Your first invoice in Spain: what it must include to be legal

What a full invoice must contain

The content of an invoice in Spain is not a matter of style: it is fixed by art. 6 of the invoicing regulation (RD 1619/2012), the Reglamento de facturacion. A factura completa (full invoice) must include:

• Number and, where used, series: numbering must be sequential within each series.
• Issue date, plus the date of the operation if it is different.
• Your details: full name or company name, NIF (Spanish tax ID) and address.
• Your client's details: name or company name, address and NIF. When you invoice another business or autonomo (self-employed worker) in Spain, the client's NIF is mandatory.
• Description of the operation, with the unit price before VAT and any discounts applied.
• Base imponible: the taxable base, the amount VAT is calculated on.
• VAT rate applied (21%, 10% or 4%) and the VAT amount shown separately, never a bare "VAT included".
• Special mentions when they apply: "inversion del sujeto pasivo" for the reverse charge, a reference to the applicable exemption, and so on.

If one invoice mixes several VAT rates, or exempt and non-exempt operations, the base of each block must be broken down separately. And the detail that makes all of this matter: only a document with every required item counts as an invoice your client can use to deduct VAT. An incomplete invoice is not a cosmetic problem, it is a problem for the person paying you.

IRPF withholding: the item everyone forgets

IRPF withholding (retencion) is the part of your invoice your client does not pay to you: they pay it to Hacienda, the Spanish tax office, in your name, as an advance on your personal income tax. It goes on the invoice when two conditions are met at once:

• You are an individual carrying out a professional activity: a freelancer, not a company.
• Your client is a Spanish business or autonomo. Private individuals and foreign clients with no establishment in Spain never withhold anything.

The general rate is 15% of the taxable base. If you are just starting out, you can apply 7% in the year you register and the two following years, as long as you carried out no professional activity in the previous year; to apply it you must tell your client in writing, and they are required to keep that signed communication.

The invoicing regulation deals with VAT and does not require this line, but in practice it has to be there: it is the only way your client knows how much to withhold and pay in through form modelo 111. How that works on the client's side is explained in our guide to modelos 111 and 115. One extra detail: renting an office or business premises carries its own withholding rate of 19%.

Full invoice or simplified invoice?

The factura simplificada (simplified invoice) is the legal heir of the shop receipt. It is only allowed in specific cases:

• Operations up to €400 VAT included, whatever the activity.
• Operations up to €3,000 VAT included in a closed list of activities: retail sales, hospitality, passenger transport, hairdressers and similar.
• Corrective invoices (facturas rectificativas).

Its appeal is that it needs fewer details: you do not have to identify the client. That is also its trap: a simplified invoice without the client's NIF and address and without the VAT amount shown separately does not let your client deduct that VAT. The regulation itself anticipates this: if the client is a business and asks for those details, you must add them. At that point, the practical move is to issue a full invoice from the start.

If your business is invoicing services to other companies, forget the simplified invoice: B2B clients almost always need to deduct, and for intra-EU operations and other cross-border B2B cases the simplified format is outright prohibited. Full invoice, always, and no one will ever question it.

Numbering and series: sequential and without gaps

The regulation requires numbering that is sequential within each series. In practice, that translates into three simple rules:

• No gaps: the text does not literally say "no gaps", but that is how sequential numbering is interpreted; during a tax check, a missing number is an invitation to ask what happened to that invoice.
• No reusing numbers and no changing the series of an invoice already issued.
• No deleting: an invoice issued with a mistake is never removed; it is corrected with a corrective invoice.

Series are optional and exist to separate flows when there is a reason to: several establishments, operations of a different nature. The most common practice is one series per year: 2026-0001, 2026-0002 and so on. What is not optional: corrective invoices must go in their own dedicated series, separate from the ordinary one (for example R-2026-0001).

One more reason to be strict from day one: under Verifactu, every invoice will generate a record chained to the previous one, so gaps and silent cancellations will be visible to the AEAT, the Spanish tax agency, by design.

A worked example with honest numbers

Say you are a freelance designer invoicing €1,000 to a Spanish company. Your invoice reads:

• Taxable base: €1,000
• VAT at 21%: plus €210
• IRPF withholding at 15%: minus €150 (calculated on the base, not on the total)
• Total payable by the client: €1,060

Now the honest part, the one no template explains. Of the €1,060 that lands in your account, the €210 of VAT is not yours: you collect it on behalf of Hacienda and will report it in the quarterly modelo 303 VAT return. The €150 withheld is not lost either: your client pays it in under your name and it is credited against your income tax later. Your real income, before expenses and final taxes, is the €1,000 base.

With the 7% new-professional rate the arithmetic changes: €1,000 plus €210 of VAT minus €70 of withholding leaves €1,140 to collect. You receive more today, but be careful: withholding is an advance, not the tax itself. A lower rate only means you prepay less now and settle more in the annual return. Setting aside part of every payment is still on you.

Invoicing EU clients and clients outside the EU

With a business client in another EU country, the general rule for B2B services is to invoice without Spanish VAT: your client accounts for the tax in their own country under the reverse charge. To do it properly you need three things:

• Registration in the ROI (Registro de Operadores Intracomunitarios, the intra-EU operators register) through form modelo 036, which gives you a NIF-IVA with the ES prefix.
• A check of your client's VAT number in VIES before invoicing, keeping the evidence. If they are not listed, the general rule is to charge Spanish VAT.
• The client's NIF-IVA on the invoice plus the literal mention "inversion del sujeto pasivo".

These invoices carry no withholding and create one extra obligation: reporting them in modelo 349. We cover it in detail in the 349 guide.

Outside the EU, the general rule for services to businesses is also no Spanish VAT: the operation is not located in Spain for VAT purposes. The invoice is still mandatory and still follows Spanish rules, without VAT; it is good practice to state the reason, for example "operation not subject to VAT under localisation rules". The nuances are real, though: sales to individuals, goods and certain services follow their own rules, so verify your specific case before assuming "no VAT".

Word and Excel today, Verifactu tomorrow

Today the law regulates the content of the invoice, not the tool. An invoice made in Word, Excel or a template is perfectly valid if it contains every item required by art. 6. The problems we see do not come from the tool but from three classic mistakes:

• Broken numbering: gaps, repeated numbers or series restarted mid-year.
• Forgetting the withholding when invoicing businesses: the client overpays and a corrective invoice follows.
• Charging VAT when it does not apply (an EU client validated in VIES) or skipping it when it does (a client who is not in VIES).

What changes is the calendar. Under Verifactu, the system you issue invoices with will have to generate tamper-proof, chained records and print a QR code on every invoice: for companies from 1 January 2027 and for autonomos from 1 July 2027. A loose template produces neither records nor QR codes, so "I manage fine with Excel" comes with an expiry date; the details are in our guide to what Verifactu is. kontora issues full, valid invoices with sequential numbering by series and is already Verifactu-ready, so this change will not catch you rebuilding your invoicing from scratch.

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