Start with the tourism register
Before the first guest, the property is declared to the Consejería de Turismo of the Junta de Andalucía, the regional government, through a responsible declaration (declaración responsable). The Registro de Turismo de Andalucía issues a code of the form VUT/MA/00000, which belongs in every advertisement. The Supreme Court judgment 620/2026 annulled the single state register but not this one, so the Andalusian code remains the document that matters.
A Marbella complication worth naming: in gated urbanisations and beachfront blocks the property is often held through a company, or by several family members, or by a trust structure set up abroad. The register asks who is exploiting the property, and the tax return asks who owns it. Those two answers must be consistent, and in our experience they frequently are not.
Where you live decides the return
| Your position | What you file |
|---|---|
| Resident in Spain | The profit goes into your income tax return, after deducting the costs you can document |
| Self-employed for this activity | Modelo 130 and Modelo 303 quarterly, Modelo 390 in January |
| Non-resident | Modelo 210 per property and per owner, with imputed income for the days you kept it available |
Non-residents pay 19 % if they live in the European Union, Iceland, Norway or Liechtenstein, with costs deductible, and 24 % on gross rent with nothing deductible if they live anywhere else. Since 2021 a British owner falls into the second group, and on a Marbella rental that difference is usually four figures a year. It is the first thing we model when a UK client asks us to look at a file.
VAT: the villa's services still decide the rate
For a few days in autumn 2026 the old Marbella question looked settled. Royal Decree-law 26/2026 put every furnished home let for up to 30 nights at 10 % VAT, whether or not a villa's concierge, daily maid or mid-week linen change came with it; Congress rejected the decree on 2 October 2026, before it had applied to a single booking. So the question is back, for a summer week as much as for a winter let: the letting is exempt if you supply no hotel services, and taxable at 10 % if the management company bundles them into the price, so the management contract still needs reading.
The general 10 % has not gone away. Its start date is simply unknown, with July 2028 as the latest point under Directive (EU) 2025/516. For villas with high running costs the arithmetic will be less painful than the headline suggests: once the letting is taxed, the VAT on pool maintenance, gardening, cleaning and the management fee becomes deductible, provided the invoices are made out to you.
Platform commissions remain a VAT obligation in their own right: Airbnb bills from Ireland, Booking from the Netherlands, and you self-account for the Spanish VAT on that commission through the ROI register and Modelo 349, recovering it on the same Modelo 303 only where the letting itself is taxed.
The tax that follows the value, not the rent
Marbella values reach the level where Spanish wealth tax becomes real for a non-resident, who is taxed on Spanish assets alone. Before you plan the letting, it is worth knowing whether the property on its own crosses the threshold, and whether a mortgage reduces the base. It is the tax most often overlooked by owners who file their rental returns impeccably.
A long season, but not a full year
Golf, a mild spring and an autumn that runs into November stretch the Marbella season well beyond the summer, and an owner here often lets far more nights than one in a purely August destination. That lengthens the share of costs that can be deducted, because expenses are apportioned across the nights genuinely let.
The counterweight is that many Marbella owners keep the property for their own use for weeks at a time. Those weeks are not a gap in the accounts; for a non-resident they generate imputed income, charged on the cadastral value for every day the property stood at your disposal. Owners are often surprised that a month of personal use produces a tax bill. It does, and the calendar you keep is the evidence.
Community rules bite hardest here
Since 2025 a community of owners can restrict or condition tourist letting with three fifths of the votes. Marbella is full of the kind of building where that vote is winnable: large urbanisations with pools, gardens and a permanent resident majority who notice suitcases at midnight. Some communities have gone further and written the restriction into the statutes. Check the statutes, the minutes and any recent resolution before you commit money, and take advice if a resolution has already been passed, because the rules on who it binds are not obvious.
On municipal charges, the waste tariff and the planning classification of your address are both decided by the city hall and both vary. We look at the specific ordinance that applies to your property rather than repeating a figure that may not be yours.
Who owns it, and who inherits it
Two structural questions come up in almost every Marbella file and in almost no inland one. The first is joint ownership: where a property belongs to two or more people, each owner files their own return for their own share, and a single return covering the whole property is wrong even when the money lands in one account. The second is succession. A non-resident who owns Spanish property has Spanish inheritance tax exposure on that property, settled under the rules of the region where it lies, with six months to file from the death. Andalusia is generous to close family and much less so to anyone else, and the gap between the two groups is measured in multiples rather than percentages. If the property is held through a company, or was bought with money from a trust, the analysis is longer and it should be done while there is time to act on the answer. None of this is urgent until it is extremely urgent, which is why we raise it at the start.
What we take on
We handle the recurring tax compliance of Marbella owners: reading the management statements, working out what is deductible against the nights let, preparing the returns and filing them, and telling you when the wealth tax or a sale needs its own answer. From 60 € a month plus VAT, and no tie-in. See the pricing page, or send us the case.
A Nueva Andalucía villa let with daily service: the VAT year of Peter and Susan
A five-bedroom villa belonging to a couple who live in Surrey and only use it at Christmas. A local management company markets it from June to September and for some Easter weeks. Guests pay about 4,800 € a week and get what they expect in Marbella: daily cleaning, fresh towels, someone on call for problems, sometimes a cook on request. None of that is unusual here. What is unusual is an owner who knows those services move the letting out of the VAT exemption and into VAT at 10 %, with the owner, though living in England, registered for VAT and filing Modelo 303 each quarter. Fourteen weeks at 4,800 € before VAT, services included:
| Full year | Base | VAT |
|---|---|---|
| Lettings with hotel-type services (14 weeks) | 67,200 € | 6,720 € charged (10 %) |
| Management fee and services (20 %) | 13,440 € | 2,822.40 € paid (21 %) |
| Pool and garden upkeep | 3,600 € | 756 € paid (21 %) |
| VAT payable for the year | 6,720 − 2,822.40 − 756 = 3,141.60 € |
The upside of being inside VAT is that input VAT becomes deductible, which it never is while the letting is exempt. The downside is four returns a year plus an annual summary, and a manager who must invoice with VAT shown separately and addressed to the right owners. The two regimes compared are in with or without hotel services.
Two Modelo 210s from Surrey
As UK residents, outside the European Economic Area since Brexit, each spouse pays 24 % on gross income with no costs deducted, and each files for their half:
- Income per spouse: 67,200 / 2 = 33,600 €. Tax: 33,600 × 24 % = 8,064 € each.
- Days not let: 365 − 98 = 267. On a cadastral value of 600,000 €, imputed income is 600,000 × 1.1 % × 267 / 365 = 4,827.95 €, or 2,413.97 € each, which at 24 % is 579.35 € apiece.
- Couple's total: 2 × (8,064 + 579.35) = 17,286.70 €.
A neighbouring couple resident in Ireland would pay 19 % and could deduct the management fee, the pool, the IBI and depreciation in proportion to the days let. On a villa of this size that gap usually runs to thousands of euros.
Villas owned through companies
Many properties in the area are held by companies, some set up outside Spain decades ago. A Spanish company books the rent as its own income under corporation tax, and a shareholder using the villa free of charge has tax consequences of its own. A foreign company without a Spanish establishment is taxed as a non-resident on the property's income, and if it sits in a territory classed as non-cooperative it may also owe a special annual levy of 3 % of the cadastral value, declared on Modelo 213, with exemptions that need case-by-case study. Whoever appears as holder on the tourism register, whoever signs with the manager and whoever declares the income must match; when they do not, that is usually where the first letter comes from.
A different set-up altogether is leasing the villa to the operator so that it sublets. The owner then no longer lets to tourists, and a lease to a business is normally subject to VAT rather than exempt. It is a structural choice made with the contract in front of you, not by drift.
Four quarterly returns, one heavy summer
Once inside VAT the calendar is fixed: the first quarter is filed from 1 to 20 April, the second from 1 to 20 July, the third from 1 to 20 October, the fourth by 30 January together with the annual summary, Modelo 390. In Marbella almost all the VAT lands in the third quarter; Easter falls in the first or second depending on the year. Empty winter quarters still need a nil return while you remain registered. With two owners, VAT is not split like income: they usually act as a joint ownership entity (comunidad de bienes) with its own tax number, which charges the VAT, files Modelo 303 and must be the name on the manager's invoices.