Holiday lets in Málaga: registration and tax

The register is regional, not municipal

A property let to tourists in Andalusia is entered in the Registro de Turismo de Andalucía by filing a responsible declaration (declaración responsable) with the Consejería de Turismo of the Junta de Andalucía, the regional government. The register answers with a code, and in the province of Málaga it reads VUT/MA/00000. That code is not a formality you file away: every listing you publish has to carry it, and the platforms increasingly refuse to show a property without one.

Judgment 620/2026 of the Tribunal Supremo, the Spanish Supreme Court, struck down the single state-wide register. It left the Andalusian one standing. Owners sometimes read the headline and conclude that nothing is required any more; the opposite is true, because the regional register is now the only one there is.

Which return is yours depends on where you live

The flat is in Málaga either way. What decides the paperwork is your own tax residence.

Your position	What you file
You are tax resident in Spain	The rental profit goes into your personal income tax return, net of the costs you can prove
You are registered as self-employed for this activity	Modelo 130 and Modelo 303 every quarter, plus the annual Modelo 390 in January
You are not resident in Spain	One Modelo 210 per property and per owner: rental income, and imputed income for the days the property stood at your disposal

For a non-resident the rate is 19 % if you live in the European Union, Iceland, Norway or Liechtenstein, and 24 % otherwise. The difference is not only the rate. At 19 % you deduct the running costs of the letting; at 24 % you are taxed on the gross rent with nothing taken off, which in a city with year-round bookings and real running costs is a punishing gap.

VAT: exempt for now, with the 10 % on short stays still to come

Royal Decree-law 26/2026 of 29 September, published the next day in the BOE, Spain's official gazette, set out to take holiday lets out of the exemption in Article 20.Uno.23 of the Spanish VAT Act. A furnished home let to the same tenant for 30 nights or fewer would have carried VAT at the reduced rate of 10 %, the same rate a hotel charges, from 1 December 2026. Lets of more than 30 nights without hotel services were left exempt, and so was the home the owner habitually lives in. Congress voted the decree-law down on 2 October 2026, so none of it ever applied.

For a city flat let by the night the consequences no longer arrive on a fixed date. The one firm point is the outer limit: July 2028, under Directive (EU) 2025/516. When the Spanish rule comes back it will mean an update to your registration on Modelo 036, VAT inside every booking and a quarterly Modelo 303; until then a flat let without hotel services stays exempt. The full note on holiday let tax walks through the sequence, and our guide to the 10 % VAT on holiday lets covers the decree itself.

The gap we most often found when taking over a file still matters: the commission Airbnb charges from Ireland and Booking from the Netherlands is a service received from another member state. Under the reverse charge you account for the Spanish VAT on it yourself, which means an EU VAT number on the ROI register and a Modelo 349. While your letting is exempt, the VAT you self-charge on that commission is a cost; it becomes deductible on the same return once the rent itself carries VAT.

A city that lets twelve months a year

On the coast a holiday flat earns for four or five months and sleeps for the rest. Málaga does not behave that way. Museums, a cruise terminal, conferences and a mild January keep occupancy high enough that the apportionment of costs stops being an afterthought.

That matters because expenses are deducted in proportion to the nights actually let. Community fees, the IBI property tax, insurance, the rubbish charge, interest on the mortgage and the depreciation of the building are all apportioned by days. An owner letting 240 nights takes roughly two thirds of them; an owner letting 80 nights takes under a quarter, and the rest is lost. Keeping an honest calendar of occupied nights is worth more, in euros, than most of the clever ideas we get asked about.

The community of owners, and the bills the city sends

Since 2025 a community of owners can limit or condition tourist letting in the building with a three-fifths majority. In a central Málaga block where most neighbours live there permanently and only two or three flats are let, that majority is reachable, and it is increasingly being reached. Before buying, and before spending on a refurbishment, read the statutes and the minutes of the last few general meetings rather than the estate agent's summary.

On local charges, each city hall treats a tourist property in its own way, particularly in the waste ordinance, where some tariffs put holiday lets closer to hotels than to homes. Read the bill rather than paying it blind; a charge that is wrong is challenged, and the window for doing so is short. We check the ordinance that applies to your address case by case, because it is municipal and it changes.

And when you sell it

A city flat that has been let changes hands more often than a family villa, so it is worth knowing the sequence in advance. If the seller is not resident in Spain, the buyer withholds 3 % of the price and pays it over on Modelo 211; that 3 % is a payment on account, not the tax, and where the real gain is smaller the difference is reclaimed. The municipal capital gains tax on the increase in land value is a separate bill with two possible methods of calculation, and you pay the lower of them. Having let the property does not by itself change either figure, but the records you kept while letting — the purchase deed, the refurbishment invoices, the depreciation actually deducted — are what allow the gain to be computed correctly. Depreciation taken while letting reduces the acquisition value when you sell, which is a detail owners discover late and dislike. It is not a reason to skip the deduction; it is a reason to keep the file in order from the first year.

What we actually do

We run the recurring tax compliance of owners in Málaga and across the province: we read your invoices and statements, apportion the costs against the nights you let, prepare the return, show you the draft, and file it. From 60 € a month plus VAT, and no tie-in. The pricing page sets out where the figure moves, and you can tell us about your case in two minutes.

Lucía and Andrés: a mortgaged walk-up in Trinidad, costed line by line

A couple living in Madrid bought a two-bedroom third floor without a lift in the Trinidad district in 2021, fifteen minutes on foot from the historic centre. They did not buy it to spend summers in: they bought it because city-break demand in Málaga barely pauses, with bank holidays, conferences, cruise calls and winter escapes. Last year it was occupied for 280 nights, mostly in stays of two or three days. Both are Spanish tax residents, so each puts half of the result into their own income tax return (the IRPF). We work it out for the whole flat and then split it:

Item (2026)	Annual amount	Deductible share
Income: 280 nights at 95 €	26,600 €	—
Platform commission (15 %)	3,990 €	All of it: 3,990 €
Cleaning and laundry (95 stays at 45 €)	4,275 €	All of it: 4,275 €
Mortgage interest	4,200 €	By days let: 11,603 × 280 / 365 = 8,900.93 €
Depreciation (3 % of 116,100 € of building value)	3,483 €
Utilities and internet	2,100 €
Community fees	900 €
IBI	620 €
Insurance	300 €
Net rental income	26,600 − 3,990 − 4,275 − 8,900.93 = 9,434.07 €

Three remarks on that table. Depreciation starts from the price paid plus the costs of buying, 258,000 € here, and applies the building percentage printed on the IBI bill; in the centre the land is expensive, so that percentage tends to be low, 45 % in this case. Interest and repairs together may not exceed the income the flat produced, although any excess is carried forward for four years. And the 85 days the flat stood empty create imputed income: 110,000 € of cadastral value × 1.1 % × 85 / 365 = 281.78 €.

Taking 37 % as the top rate reached by their income, the flat adds (9,434.07 + 281.78) × 37 % = 3,594.86 € to the couple's combined bill. There is no reduction to soften it: the relief for letting a tenant's permanent home does not reach tourist or seasonal lets. The day-count criteria are in our guide to apportioning by days let.

The city-centre manager who charges 20 % plus VAT

Plenty of owners in the capital hand the flat to a management firm that takes 20 % to 25 % of turnover and adds 21 % VAT on top. While the letting itself is exempt, that VAT cannot be recovered in any return; it is simply a cost, and it will become deductible input VAT only once short stays are taxed at 10 %, on a date left open since Congress voted the decree down in October 2026. Had Lucía and Andrés used a manager at 20 % in an exempt year, the fee would be 5,320 € and the VAT 1,117.20 €, 6,437.20 € in all, deductible in full against the rent because it only exists because of the letting. An advertised 20 % is, in practice, 24.2 %.

Two checks worth making with any manager: that invoices name both owners with their tax numbers, not only the one who signed the contract; and that the cleaning fee paid by guests appears as income on the statement even if the manager keeps it to pay staff. For the tax office it is part of the rent, and its cost is the expense that offsets it.

Staying tourist, going seasonal, or letting long term

Planning pressure has many owners here weighing a change of model. A mid-length let to university students, rotating hospital doctors or posted workers is not a tourist let, stays off the Junta's register and is VAT-exempt, but it earns no income tax reduction either, and the contract must reflect a genuine temporary reason. A long let as the tenant's home does qualify for the reduction, which for contracts signed from 26 May 2023 is 50 % as a general rule, higher in specific cases. The figures side by side are in tourist or seasonal letting.