were already doing

   A third rule in Article 1114, and the most practical: if the time of performance follows from the usages or practices established between the parties, payment must be made at that time. The habit between the same two parties counts as the date.

4. 4

   Step 4: Where payment is made

   Article 1115 works down a ladder. First: payment must be executed at the place designated in the obligation. If no place was stipulated and a determinate thing is to be delivered, payment must be made where the thing existed when the obligation was constituted. And in any other case, the place of payment is the municipality where the debtor resides.

5. 5

   Step 5: Who pays the expenses of paying

   Article 1116 splits it in two. The extrajudicial expenses occasioned by payment are on the debtor’s account: the travel, the arrangements, whatever it costs to put the payment in the creditor’s hands. As to judicial expenses, the Code does not decide: it says the court will decide in accordance with the Rules of Civil Procedure.

6. 6

   Step 6: And why this guide does not say what court costs are

   Because the Code does not say. The second sentence of Article 1116 hands the whole matter to the Rules of Civil Procedure, which we did not read for this guide. So there is no figure and no costs procedure here: there is the referral, exactly as the statute leaves it.

These rules apply between the parties, with no counter and no agency. The municipality where the debtor resides appears only as the default place of payment in Article 1115; it does not mean paying at a municipal office. Judicial costs are decided by the court under the Rules of Civil Procedure.

• Assuming no date means indefinite time: with no designated term, payment is due immediately after the obligation is contracted.
• Ignoring the tacit term that follows from the nature and circumstances of the obligation.
• Dismissing the parties’ own habit: if the time follows from usages or practices, that is the time.
• Applying the debtor’s municipality where the obligation did designate a place: the designated place governs first.
• Using the debtor’s residence where a determinate thing is owed: then payment is made where it existed when the obligation was constituted.
• Charging the creditor for the extrajudicial expenses of payment: they are on the debtor’s account.
• Looking in the Code for the amount of court costs: it sends them to the Rules of Civil Procedure.
• Confusing the debtor’s municipality with a municipal office where payment must be made.

These are the government pages this guide is based on.

• Poder Judicial de Puerto Rico

  Poder Judicial

  bvirtualogp.pr.gov