Renting out a property in Spain as a non-resident: what you pay and when you declare it

What you declare: one tax per accrual, not one a year

Article 13.1.g) of the consolidated text of the IRNR Law (Impuesto sobre la Renta de no Residentes, Spain's income tax for people who do not live here), approved by Royal Legislative Decree 5/2004, treats as income obtained in Spanish territory "the income derived, directly or indirectly, from immovable property located in Spanish territory or from rights over it". The rent from your flat is inside that: it makes no difference where you live, where you signed the contract or which bank the money lands in.

It is declared with the modelo 210, the same form used for an empty flat and for a sale. The form tells them apart with an income type code that you do not get to choose, because it follows from what you do with the property: rent is 01, and 35 when the letting is not subject to withholding and there are several payers.

And here is the practical difference from the empty flat. Imputed income accrues once a year, on 31 December (article 27.1.c). Rent does not: article 27.1.a) places the accrual of the income "when it becomes due or on the date of collection if that is earlier". Every monthly payment that falls due is an accrual. And the second paragraph of article 15.1 finishes the idea off: someone who obtains income without a permanent establishment is taxed "separately on each full or partial accrual of income subject to tax, with no offsetting being possible between them". Not between months, not between properties, and not a bad quarter against a good one.

Filing is not optional and no bill turns up: article 28.1 requires the taxpayer without a permanent establishment to file a return "determining and paying the tax debt". The AEAT (Agencia Estatal de Administración Tributaria, the Spanish tax agency) does not send you anything to pay, and it does not remind you either. Having a convenio de doble imposición (a double taxation treaty) does not get you out of it: treaties drafted along the OECD model say that income from immovable property "may be taxed" in the State where the property is located, and their paragraph 3 mentions letting expressly.

The taxable base: the gross rent, without the reductions residents get

Article 24.1 of the IRNR Law is blunt: the base imponible (the taxable base) "shall be made up of its full amount", determined under the rules of the IRPF Law (Spain's income tax for residents), "with the multiplying percentages of article 23.1 of that consolidated text not being applicable, nor the reductions".

What that full amount is comes from article 22.2 of Law 35/2006: everything the tenant has to pay you on any account, including what corresponds to the assets handed over with the property (the furniture, the appliances, the parking space that goes with the flat) and excluding IVA (Spanish VAT) or, in the Canary Islands, IGIC. If the tenant separately pays part of the utilities or of the building service charge, that is your income too.

And now the most expensive and most repeated mistake in this tax, the one people make by copying a guide written for Spanish residents. The reduction for letting a home never applies to a non-resident, not even one living in the European Union. Article 23.2 of the IRPF Law lets a resident cut the net income from a let home by 90%, 70%, 60% or 50% depending on the case; article 24.1 of the IRNR Law excludes "the reductions" as a block, with no exceptions. And article 24.6, the only door left open to an EU resident, talks about expenses, not reductions.

Translated: a Spanish resident and a German resident with the same flat and the same residential tenancy do not do the same sum. The Spaniard takes off between 50% and 90% of the net income; the German, nothing. The same goes for the 30% reduction for income generated over more than two years in article 23.3: excluded by the same sentence.

One last floor worth knowing: if you let to your spouse or to a relative up to the third degree, relatives by marriage included, article 24 of the IRPF Law stops the net income coming out below the imputed income that would result from article 85. Charging your son a cheap rent does not lower the tax.

Expenses: who may subtract them and which ones count

The general rule in article 24.1 is that you are taxed on the gross. The exception is article 24.6: only taxpayers "resident in another Member State of the European Union" deduct expenses, and for individuals those are "the expenses provided for in Law 35/2006". Its final paragraph extends the regime to the European Economic Area, but with an express condition that is not automatic: that there is an effective exchange of tax information (first additional provision, paragraph 4, of Law 36/2006). And you have to show that the expenses are "directly related to the income obtained in Spain" and have "a direct and inseparable economic link with the activity carried on in Spain".

The expenses are those of article 23.1 of the IRPF Law and of article 13 of its regulation:

• Interest on borrowed capital invested in acquiring or improving the property, and repair and maintenance. They share a ceiling: between the two they cannot exceed the gross income from that property, and the excess is deducted over the following four years (article 23.1.a.1.º). Extension and improvement are not repair (article 13.a of the regulation).
• Non-state taxes and surcharges that fall on the income or on the property and are not penalties: this is where the IBI comes in (Impuesto sobre Bienes Inmuebles, the annual property tax your Spanish town hall charges; its receipt is also where you read the valor catastral). It is owed by the holder of the right (article 63.1 of the Ley Reguladora de las Haciendas Locales, the law on local authority finances).
• Running costs of the letting: the comunidad de propietarios (the service charge of the owners' association in your building), management, security and porterage (articles 23.1.a.4.º and 13.c), insurance premiums (13.f), services and utilities you pay for (13.g), drawing up the contract and legal defence (13.d), and doubtful debts more than six months after the first recovery step (13.e).
• Depreciation: 3% a year on the higher of two figures, the acquisition cost actually paid or the valor catastral (the value the Catastro, Spain's official property register for tax purposes, assigns to each property; it is neither the price you paid nor the market price), excluding the value of the land (article 23.1.b of the IRPF Law and article 14.2.a of the regulation). If you do not know the land value, the acquisition cost is apportioned using the cadastral values of land and building.

On apportioning, an honest note: when the flat is only let for part of the year, the prudent course is to split the expenses in proportion to the days let, and that is how it is applied in practice, but article 24.6 does not say so; all it demands are those two conditions of proof.

And if you live outside the European Union and the European Economic Area? Article 24.6 does not reach you: you are taxed on the gross rent, without subtracting a single euro. Not the IBI, not the service charge, not the interest, and not the depreciation, which is usually the largest item of all. Since 2021 that has been the position of anyone tax resident in the United Kingdom, and it is the biggest thing Brexit changed in this tax, bigger than the rate.

The rate: 19% if you live in the EU or the EEA, 24% everywhere else

The tipo impositivo (the tax rate) is in article 25.1.a) of the IRNR Law, and it is literal: "as a general rule 24 por 100. However, the tax rate shall be 19 por ciento where the taxpayer is resident in another Member State of the European Union or of the European Economic Area with which there is an effective exchange of tax information". That is 24 percent and 19 percent.

Notice that the 19% of article 25.1.a) and the expenses of article 24.6 are two separate advantages with two separate requirements, even though in practice they nearly always travel together. A resident of the European Union has both automatically. A resident of the European Economic Area needs the effective exchange of information condition for both. And someone resident outside both areas loses both at once, which is what multiplies the bill.

The precise scope is published by the Agencia Tributaria in its non-residents manual, and it brings three surprises that come up again and again:

The United Kingdom stopped being a Member State in 2021, so the British owner, the largest group of foreign owners on the Spanish coast, lost both advantages at a stroke: the rate went from 19% to 24% and the deductible expenses of article 24.6 disappeared. Nothing landed on the doormat to announce it. Switzerland has never been part of the European Economic Area. And Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein keep the 19% without being in the European Union.

So Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark and Finland are all inside the European Union: a resident there pays 19% and deducts expenses. A resident of the United States pays 24% and deducts nothing, exactly like a British resident. What decides it is your tax residence, not your passport or your nationality: a British citizen who is tax resident in Ireland sits on the 19% side, and an Irish citizen who is tax resident in the United States sits on the 24% side. If you are not sure which one you are, start with the guide on tax residence in Spain.

Almost nothing comes off the resulting tax: article 26 allows only two deductions, donations and any withholdings or payments on account made on you. There is no personal allowance, no relief for a main home and no relief for international double taxation.

The same flat, two owners: the example that explains everything

Two people buy the same flat, let it for €1,000 a month throughout 2026 and have exactly the same expenses. One lives in Germany; the other, in the United Kingdom or the United States.

The property figures: acquisition cost actually paid of €180,000 and a valor catastral of €90,000, of which €54,000 corresponds to the building and €36,000 to the land. For depreciation you take the higher of the two figures, the acquisition cost, and strip out the land part using the cadastral proportion (60% building): 180,000 × 60% = €108,000, and 3% of that is €3,240 a year.

Same flat, same tenant, same rent: €1,958.50 of difference, more than three times the tax. And only part of that gap comes from the rate; most of it comes from the base.

Two checks always worth making. First: the ceiling in article 23.1.a.1.º, which caps interest plus repair and maintenance at the gross income from that property. Here that is 1,900 + 600 = €2,500 against €12,000 of rent, so it does not bite; with a large mortgage and a small rent it would, and the excess would carry forward over the following four years. Second: neither owner applies the reduction for letting a home. A Spanish resident with this same flat would apply it, and would pay noticeably less than the German.

The months it is not let: the second return almost nobody files

A flat let for half the year does not produce half a return: it produces two different kinds of income and two different returns. It is the quietest mistake in this tax, because nothing anywhere warns you.

The reason is in article 85.1 of the IRPF Law, which excludes from the imputation of real estate income only property "generating capital income". The days it is let are exactly that and impute nothing; the days the property is at your disposal are not, and they do impute, "determined in proportion to the number of days involved in each tax period". That article reaches the non-resident through a chain of three links worth quoting in full: article 24.5 of the IRNR Law refers to article 87 of the 2004 consolidated IRPF text, and the seventeenth additional provision of Law 35/2006 orders those references to be read as made to the corresponding provisions of the law in force, that is, to article 85.

Imputed income is 2% of the valor catastral, or 1.1% if the values of the municipality were revised through a general collective valuation procedure that took effect in the tax period or in the ten preceding ones. The full calculation is in the guide on the modelo 210.

An example: you let the flat from 1 January to 30 June 2026 for €1,000 a month and keep it at your own disposal for the rest of the year. That is 181 days let and 184 days of imputation. On one side you declare €6,000 of gross income, with its expenses if you are entitled to them. On the other, with a valor catastral of €90,000 and assuming your property falls under the 1.1%, the imputed income is 990 × 184 / 365 = €499.07, which at 19% is €94.82.

They are two different income type codes (01 or 35 against 02), with different accrual dates (the rent falling due against 31 December) and different deadlines. They do not go in the same 210 and they do not offset each other (article 15.1).

Deadlines and grouping: what fits in one return and when it falls due

First, what can be put together. Article 2.1.b) of Order EHA/3316/2010 allows several items of income of the same taxpayer to be grouped only if four conditions hold at once: the same income type code, the same payer, the same tax rate and, "where they derive from an asset or a right, come from the same asset or right".

• You can group the year's monthly payments from the same tenant on the same flat.
• You cannot group two different properties, even if the tenant is the same: they are different assets.
• You cannot group the rent with the imputed income of the same flat: they are different income type codes.
• For the case of many payers with no withholding, the form has a code of its own, 35.

And then, when. The law sets no deadline at all: article 28.1 says the return is filed "in the manner, place and time limits laid down", and the ones that lay them down are the ministerial orders governing the form. Order HAC/623/2026, published in the BOE, Spain's official gazette, of 23 June 2026, reordered them by accrual.

The deadline depends on the result, not only on the type of income. The same rent, in the same box, falls due in April if there is tax to pay and in January if the result is zero. An expense that appears or disappears moves the cut-off date, so you do the numbers first and look at the calendar afterwards, never the other way round.

There is a second axis worth not mixing with the first: the new form governs every self-assessment filed from 1 January 2027, whichever year you are declaring, while the new deadlines govern by accrual.

If the date goes past you, the way out is set out in the rules: article 27.2 of the General Tax Law applies a recargo (a surcharge for filing late) of 1% plus 1% for each full month of delay if you file before anyone demands it, of 15% plus late payment interest once 12 months have passed, with a 25% reduction if you pay everything on time (article 27.5). You can estimate it with the late filing surcharge calculator.

Holiday letting: where this stops being a matter for this guide

Letting by the week or by the night does not, on its own, change anything above: it is still the income of article 13.1.g), accruing when the rent falls due or is collected (article 27.1.a), with a gross base (article 24.1) and the expenses of article 24.6 if you live in the European Union or in the European Economic Area with effective exchange. What changes is the volume: dozens of accruals and dozens of payers in a single year, plus the days at your own disposal, which generate their own imputed income separately.

What does change the ground under your feet is the permanent establishment. Everything you have read here is the regime for someone who obtains income without a permanent establishment, the one taxed "separately on each accrual" under article 15.1. If you have someone employed full time in Spain to run the letting, or if on top of handing over the use you provide services typical of the hotel trade, the classification can stop being that one, and with it the tax, the form and the calendar all change.

Here honesty is owed: that boundary is not settled by any of the articles quoted in this guide, it is decided case by case and it is not ground to gamble on alone. If you recognise yourself in that situation, get professional advice in Spain before you file anything.

And with the same honesty, what kontora does today and what it does not: kontora's modelo 210 service covers the imputed income of a property at your own disposal, not the rent. If your flat was let for part of the year, the return for the days it was not let is covered; the one for the rent is not, yet. When it is, it will be announced on the modelo 210 service page and on pricing.

File your own modelo 210 for €19.95 + IVA. kontora works out the tax and prepares the completed form; you do the filing. How it works · tell me when it opens.

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