Holiday lets in Manilva: registration and tax

The Andalusian register

The property is declared to the Consejería de Turismo of the Junta de Andalucía, the regional government, by responsible declaration, and receives a code from the Registro de Turismo de Andalucía. Manilva is in the province of Málaga, so the code reads VUT/MA/00000 and it belongs in your advertisements. Supreme Court judgment 620/2026 removed the state-wide single register without affecting the regional one.

Your residence decides the return

Your position	What you file
Resident in Spain	The profit goes into your income tax return
Self-employed for this activity	Modelo 130 and 303 each quarter, Modelo 390 in January
Non-resident	Modelo 210 per property and per owner: rent by year, imputed income for the rest

Nineteen per cent with costs deductible if you live in the European Union, Iceland, Norway or Liechtenstein; 24 % on gross rent, no deductions, if you live anywhere else. In a municipality where the great majority of owners are non-resident, that sentence is the whole tax policy.

VAT: exempt today, and a calendar nobody can print yet

A home let without hotel services is exempt under Article 20.Uno.23 of the VAT Act. For stays of up to 30 nights that was due to end on 1 December 2026, when Royal Decree-law 26/2026 would have applied the reduced rate of 10 %, as for hotels; Congress voted the decree down on 2 October. A Manilva let without hotel services therefore stays exempt, whatever its length.

The calendar was what caught people out, and for the moment there is none. The outer limit is July 2028, under Directive (EU) 2025/516; the real start depends on a law that has not been written. When it comes you will need an invoice for every stay and a record of the invoices you have received. The commission paid to Airbnb, invoiced from Ireland, or to Booking, invoiced from the Netherlands, requires the ROI register and Modelo 349 already; the VAT you self-account on it becomes deductible only once the rent is taxed.

Short season, sharp arithmetic

Costs are deducted in proportion to nights let, and in a destination working perhaps ten or twelve weeks a year that proportion is small. Community fees of 1,800 € a year on a property let for 70 nights contribute roughly a fifth of themselves to the return; the rest is simply not deductible. The same logic applies to IBI, insurance, the waste charge, supplies, mortgage interest and depreciation.

Two consequences follow. First, extending the season by even three weeks improves the tax result more than most owners expect, because it raises the deduction ratio across every cost line. Second, the nights have to be documented: platform statements, contracts and the guest register are what support the proportion you claim.

Communities, and what the town hall charges

Since 2025 a community of owners can limit or condition tourist letting with three fifths of the votes. Manilva blocks are often split between holiday flats and a small core of permanent residents, and the meetings are frequently held in low season when the non-resident owners are not there. Delegating your vote is not a formality here; it is the difference between being in the room and being told afterwards.

Waste tariffs and the planning treatment of tourist properties are municipal, they vary and they change. We read the ordinance applying to your address rather than assuming Manilva does what its neighbours do.

Small municipality, same obligations

There is a persistent belief that a modest flat in a small town attracts less attention than a villa on the Golden Mile. It does not, because the checking is automated. The platforms report bookings, the cadastre reports ownership and values, the utilities report supply contracts, and the tourism register reports the code attached to your address. A flat let for nine weeks a year in Manilva appears in those data sets exactly as a Marbella villa does, and the discrepancy that triggers a letter is a mismatch between sources, not a threshold of size. The only difference size makes is to the amount at stake once the letter arrives. Compliance here is cheap precisely because the file is simple; it is the years of silence that turn a simple file into an expensive one.

The calendar a non-resident owner lives by

Manilva files are almost all Modelo 210 files, so the deadlines matter more than usual. Rental income is now grouped and declared annually, and the imputed income for the days the property stood at your disposal is declared in the year following the one it relates to. Different deadlines have applied to different concepts over recent years, and they have changed more than once, which is why we keep the calendar rather than asking owners to. What does not change is the consequence of being late: if you come forward yourself before the tax office writes to you, the cost is a surcharge that scales with the delay; if you wait for their letter, it becomes a penalty, and the difference between the two on a few years of unfiled returns is substantial. Owners who have let for several years without filing are better served by a voluntary catch-up than by hoping, and it is a common enough situation here that nobody should feel singular about it.

What we take off your desk

We handle the recurring returns, work out the apportionment honestly, keep the imputed income correct for the idle months, and tell you when a municipal bill looks wrong. From 60 € a month plus VAT, and no tie-in. Pricing · Tell us about the property.

Richard from Bristol: a marina-view flat and five years of nothing filed

A two-bedroom apartment looking over the Duquesa marina, bought in 2016 and let about 130 nights a year at 120 € through a key-holder who keeps 20 %. Richard believed that because the key-holder gave him receipts, «it was all taken care of». It was not: a key-holder is paid to handle keys and cleaners, not to file the owner's taxes. A non-resident letting in Spain owes a Modelo 210 for each year's rent and another for the imputed income on the days the flat was at their disposal. If those were never filed, they can still be put right.

What a five-year catch-up actually takes

Living outside the EU, Richard cannot deduct costs, which makes the reconstruction simpler than for an Irish or Dutch owner: all that is needed is each year's gross income and days let, drawn from the key-holder's receipts, the platform statements and the bank. For imputed income, each year's cadastral value, which is printed on the IBI bill. From that, one return for the rent and one for the imputed income for every year not yet time-barred. Limitation runs four years from the end of each filing period, so there is no need to go back indefinitely.

A married couple doubles it: five years, two owners and two returns a year make twenty forms. It sounds a lot, but they are filed together. Filed voluntarily, before any letter, each carries a surcharge of 1 % to 15 % depending on its own delay, plus interest once past a year, and no penalty. If the tax office moves first, the penalty starts, before reductions, at 50 % of the unpaid tax, with interest added. The steps are in catching up a late Modelo 210 and the surcharge in the late filing calculator.

Some guests hand the key-holder cash on arrival for the final clean, an extra night or a cot. Even if that money never reaches your account, it is income of your flat and belongs on the return. Ask for a monthly summary of everything collected by any means, not only what is transferred to you.

Holiday let or a year-round tenant? Richard's figures

Since Brexit Richard pays 24 % on gross income with nothing deducted, which transforms the comparison with letting to a local resident for the whole year, because the tourist model carries costs he can never set against tax:

Per year	Tourist (130 nights at 120 €)	Long let (850 € a month)
Income	15,600.00 €	10,200.00 €
Key-holder (20 %)	−3,120.00 €	—
Cleaning	−1,800.00 €	—
Utilities	−1,600.00 €	Paid by the tenant
Community, IBI and insurance	−2,200.00 €	−2,200.00 €
Tax on the rent (24 % of gross)	−3,744.00 €	−2,448.00 €
Imputed income, 235 idle days (24 %)	−144.48 €	None: let all year
What he keeps	2,991.52 €	5,552.00 €

The imputed figure is 85,000 € of cadastral value × 1.1 % × 235 / 365 = 601.99 €, taxed at 24 %. On these numbers the holiday let leaves Richard less money and more work. That will not always hold: it depends on occupancy, price and his own use of the flat, since a long-term tenant rules out his holidays there. Two further points: the reduction for letting someone's permanent home exists only in a resident's Spanish income tax, so a non-resident never gets it; and a lease to a resident falls under the Urban Leases Act (Ley de Arrendamientos Urbanos) with minimum durations worth knowing before signing.

Winter golfers at the Duquesa

Manilva has a second season many owners ignore: northern European golfers wanting a flat by the week or the month between November and March, close to the courses. For an owner paying 24 %, those weeks are taxed on the gross like August ones, but they shrink the imputed days and generate little cleaning. If the holiday let is going to pay, it is usually by filling the winter, not by raising summer prices.

Living here, working across the frontier in Gibraltar

Some owners live in Manilva and work in Gibraltar. If they spend most of the year in Spain or have their life here, they are Spanish tax residents and a second property's rent goes into their Spanish income tax, not Modelo 210. The 2019 tax agreement between Spain and the United Kingdom concerning Gibraltar has its own tie-break rules for doubtful residence cases. What Gibraltar law says is not for us to assess; what Spanish law says is, and it is what governs here.