How these guides are meant to be used
Each one answers a question an owner or a freelancer actually asks, rather than summarising a piece of legislation. They are deliberately specific: what goes in which box, what a review looks at first, what the deadline really is once direct debit shortens it. Where something is genuinely unsettled — and a fair amount of Spanish tax practice is — the guide says so instead of pretending otherwise.
What they are not is advice on your file. A real case has details no guide covers: ownership that changed mid-year, works that could be repair or improvement, an expired residence certificate, earlier years filed wrongly that carry balances forward. Use these to understand the mechanism and to sanity-check a number somebody has given you.
Holiday lets
- Form 303 for a holiday let — how the quarterly VAT return is built when the letting is within the scope of VAT, and where the input tax goes wrong.
- Hotel-type services and VAT — the sentence that decides today whether a stay is exempt or taxable at 10 %, with examples.
- Deductible costs on a holiday let — what goes in, in what proportion, and the paperwork each one needs to survive.
- The 10 % VAT on holiday lets — what the decree-law of 29 September 2026 said, why it lapsed, and what to have ready while the date is uncertain.
- Form 349 and platform commission — the obligation that applies today, VAT or no VAT on the rent, and that almost nobody complies with.
- The single short-let register — what the Supreme Court annulled in May 2026 and what remains standing.
Self-employed
- Form 130 — why it accumulates from 1 January, what gets deducted from it, and a worked example across four quarters.
- Form 303 for a freelancer — the quarterly VAT return, mixed-use costs, and the cross-border transactions almost everybody now has.
- Forms 111 and 115 — when you have to withhold tax from someone you pay, how much, and why the liability is yours.
- Self-employed under the Beckham regime — who can elect for article 93 while working for themselves, and the questions with no clean answer.
Non-resident owners
- Nights let and apportioning costs — how nights are counted, the booking that straddles two periods, and why the count drives three taxes.
- The certificate of tax residence — what it proves, how long it lasts, and why its expiry date matters more than anything else on the file.
Where to start, depending on who you are
| If you are… | Start with |
|---|---|
| A foreign owner letting a Spanish flat on Airbnb | nights let, then deductible costs, then platform commission |
| A foreign owner who does not let at all | deemed rental income and the form 210 guide |
| Newly self-employed in Spain | form 130 and registering as self-employed |
| A freelancer with clients abroad | form 303 and invoicing clients abroad |
| Recently arrived and wondering about the special regime | the Beckham regime for the self-employed |
| Behind on something | the surcharge calculator, and then talk to somebody |
Beyond the guides
Several subjects are big enough to have their own page rather than a guide. The overall picture for a holiday let is in tax on holiday lets in Spain; for a foreign owner, in non-resident property tax and the guide to form 210; for a freelancer, in self-employed tax returns in Spain. Every deadline mentioned anywhere is collected in the Spanish tax calendar.
There are also calculators for the numbers people most often want to check: form 210, the 10 % VAT on a holiday let, the apportionment by nights, the late-filing surcharge and our own monthly fee. They run in your browser and keep nothing.
How they are kept current
Each guide carries the date it was last reviewed and names the rule it relies on, so you can tell whether it predates a change. Spanish tax rules move constantly — a ministerial order changed the form 210 deadlines in June 2026, the Supreme Court annulled the national short-let register in May 2026, and Congress voted down, on 2 October 2026, the decree-law that would have brought holiday stays of up to 30 nights into VAT at 10 %. When something changes we update the figures and the date rather than quietly leaving the old text up.
If you find something here that contradicts what you have been told elsewhere, tell us. Either this is wrong or the other source is, and both are worth knowing. You can write to us directly, and if what you want is for someone to take the whole thing off your desk, the recurring service and what it costs are set out in pricing and how it works.
The vocabulary that trips foreign readers up
Four Spanish words appear throughout and are worth having once. IBI is the annual tax the town hall charges on a property; its bill also shows the valor catastral, the rateable value set by the land registry office, which is what the deemed-income charge is calculated on and is normally far below market value. The comunidad de propietarios is the owners' association that every block of flats has by law, charging a periodic service charge and occasionally voting a one-off levy for works. Autonomo is the status of a person registered as self-employed, which in Spain means two separate registrations, one with the tax office and one with social security. And a modelo is simply a numbered tax form: the 303 for VAT, the 130 for payments on account, the 210 for non-resident income.
Three things worth knowing before you read anything else
Nothing here is decided in advance. Spanish tax is self-assessed: you work out what you owe, you file it, and it is only tested if somebody asks. There is no ruling that blesses your position beforehand. That is why the guides spend as much space on what evidence to keep as on what the rate is.
Two administrations, two sets of rules. Your regional tourism registration and your tax position are entirely separate systems. Being perfect in one proves nothing about the other, and plenty of the owners we meet are immaculate on one side and exposed on the other.
Moving first is almost always cheaper. Across every subject on this page, the same asymmetry appears: correcting something yourself carries a surcharge, while being asked about it carries a penalty several times larger. Where a guide seems to be nagging about deadlines, that is the reason.
A word about what we do not do here
These pages describe how Spanish tax rules work. They do not tell you what to do about your own position, they do not promise an outcome, and where something carries risk they say so once and plainly rather than burying it. That is deliberate: a guide that only contains good news is a sales document, and the point of these is to be useful to somebody who has to make a decision.
How to use these guides
They are written to be read on their own, so there is no order to follow. If something applies to you, the guide says so in its first lines; if it does not, you will know within a paragraph and can stop.
What they are not is advice on your case. A guide describes the rule and the usual traps; it cannot know the dates on your deed, where you were resident the year of the sale, or what your contract says. When those things decide the answer — and they usually do — that is a conversation, not a page.