How these pages are built
Each one takes a question we are asked every week, restates it properly — because it is usually asked backwards — and then sets the two options face to face in a table. After that comes when each one wins, what nobody tells you about the one that looks better, and what we would actually check before answering in your case.
None of them is a recommendation. A table with two columns cannot decide for you, because the answer depends on facts that are yours: where you are tax resident, what your property is worth on the cadastre, how many years you have owned it, which country pays your pension, what your plan documents say. What these pages do is tell you which facts matter, so that the conversation starts in the right place.
You own property in Spain and you let it
Three decisions that get confused with one another constantly. The first is about the kind of letting and the permissions it needs; the second is about VAT and is decided by what you undertake to provide; the third is about whether letting at all beats leaving the place shut.
- Holiday let or seasonal let — the licence, the neighbours and the income tax reduction that only one of them can reach.
- Hotel-type services or not — the line that decides, for short stays as well today, whether you charge VAT and whether you can recover any.
- Letting it or leaving it empty — an empty flat is taxed too, and from how many months of rent that stops mattering.
You are selling, or you are buying from someone who lives abroad
A sale sets off three separate taxes and two different authorities, and the answers change depending on which side of the table you sit. If you are the buyer, one of these pages is about a liability that becomes yours on the day you sign.
- Selling as a resident or a non-resident — the same sale, two very different tax bills.
- Municipal land tax: objective or real method — both are worked out, and you choose the lower.
- Withholding the 3 % or not — for buyers: if you should have withheld and you did not, the debt travels with the property.
- Reinvesting or paying the tax — what has to be reinvested is the price, not the gain.
You work for yourself
These four sit in chronological order, and taking them out of order is expensive: the shape of the business, the timing of your registration, what to do with an unemployment entitlement, and the VAT rules once your clients are not in Spain.
- Sole trader or limited company — decided by the profit, and by how much of it you need to take out.
- Registering before starting or waiting to invoice — there are two registrations, and they do not follow the same rule.
- Lump sum or benefit alongside the business — both are applied for before you start, and choosing one closes the other.
- Invoicing inside or outside the EU — the register, the recapitulative return and proving where your client is.
You have just moved here, or you are paid partly in shares
The inbound regime and share plans belong together more often than people expect, because the regime changes when equity is taxed and which part of it comes into the Spanish return at all.
- The Beckham regime or the ordinary regime — the flat rate is not the part that decides most cases.
- Stock options or RSUs — one has to be bought, and that changes everything.
- ISO or NSO — the favourable treatment is American, and it does not travel.
Your money, or your family, is in more than one country
This is where most of our work sits. Nothing here is unusual for someone who has lived in two or three places: it only looks unusual from inside a single tax system.
- Modelo 720 or modelo 721 — two reporting obligations whose thresholds are not added together.
- Wealth tax or the solidarity tax — your region rebating the first is what switches on the second.
- Gifting now or leaving it in the estate — three taxes on each road, and they are not the same three.
- Government service or social security pension — the distinction that decides which country charges you.
- Ordinary or treaty certificate — your foreign payer will only accept one of them.
Something has already gone wrong
These three are about timing more than about law. In all of them, the cost of the same facts changes depending on who moves first and how many months have gone by.
- Amended return or claim for rectification — the direction of the error decides the document.
- Deferring or paying in instalments — one form, two requests, and two ways of failing.
- Request for information or limited review — they look alike in the envelope and not in their consequences.
The case that fits neither column
Most of the enquiries we open do not sit inside one of these pages. They sit across two or three of them at once, and that is where the answer actually lives.
- The year you move is the year you sell. A decision about a property and a decision about residence land in the same twelve months, and each one changes the other. Answering them separately produces two defensible answers and one wrong result.
- The retired owner who also lets. A pension taxed in one country, a flat taxed in another and a letting that may or may not allow costs to be deducted. Three of these pages, one household.
- The United States citizen living here. Filing continues in both systems whatever Spain decides, so the question is never simply which Spanish treatment is cheaper: it is how the two calendars, and the credits that run between them, line up.
- The co-owners who no longer live in the same country. A couple, two siblings, a former partnership. Each share follows its owner, and almost every form in this collection then has to be filed twice, differently.
- The person who arrived in the second half of the year. Spain does not split the tax year, so the arrival year rarely behaves like either column of anything. It has rules of its own, and it is the year where planning is most often lost.
If yours is one of those, the right starting point is not the page that looks closest. It is the one question that decides the rest — usually where you are tax resident for a given year — because once that is settled the other pages stop contradicting each other.
What to have in front of you before you choose
Almost every comparison in this collection unlocks with the same short set of documents. Gathering them takes an afternoon and saves the two or three exchanges that would otherwise be needed before anyone could give you a figure:
- A certificate of tax residence for each year in question, issued by the country you were living in. Not a residence card, not a utility bill, not a padrón registration.
- The deeds, if property is involved: the one by which you acquired and, where there is one, the one by which you sold, with the costs and taxes of each.
- The latest IBI receipt, which carries the rateable value that half of these pages are calculated from.
- The returns you have already filed in Spain and elsewhere for the last four years, and any letter received about them.
- The contract: employment, tenancy, share plan or management agreement, complete and with its schedules rather than the summary you were sent.
- The dates. Arrival, departure, grant, vesting, completion, death, gift. Nearly every wrong answer in tax comes from a date that was assumed rather than checked.
What we do not do on these pages
We do not promise outcomes. Where a point is genuinely arguable we say so and explain the risk on each side, rather than presenting one reading as settled. Where the figures are illustrative — coefficients, thresholds, rates that each region sets for itself — we say that too, because a number lifted from an example and applied to a different case is worse than no number at all. And we do not advise on foreign law: if your case needs somebody in another country, we will say so and coordinate with whoever you appoint.
If your question is not here, tell us anyway. Two minutes of a form and we answer with your case rather than with a general article. The fees are on pricing and the process is on how it works.