Short answer. Yes, generally. The article sets its base penalty for armed offenders, but adds: when the offenders do not carry arms, and the value of the property taken exceeds Fifty thousand pesos, the penalty next lower in degree shall be imposed — being unarmed generally brings the sentence down by a full degree.
What the law says
When the offenders do not carry arms, and the value of the property taken exceeds Fifty thousand pesos (₱50,000), the penalty next lower in degree shall be imposed
Revised Penal Code, Article 299 — Robbery In An Inhabited House. Read the full provision →
The article's baseline is written around armed offenders
The core penalty this article describes is framed for any armed person who shall commit robbery in an inhabited house or public building or edifice devoted to religious worship, punished by reclusion temporal when the property's value passes the stated threshold and the entry or circumstances match the ways the article lists. Being armed is genuinely baked into that base description of the offense, right alongside the value of the property actually taken.
Being unarmed brings a specific reduction
The article then adjusts for offenders who are not armed: when they do not carry arms, and the property taken still exceeds the stated value threshold, the penalty next lower in degree shall be imposed. So yes — all else being equal on the value of what was actually taken, an unarmed robbery under this article generally carries a meaningfully lighter penalty than an armed one. The reduction is not discretionary once the facts fit the description; it is the penalty the article itself directs for that specific combination of circumstances, regardless of any other aggravating detail the incident may otherwise present.
How value and being armed interact
The article treats being armed and the value of property taken as two separate variables that can each shift the penalty. The reverse situation is addressed too: the same lower-degree reduction applies when offenders are armed but the property taken falls below the threshold, and an even greater reduction applies when offenders are unarmed and the property taken also falls below that same threshold amount. Being armed and the value taken therefore work as two independent inputs into the same penalty scheme, each capable of moving the eventual sentence up or down on its own, rather than one factor simply overriding the other whenever both happen to be present in a given case.
A note on the peso figures in this article
The peso thresholds printed in this article were revised by Republic Act No. 10951 (2017), which updated property values and fines throughout the Revised Penal Code. If you are reading an older reproduction of the Code, confirm it reflects that 2017 revision rather than the figures as originally enacted decades earlier, since the older, smaller amounts no longer represent current law today.