The obligation most non-resident owners have never heard of, and the one that quietly accumulates year after year.

How it works

If you are non-resident and own a home in Spain that is available to you, Spanish law imputes an income for the days it is not let. You do not need to use it; availability is enough.

1. Start from the rateable value (valor catastral) on your IBI receipt.
2. Apply 1.1 % if that value was revised in the last ten years, or 2 % if it was not.
3. Apportion by your ownership share and by the days available.
4. Apply your rate: 19 % or 24 %.

Worked example

Rateable value €96,000, not revised, 50 % ownership, French resident, let for 120 nights:

• Days available: 365 − 120 = 245
• Base: 96,000 × 2 % × 50 % × 245/365 = €644.38
• Tax: 644.38 × 19 % = €122.43

The 1.1 % test, and how to settle it

The whole calculation turns on one question: was the rateable value of your property revised, and did that revision take effect within the ten tax periods before the year you are declaring? If it did, the rate is 1.1 %. If it did not, it is 2 %, and your taxable base is almost double for exactly the same flat.

It is a fact, not a judgement, and it is checked in two places. Your IBI receipt shows the rateable value and usually the year of the last collective valuation for the municipality. The Cadastre holds the same information tied to the cadastral reference, which is the twenty-character code that identifies the property. What you cannot do is assume: revisions are carried out municipality by municipality, so two owners in neighbouring towns, with identical flats bought the same year, can sit on different rates.

One consequence people find counter-intuitive is that a revision usually raises the rateable value and at the same time lowers the percentage applied to it. Whether the bill goes up or down depends on which of the two moved further, so a revaluation letter from the town hall is not automatically bad news for this tax, even though it is rarely good news for the IBI.

Two apportionments, applied one after the other

The annual figure is almost never the figure you owe, because two fractions cut into it.

By ownership share. Each owner declares their own percentage, taken from the deed. Two spouses who own jointly are two taxpayers with two returns, not one couple with one. Spanish non-resident income tax has no joint filing and no family unit: the concept simply does not exist here, whatever your own country allows.

By days. You are taxed on the days the property was at your disposal. Days that were let are not imputed — they are taxed as rental income instead — so the two figures divide the calendar between them and neither should cover the same night twice. That is why the nights let are the number the whole year hangs on, and why it has to come from the platform statements and the tenancy agreements rather than from memory.

The days on which the property was empty between bookings are the contested part. The administration treats a flat that is not actually let as being at the owner's disposal, and therefore imputes those days. We apply that criterion because it is the one that is applied to you, and where your case allows a different reading we will tell you so in writing rather than quietly file on a view we cannot support.

The year you buy, and the year you sell

Ownership starts and ends on a date, and the imputation follows it to the day.

• The year of purchase. You are imputed from the date of the deed to 31 December, not from 1 January. A completion in October produces a small figure — which is precisely why it is the one most often left unfiled, and why a first enquiry so often covers a year almost nobody thought existed.
• The year of sale. You are imputed up to the date of the deed. The return still has to be filed after you have sold, in the following year, for a property you no longer own. Having left Spain is not a reason not to file it.
• The IBI does not follow the same logic. IBI is charged for the whole year to whoever owned the property on 1 January, and any split between buyer and seller is a private arrangement in the deed. It does not change who declares what for this tax.

Inheritance works the same way: the heirs' ownership dates back to the death, not to the deed of partition, so a year in which an estate was being sorted out is still a year somebody has to declare.

Garages, storage rooms and anything else with its own reference

This is where the arithmetic multiplies quietly. If your parking space or storage room has its own cadastral reference and its own rateable value, it is a separate property: its own imputation, its own calculation and its own return, per owner. If instead it is an annexe recorded under the same reference as the flat, its value is already inside the flat's rateable value and there is nothing separate to file.

Which of the two you have is on the IBI receipt, and it is not a matter of how the estate agent described it. A couple owning a flat plus a garage plus a storage room, all separately referenced, are not filing two returns a year: they are filing six.

Deadline, and the years you may already owe

For 2025, any time up to 31 December 2026. For 2026 onwards, 1 April to 31 December of the following year. The window is long, which is exactly why it gets forgotten.

When it has been forgotten, the exposure is not one year. The Spanish tax authorities have four years to review a return, counted from the end of its filing period, so at any moment there are typically four open years plus the one in progress — each one with its own return, per property and per owner, and each one gathering late-payment interest.

The amounts per year are often modest, which is exactly what makes people leave them. Multiplied by four years, two owners and three cadastral references, they stop being modest. The route back is voluntary disclosure: filing late before anyone asks carries a surcharge that increases with the delay, while filing after a letter has arrived carries a penalty instead. We cannot promise what the tax office will do with any given file, but which of those two regimes applies depends only on who moves first, and that part is within your control.

If you are tax resident in Spain rather than abroad, none of this disappears: the same notional income is declared inside your ordinary income tax return for any property other than your main home. The mechanics differ, the idea does not.