Modelo 200: the annual corporate tax return of a Spanish SL, step by step

What modelo 200 is and who has to file it

Modelo 200 is the annual self-assessment of Impuesto sobre Sociedades, Spanish corporate income tax. In it the company declares its result for the year, turns it into a taxable base, applies the rate it qualifies for and works out how much it pays or gets back. It is a single return per year, unlike VAT and withholdings, which are settled quarterly.

Every entity with legal personality that is tax resident in Spain has to file it: the sociedad limitada (SL), the sociedad anónima, cooperatives, associations. The rule that takes longest to sink in is that the obligation does not depend on the result. You file with a profit, with a loss, with a zero base and with the company sitting idle. The Act only exempts from filing the fully exempt entities of its article 9 (the State and public bodies); an SL is never on that list.

Nor does it depend on where you live. An SL incorporated in Spain is tax resident in Spain and settles its tax here even if the sole shareholder lives in London or Mexico City. The company is taxed, not the person; your personal income follows a different path, and if you are not resident, that path is described in the guide to non-resident taxation.

It is also filed for the short period of the incorporation year, from the deed to 31 December, and for the period that ends with the winding-up. There is no financial year without a return.

The deadline: 25 calendar days after the six months following year-end

Article 124 of the Corporate Income Tax Act sets the deadline as a rule rather than a date: the return is filed within the 25 calendar days following the 6 months after the end of the tax period. For an SL whose financial year is the calendar year, which is the vast majority, that means 1 to 25 July of the following year: the 2026 tax is declared in July 2027.

If your financial year is not the calendar year, the same rule applies from a different starting point: a year ending 31 March is filed from 1 to 25 October. And the first financial year of a newly incorporated SL, from the deed to 31 December, closes in December like any other and is filed in July.

Two details. The period is counted in calendar days, but if the last day is a Saturday, Sunday or public holiday it moves to the next working day: check the AEAT calendar each year, or the 2026-2027 tax calendar, where the shifts are already worked out. And if you intend to pay by direct debit, the order has to be given a few days before the deadline ends, as with every other return.

Notice that almost seven months separate 31 December from 25 July. That is not spare time, it is time allocated to other things: drawing up the accounts before the end of March, legalising the books before 30 April and having them approved by the shareholders before 30 June. Modelo 200 is the last link in that chain, not the first.

From the books to the tax bill: how the return is built

Modelo 200 is not filled in from scratch: it is filled in from closed accounts. The circuit, in the order the form itself follows, is this:

1. Accounting result. The balance of the profit and loss account for the year, before the tax itself. That is why the 200 also asks for the balance sheet and the income statement on its first pages: they are the source of everything else.
2. Tax adjustments. Corrections for differences between accounting and tax rules. The most common in a small SL are the items article 15 of the Act refuses as expenses: the tax expense itself, fines and penalties, late-filing surcharges, donations and gifts, and the cost of actions contrary to the law. Each is added back in its own box.
3. Preliminary taxable base and loss relief. If you declared negative bases in earlier years, they are deducted here. Article 26 allows them to be offset up to 70% of the preliminary base, and in any case up to one million euros a year, a figure a small SL never gets near. There is no time limit.
4. Tax rate and gross tax. The rate the company qualifies for that year is applied to the base; the rates are in the next section.
5. Credits and allowances. They reduce the gross tax if you are entitled to any; in a small service SL there usually are none.
6. Withholdings and prepayments. Tax withheld from the company (bank interest, for instance) and the 202 instalments are deducted here.
7. Net amount. What you pay, or what the AEAT refunds if the prepayments exceeded the tax.

Step 1 decides the quality of everything else. With the books properly closed, depreciation booked and the bank reconciled, the 200 is almost mechanical; if not, every box is a question. The habit that prevents this is in the guide on how to keep the books.

The 2026 rates and how to know which one is yours

The rates are in article 29 of the Act, with the transitional 2026 scale in its corresponding provision. For a small SL, three matter:

The micro-company scale drops to 17% and 20% from 2027. The 23% figure still circulating online belongs to an earlier year and no longer applies.

The order of priority is simple: if you meet the new-company requirements, the 15% applies because it is lower than any step of the scale; once that two-year window is used up, you move to the micro-company scale as long as turnover stays under a million; and to 25% if you exceed it. The new-company requirements are not a formality: the law does not treat as newly started an activity already carried on by a related person or entity, nor one carried on in the year before incorporation by an individual holding more than 50% of the new company's capital. If you were an autónomo and have moved the same activity into an SL, the 15% is not yours. Nor does it apply to asset-holding entities or companies in a group.

If your first tax period is shorter than a year, the 50,000 euro first step is prorated by days. To get a feel for the bill before year-end, the corporate tax estimator applies these rules to the profit you enter; the detail of each rate is in the guide to corporate income tax in year one.

How it is filed: Sociedades WEB, the certificate and ways to pay

Filing is electronic only. A company cannot use Cl@ve: it needs the digital certificate of a legal-person representative, in the director's name, or a colaborador social (a gestoría) files on its behalf. If you intend to file yourself, the certificate is the first thing to sort out, and not on 20 July.

The form is called Sociedades WEB and lives on the AEAT's online office. It lets you fill in the 200 in the browser, save drafts, import the accounting data from a file in the format the AEAT publishes, and validate before sending. The validations catch arithmetic mismatches, not accounting errors: those have to be fixed beforehand.

If the result is an amount due, you choose how to pay when filing:

• Direct debit from a company bank account: the most convenient, but the order closes a few days before the deadline.
• Payment with an NRC: you pay at your bank first and enter the reference number when filing. Valid until the last day.
• Acknowledgement of debt with a request for deferral or set-off if you cannot pay. Filing on time and deferring is far better than filing late.

If the result is a refund, you give the company's account and the AEAT has six months from the end of the filing period to refund it of its own motion (article 127 of the Act). If the result is zero, you file all the same. In every case, keep the filing receipt: it is what proves you complied.

A warning for owners who live abroad: the AEAT's electronic notifications to a company are compulsory and are deemed served a few days after being made available, even if nobody opens them. If the tax agency has a question about your 200, it will arrive that way, and the time to reply runs from there.

Prepayments: modelo 202 during the year

Corporate income tax is paid in advance during the year through instalments, declared on modelo 202. Article 40 of the Act sets three windows: the first 20 calendar days of April, October and December.

Under the general method, the one any small SL uses, each instalment is 18% of the gross tax on the last modelo 200 whose filing period had already expired on the 1st of the payment month, reduced by that year's credits, allowances and withholdings. In other words, the 202 does not look at what you earn this year: it looks at what you declared on the last 200 that fell due.

That produces the lag that confuses everyone. The April 2027 instalment is calculated on the 2025 return, because the 2026 one has not fallen due yet; the October and December 2027 instalments are already calculated on the 2026 return, filed that July. Three payments, two reference returns.

Three practical consequences:

• No positive tax, no 202. If your last 200 came out at zero or with a negative base, there is no instalment and no form.
• In the first year there is no 202, because there is no earlier 200. The first instalment for an SL incorporated in 2026 and profitable that year would arrive in October 2027.
• A previous year shorter than twelve months means completing the base with the proportional share of earlier periods until twelve months are covered.

There is a second method, under article 40.3, calculated on the cumulative taxable base of the first 3, 9 or 11 months of the current year: compulsory above 6 million euros of turnover and optional for the rest, by election on the census return in February. For a small SL, the general method is usually the sensible one.

Whatever you pay through the 202s is deducted on the 200 for the same year. If you advanced more than the final tax, the 200 comes out as a refund.

Modelo 200 and the annual accounts: two calendars that cross

The 200 is tax; the annual accounts are company law. But they draw on the same books and their deadlines interlock so tightly that it helps to see them as one sequence:

The dependency is very specific: the 200 incorporates the balance sheet, the profit and loss account and certain data from the notes, and those figures have to be the same ones the shareholders approved and that you are about to deposit. If you file the 200 with one result and deposit accounts with another, you have a mismatch between two public records that the AEAT can cross-check.

Hence a rule of order: close the books once, draw up, approve, and from then on both the 200 and the deposit are filled in from the same close. If, while preparing the 200, you find a material accounting error, correct it in the accounts before they are approved, not only in the tax. The tax expense itself is booked at the close as a provision and then added back on the 200 because it is not deductible: it feels circular, and it is. The deadlines for drawing up, approving and depositing, and the consequences of not depositing, are in the guide to annual accounts of a Spanish SL: deadlines and deposit.

What happens if you file modelo 200 late

It depends on two things: whether you move first or the AEAT does, and whether there was tax to pay.

You file late on your own initiative and there was tax due. The late-filing surcharge of article 27 of the General Tax Act applies: a flat 1% plus a further 1% for each full month of delay, calculated on the amount you pay, with no penalty and no interest during the first twelve months. After twelve months from the deadline, the surcharge is 15% and late-payment interest is added from that point. The surcharge is cut by 25% if you pay within the voluntary period and do not appeal. You can see what it would come to in your case with the late-filing surcharge calculator.

You file late on your own initiative and there was no tax due. The classic case of the loss-making SL that forgets about July. No surcharge, because there is no amount, but an infringement: article 198 of the General Tax Act provides a fixed fine of 200 euros for not filing a return on time where the Treasury suffers no loss, halved to 100 euros when filed without a prior request. Cheap compared with what comes next.

The AEAT requests it before you file. The surcharge regime disappears and the penalty regime takes over: a penalty proportional to the unpaid tax, plus interest. And a negative base not declared on time can end up disputed when you want to use it.

The orderly way out is always the same: file as soon as possible, on your own initiative, and if the problem is cash, request a deferral instead of waiting; the guide on what to do when you miss a deadline walks through the steps. If you filed on time but with an error, the route is a supplementary return if the error was in the Treasury's disfavour, or a request for rectification if it was in yours.

From the year-end close to the modelo 200 draft

Each step of the sequence above uses the one before, so the January close is the one that governs everything else.

kontora is built around that sequence. Double-entry bookkeeping is generated from your invoices and expenses, the year-end close books depreciation and calculates the tax provision, and from there come the balance sheet, the income statement and the box-by-box draft of modelo 200, with the article 15 adjustments identified and the 202 instalments already deducted. The year's 202s are prepared from the last 200 that fell due, with a reminder before each window. Filing on Sociedades WEB is still your move, with the company's certificate, or your gestoría's; what changes is that you reach July with the work done. The full map of your company's obligations is in the Spanish SL tax guide.

Frequently asked questions

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