Yayasan, PT or CV: Which One Should Your Centre Be?

Who is actually allowed to keep the money?

Current as of August 2026. Every rule below was read against its official register on that date.

You have been running classes for two years, three people have given you three different answers, and underneath all of them sits one question: who is allowed to take money out of the business. That is the question the legal form settles, and the three forms settle it very differently.

A yayasan settles it most restrictively. The Yayasan Law, as amended in 2004, forbids yayasan assets from reaching its Pembina, Pengurus or Pengawas in any form that can be valued in money, and it names salary, wages and honorarium specifically. The single exception is a Pengurus who is not a founder, is unaffiliated with the founder, Pembina and Pengawas to the third degree by marriage or descent, and runs the yayasan directly and full time.

Read that against your own position before anything else. A founder who runs their own centre daily is precisely the person the exception does not cover, and the law puts a prison term of up to five years, plus an obligation to return what was moved, behind the ban.

A PT settles it the other way. Its capital is divided into shares, the shares belong to shareholders, and profit reaches those shareholders after the company has paid its own tax. A CV has no share capital at all, and what the partners may take is governed by the partnership deed rather than by a companies statute.

None of this makes a yayasan a poor structure. It makes it a structure for money that is meant to stay in the institution, which is a real thing some owners want and many choose without noticing.

What happens when you want to sell, or bring a partner in?

This is where the three stop being interchangeable. It is also the difference owners tend to discover late, once somebody has offered to buy in.

A yayasan has no members. That sits in the first article of the Yayasan Law and it is not a technicality: with no members there are no ownership interests, so there is nothing for a buyer to buy and no share for a partner to be given. Control moves by changing who sits in the organs, which is a different transaction from a sale and produces no proceeds for you.

Winding it up does not release the value either. On liquidation what remains goes to another yayasan carrying on the same activity, or to another legal entity with the same activity where that entity's own law allows it, and failing both to the state.

A PT is built for the transaction a yayasan cannot do. Shares are transferable, so bringing in a partner means issuing or transferring shares, and selling the centre means selling the shares. An ordinary PT is founded by two or more people by notarial deed, and if the shareholders ever fall to one, the holder has six months to bring in another or the company issues new shares.

One further point about a yayasan catches owners running a genuinely commercial operation. The elucidation to the Yayasan Law states that a yayasan is not to be used as a business vehicle and does not carry on business activity directly, but only through a business entity it establishes or places assets in. Where the line falls between running a school as your purpose and running a business is exactly the question to put to a notary about your own programme, and not one to settle from reading an article.

The licence question is narrower than you have been told

Most of what gets said about licences and legal form is applied far more widely than the rule itself reaches. There is one place where the form really is decided for you, and it is narrower than the advice suggests.

Where the community runs a formal education unit, the education regulations require it to do so through a legal entity in a form such as a yayasan, a perkumpulan or a similar body. Formal education, as that same article lists it, covers early childhood education on the formal track, together with primary, secondary and higher education. If you are opening a TK, that is the rule deciding your form, and preference does not enter into it.

Everything else sits outside that list, and for most people reading this that is the entire business. A coaching centre, a music or dance programme, a swim school or a weekend robotics class is not a formal education unit, so that article does not reach it.

Which permit your specific programme needs is still a question for your Dinas Pendidikan, because the answer turns on what you are actually running rather than on what you call it. Ask it before you sign anything at the notary, since the form is the expensive half to change afterwards. If you run an early-years programme, the vertical detail sits on the early education solutions page.

How hard is each one to undo?

Ask this before the licence question, because the cost of choosing wrongly is not the setup fee. It is the exit.

A PT Perorangan has a written route out of itself. It becomes an ordinary PT once it has more than one shareholder or stops meeting the micro and small business criteria, and the change of status runs through a notarial deed registered electronically. Nothing is being unwound; you are moving along a path the regulation already describes.

The small business ceiling is what triggers that move. The ceiling used at founding and registration is business capital of up to Rp 5 billion, not counting the land and the building the business occupies, and the regulation says those figures may be revised as the economy moves. A single-site centre is nowhere near it, which is the useful part: the structure you start with will hold for years.

A yayasan has no equivalent path. It cannot be converted into something with owners, because owners are the thing it lacks, and the liquidation rule above sends the residual value somewhere other than to you. Choosing it is close to a one-way door, and it is the only one of the three where that is true.

A CV sits between them. Moving to a PT is possible, and it is a real piece of work at the notary rather than a change of label, so plan it as a project rather than an afternoon.

The capital figure people quote at you is not in the rules

Somebody has probably told you a PT needs tens of millions of rupiah in paid-up capital, and that this is the reason to take a CV instead. That threshold is not in the current rules.

The regulation on company capital leaves the amount to the founders. At least a quarter of the authorised capital must be subscribed and fully paid, with proof filed electronically within 60 days of the deed or of the founding statement.

That is why the usual argument for a CV has thinned out. A PT Perorangan is set up by one Indonesian citizen aged at least 17 and legally competent, by filing a founding statement electronically, and it becomes a legal entity in its own right once the registration certificate issues. One founder, capital you set yourself, and a legal entity standing separately from you.

People still end up with a CV, usually for one of two honest reasons. They registered years ago, when a one-person PT did not exist, or the notary quoted a lower fee and nobody asked what the difference bought. Neither is a reason to stay there if you are formalising now.

So which one for a single-site centre?

A PT, and a PT Perorangan while you are still one person and still small. The reasoning is not tax and it is not prestige. It is that you keep the two things a yayasan permanently forecloses, which are the right to take the profit and the ability to sell.

Take a yayasan when the programme you are opening is formal education, where the form is decided for you, or when you genuinely intend the money to stay in the institution. That second case is real, and the tax rules recognise it: a nonprofit body in education that is registered with its supervising agency keeps its surplus out of income tax where the surplus is spent on building or acquiring education facilities within four years of being received.

Read that relief for what it is. It is a good outcome for someone building a school they mean to hand on, and a poor one for someone who wants to draw an income from what they built, because the condition is that the money returns to buildings and equipment rather than to you.

The owners who end up with a CV are mostly those who formalised before the one-person PT existed, or who optimised for the notary's invoice. The owners who end up with a yayasan without needing one are usually copying the school down the road, which is a formal education unit and never had the choice.

The paperwork that changes on day one

Whichever form you choose, the billing changes underneath it. Fees are invoiced by the entity rather than by you personally, receipts carry the entity's name and its tax number, and the parent-facing paperwork changes on the day the deed is signed rather than gradually.

Happy Kamper's billing and invoicing is IDR-native, and the enrollment and reporting records hold the fee history a tax adviser will ask for. It does not compute your tax, produce a return, generate a filing in an official government format, or determine which form your programme should take. Those belong to the notary and the tax adviser, and no scheduling tool substitutes for either.

What is worth doing before you sign is an afternoon of arithmetic. Write down what you actually took out of the centre last year, then read the yayasan salary rule again with that number in front of you. Owners who do it in the other order tend to find out afterwards.

If you run a tutoring or language programme, the operating detail behind those records sits on the bimbel solutions page. The fee mechanics are set out on the billing and payments page.

This is general information about how the rules are written, not advice on your own centre's structure. The choice between these forms belongs with a notary and a tax adviser who can see your figures.