How these pages are built
Every one of them follows the same shape, because that is the shape of an honest answer. The options are set out with their real costs, including the ones nobody mentions. There is a table you can hold your own figures against. There is a statement of the point at which the answer changes. And there is a paragraph saying what actually tips the balance, which is very often not the tax rate at all but something structural: what you intend to do with the property, whether you need the income to live on, or how long you expect to hold it.
What you will not find is a promise. We advise on the law as it stands and we flag the risk in each route; we do not guarantee an outcome, and anybody who does should worry you. Where a question is genuinely unsettled — such as when the 10 % VAT on short lets will actually begin — we say so and describe the prudent course.
If you let a property to holidaymakers
- Exempt, or with hotel services. The line that decides today whether a holiday let charges VAT at all, short stays included, with what each side costs in returns and bookkeeping and when being taxable is worth more than being exempt.
- Preparing for the 10 % VAT on lets. The decree that set 1 December 2026 was voted down by Congress, so the start date is open and July 2028 is the limit. The price decision with real figures, four tasks worth doing meanwhile, and three shortcuts that go badly.
- When you own several properties. What actually multiplies as the portfolio grows, what does not, and the point at which the bookkeeping rather than the tax becomes the binding constraint.
If you are self-employed in Spain
- Which income tax regime. Direct assessment, simplified direct assessment or the flat-rate modules: how the choice is actually made, what the 5 % allowance is worth, and why leaving the module system has consequences that last years.
- Lowering the bill without inventing costs. What genuinely reduces what you pay, ranked by effect, and the reason buying something you do not need to save tax is spending a hundred to keep thirty.
- Stay self-employed or incorporate. The profit threshold everybody quotes does not exist. What exists is a set of questions about what you do with the profit, and a running cost that has to be earned back every year.
If you own Spanish property from abroad
- Inside or outside the EU. 19 % on the profit against 24 % on the gross, the same flat and the same income, and the small number of things that can legitimately be done about it.
- Buying personally or through a company. What the structure is usually sold on, what it actually costs to run, and the personal-use problem that is rarely explained before signature.
- Selling as a non-resident. The 3 % withholding, the municipal land tax, and why the preparation that matters happens months before the notary.
The three things that decide most of them
| Question | Why it decides so much |
|---|---|
| Do you need the money to live on? | Structures that look efficient on paper stop being efficient the moment profit has to come out as salary or dividend. Almost every incorporation question turns on this |
| How long will you hold it? | Set-up costs, running costs and exit costs are spread over the holding period. A structure that pays for itself over fifteen years is an expensive mistake over three |
| Can you evidence it? | Deductions, reliefs, rates and apportionments all depend on documents existing in the right name, at the right date. The cheapest tax planning in Spain is a complete folder of invoices |
What these pages deliberately do not say
They do not give thresholds. There is no profit figure at which a company becomes worthwhile, no number of properties at which a structure is required, and no rule of thumb that survives contact with a real set of accounts. Thresholds are what a page says when it has not been given any figures, and they are how people end up with structures that cost more to run than they ever save.
They also do not promise savings. Tax advice that begins with a saving and works backwards produces arrangements that look efficient until somebody asks a question about them. What these pages try to do instead is set out what each route costs in money, in time and in exposure, so that the decision is made with the whole picture rather than with the attractive half of it.
And they do not pretend that the law is settled where it is not. The deductibility of costs for owners resident outside the EU is currently before the Spanish Supreme Court; the 10 % VAT on short lets has had no start date since Congress voted down, on 2 October 2026, the decree that gave it one. Both of those are flagged as open questions on the pages they affect, because a strategy built on an assumed outcome is not a strategy.
Where a strategy page stops and advice begins
These pages are written from the general position of a typical owner or freelancer. They cannot take account of your other income, your country's treatment of the same income, your family arrangements or what you intend to do in five years, and all four routinely change the answer. Treat them as a way of arriving at the right question rather than as the answer itself.
When a decision needs to be made with your actual figures, that is a separate piece of work: a written report, with the numbers modelled both ways and the risks stated. It sits outside the monthly compliance fee, for the good reason that it is not compliance. What the fee does include is having those figures in a state where the report can be written at all — which, for most people arriving here, is the harder half.
Start with the two-minute form if you want to know which of these decisions are actually yours, or with the pricing page if you already know.