Holiday let or seasonal let: what actually changes

It is not the listing that decides, it is the contract

Most owners arrive convinced the difference is length: a week is a holiday let, five months is a seasonal let. It is not quite that. What separates them is why the property is handed over and under which body of law.

A seasonal let is a tenancy for a use other than permanent housing. The tenant has a specific, temporary need — a university course, a work posting, building work at home — and signs a civil contract governed by the Urban Tenancies Act. A holiday let is short-stay accommodation marketed through tourist channels, which that same Act expressly pushes out of its scope and hands over to the tourism rules of each autonomous region. Spain has seventeen of those regions and their rules do not match.

Every other difference follows from that sentence. It is not a marketing label: it decides which law governs you, what permission you need, how you are taxed and who can stop you.

The four things that change

	Holiday let	Seasonal let
Governing rules	Regional tourism regulations, plus town hall by-laws	The Urban Tenancies Act, as a tenancy for a use other than housing
Permission needed first	Entry in the region's tourism register, whatever the town hall requires, and the single registry number needed to advertise on platforms	None: the contract is enough
VAT	Exempt today without hotel-type services, 10 % with them. A 10 % on every stay of up to 30 nights has no start date: Congress rejected the decree that set one, and July 2028 is the limit	Exempt where the property is handed over for the tenant to live in
Your neighbours	The owners' association can restrict or condition it by a three-fifths majority since the 2025 reform	Not subject to that vote
Income tax reduction on the net rent	Never	Arguable, and in practice the tax office refuses it unless the tenant is using the flat as a home
Nights with nobody in it	Imputed property income for those days	Imputed property income for those days

The owners' association, and why it now decides so much

A Spanish block of flats is run by a comunidad de propietarios: every owner belongs to it automatically, it meets at least once a year, and its resolutions bind you whether you attended or not. Since 2025 that meeting can resolve, by a three-fifths majority of owners representing three-fifths of the participation quotas, to limit or condition holiday letting in the building.

For a foreign buyer this is the risk that has changed most, and it is not theoretical. Buying an apartment specifically to run it as a holiday let and then meeting that resolution at your first annual meeting happens. Before you commit, the documents worth reading are the association's statutes and the minutes of the last few meetings — not the estate agent's brochure. A seasonal let falls outside that vote entirely.

The reduction that gets lost on the way

Letting a property as someone's home carries, in Spanish personal income tax, a reduction on the net rental income. The classic figure was 60 %, and after the latest reform the percentages differ according to the contract and the situation of the property. It cuts the bill substantially. A holiday let never gets it: there is no household whose permanent need is being met.

With a seasonal let the position is more nuanced, and it is worth saying plainly: the usual administrative view is that the reduction does not apply either, because the contract meets a temporary need rather than a permanent one. Some taxpayers claim it and argue the point, and there are arguments to be made, but it is contested ground and we flag it as such. Anyone building a yield calculation on that reduction is building on a piece that may fall away.

When each one wins

The holiday let wins where seasonality is strong and the nightly rate is high: coastline, historic centres, anywhere near a fairground or conference venue. Three well-sold summer months can beat twelve months of ordinary rent. It also wins when the owner wants to use the property for part of the year, which a nine-month seasonal contract does not allow.

The seasonal let wins where there is steady medium-term demand: university towns, districts near hospitals with relocated staff, areas with seasonal workers. The income per night is lower but it is constant, there are no platform commissions, no turnover, no cleaning every three days and, above all, no licence to obtain and no neighbours who can forbid it.

What nobody tells you about the holiday let

• It is not let all year. For the days the property is not let, imputed property income arises exactly as if it had stood empty. A flat with forty nights sold is taxed on those forty nights and on the remaining three hundred and twenty-five days.
• Costs are apportioned. IBI (the annual municipal property tax), the service charge, insurance, utilities and depreciation are deductible only in proportion to the days actually let. January's boiler invoice is not fully deductible because the flat was let in August.
• Running it is an activity. Platform commissions, cleaning, laundry, incidents, and registering each guest with the authorities. None of those hours shows up in a comparison of gross income, and all of them exist.
• The town hall has a view too. Some municipalities have planning rules reserving accommodation use to particular situations within a building. Holding a tourism registration number is not the same as holding permitted planning use, and the two are checked by different offices.

When holiday let or seasonal let: what actually changes fits neither column

The medium stay. A relocated professional books ninety nights through a platform, pays by the night, lets himself in with a key safe and never registers at the town hall. It is neither the fortnight on the beach nor the nine-month academic year: it sits exactly in between, and it is the booking that has grown fastest in the last few years.

The calendar does not answer it; the whole picture does. If the property is marketed in the ordinary way through tourism channels, priced by the night and with open availability, the regional tourism rules reach it even though that particular booking runs for three months. If instead there is a signed contract for an identified temporary need, with a monthly rent, a deposit lodged with the regional body and no permanent listing behind it, you are in a seasonal tenancy even though the tenant first appeared on a website. Several regions have begun to regulate the medium stay expressly, and not all of them in the same way, so the same flat can be answered differently six hundred kilometres apart.

Two further situations reach us often and appear in neither column. One is letting rooms inside the home the owner still lives in, which some regional rules bring within registration and others leave outside it. The other is the arrangement foreign owners on the coast drift into without ever planning it: a seasonal contract from October to May, and nights sold to holidaymakers in summer. That means living with two regimes in the same tax year, apportioning costs day by day, and making sure the seasonal contract has genuinely ended before the first guest arrives, with no tacit renewal overlapping the high season.

What to look at before deciding on holiday let or seasonal let: what actually changes

Six things. Without them in front of you the comparison is a conversation rather than a decision:

• The registered statutes of the owners' association — the ones filed at the Land Registry, not the version circulating on the residents' chat group — together with the minutes of recent meetings, which is where any restricting resolution and its date will be found. Both are in Spanish, and the gap between the two versions is precisely the point.
• The municipal by-law and the planning rules for your street, including the sheet covering accommodation use. That is what decides whether the town hall can stop you even if nobody in the building objects.
• The rateable value, and whether it has been revised, because it fixes the imputed income for the days nobody is inside the property, and those days exist under both options.
• An honest occupancy estimate, in nights and in average nightly price, built from figures for your own area rather than from the memory of one very good August.
• The real annual outgoings: IBI, service charge, any special levy already voted, insurance, utilities, maintenance and, if there is to be a manager, the commission with its VAT.
• Where you are tax resident, and your own calendar. The country you live in decides whether you may deduct any of those outgoings at all, and the weeks you intend to keep for yourself are not free. Both are worth putting a number on before you choose, not afterwards.

How we handle holiday let or seasonal let: what actually changes

With three inputs: what your region's tourism rules and your town hall's by-law say, what your building's statutes and recent minutes say, and what the figures look like under each scenario once you have taken out commissions, cleaning, the imputed income for the empty days and whichever reduction does or does not apply.

Sometimes the answer is that the holiday let yields considerably more and the licence is worth fighting for. Sometimes the gap is a few hundred euros a year and it is worth neither the work nor the exposure. What we do not do is decide before seeing the building and the numbers. The whole line is on holiday lets, and the form asks what we need in order to answer with your case rather than with a general rule.