Payments for ecosystem services (PES) are policy instruments aimed at giving incentives to landholders to conserve/restore ecosystems and adopt land uses and/or practices that are supposed to increase the potential supply of strategic ecosystem services. When implemented, PES operate in a socio-ecological system with specific biophysical, economic, cultural, and institutional characteristics that may influence their effectiveness. Therefore, choosing the areas to be part of the scheme must take into consideration such characteristics and their interactions. However, up to date the selection of areas to be part of PES has considered either a single criterion or multiple criteria without considering the interaction among them. This paper proposes a multicriteria analysis methodology (Analytic Network Process) to select strategic areas to be part of a PES and operationalizes it in a strategic basin in the Colombian Andes for PES for hydrological regulation. The criteria that the methodolo