Short answer. Your debtor bears them. Article 1251 makes the debtor's domicile the default place of payment, but if he changes his domicile in bad faith, or after he has already incurred delay, he alone bears the additional expenses that change causes the creditor. You should not have to absorb the extra cost of his relocation.
What the law says
In any other case the place of payment shall be the domicile of the debtor. If the debtor changes his domicile in bad faith or after he has incurred in delay, the additional expenses shall be borne by him.
Civil Code, Article 1251 — Place of Payment. Read the full provision →
Where payment happens by default
Article 1251 sets out a hierarchy for where an obligation is to be paid. First, whatever the parties expressly agreed on controls. If they said nothing and the obligation is to deliver a specific, determinate thing, payment happens wherever that thing was located when the obligation arose. For everything else, the article falls back on a default: in any other case the place of payment shall be the domicile of the debtor. That default is what puts the debtor's location at the center of this question in the first place.
Bad-faith relocation shifts the extra cost to the debtor
Article 1251 does not let a debtor use his own move to make collection harder for you and pass the cost of that move on to you. It provides squarely: if the debtor changes his domicile in bad faith or after he has incurred in delay, the additional expenses shall be borne by him. If your debtor relocated specifically to frustrate or complicate payment or collection, any extra travel, communication, or collection expense that his new location creates is his to bear, not yours.
The rule also applies once the debtor is in delay
Notice that Article 1251 gives two separate triggers, joined by "or": bad faith is one, but a domicile change made after the debtor has already incurred delay is the other, and it does not require proving bad motive at all. If your debtor was already late in performing before he moved, the extra expenses his relocation creates fall on him regardless of why he moved. This matters practically, because bad faith can be hard to prove, while delay is often a simple factual question of whether the due date had already passed when the move happened.
This rule is about payment, not where you can sue
Article 1251 closes with a reminder that it governs where an obligation is performed, not where a lawsuit may be filed: these provisions are without prejudice to venue under the Rules of Court. So even if the debtor's original or changed domicile fixes the place of payment, that does not by itself dictate which court can hear a collection case against him. Venue for litigation is a separate question governed by its own rules, and a shift in the place of payment under this article does not automatically move where you are entitled to bring your claim.
Cases citing this provision
These Supreme Court decisions cite the provision above. We list them so you can read them yourself; the summaries of what each decided are not ours to give.
- Santiago Ibasco vs. Court of Appeals, et al, G.R. No. 117488, September 5, 1996 — read the decision on LawPhil →