The register, briefly
A tourist property in Andalusia is declared to the Consejería de Turismo through a responsible declaration and receives a code from the Registro de Turismo de Andalucía. In this province it reads VUT/MA/00000 and it has to appear in your listings. The Supreme Court judgment 620/2026 removed the national single register; the Andalusian one was untouched and is still compulsory.
The waste charge deserves a second look
Torremolinos has been billing tourist properties at the tariff written for hotel establishments, which is far above the tariff for a home. It is worth reading the demand rather than paying it on autopilot: an assessment can be challenged, the ordinary route is an application for reconsideration, and the window is one month from notification. Miss it and the amount hardens.
Which tax, and at what rate
Where the flat is tells you nothing about the return. Where you live tells you everything.
| Your position | What you file |
|---|---|
| Resident in Spain | Rental profit in your income tax return, costs deducted in proportion to the nights let |
| Self-employed for this activity | Modelo 130 and 303 each quarter, Modelo 390 in January |
| Non-resident | Modelo 210 for each property and each owner, plus imputed income for the days at your disposal |
Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish owners are inside the 19 % band, being resident in the European Union, Iceland, Norway or Liechtenstein, and can deduct the running costs of the letting. That band is a genuine advantage and it is wasted every time an owner files gross because nobody asked for the invoices. If you are outside that group the rate is 24 % on the gross rent with no deductions at all.
VAT: short stays remain exempt until a new date is set
Article 7 of Royal Decree-law 26/2026 was meant to end the VAT exemption for holiday lets of up to 30 nights and tax them at the reduced rate of 10 %, as hotels are, leaving lets of more than 30 nights exempt under Article 20.Uno.23 of the VAT Act. It never took effect: Congress voted it down on 2 October 2026. Whether or not you clean during the stay is therefore still what changes the rate on a short booking.
The commercial decision is postponed, not cancelled. On the day the 10 % arrives (no date yet; July 2028 at the latest under Directive (EU) 2025/516), a nightly rate left where it was will contain the tax: of 110 € collected, 100 € is yours and 10 € belongs to the tax office. That is worth knowing before you fix prices a season ahead. There is more detail in our note on holiday let tax.
The commission you pay Airbnb or Booking is still a cross-border service on which you self-account for Spanish VAT, with an EU VAT number and Modelo 349. It applies from the first booking, and while the letting is exempt the VAT on it is a cost, not something you recover in a quarterly return.
A twelve-month town, which is unusual
Torremolinos does not empty in October. Northern European visitors who spend the winter here, and a steady flow of weekend traffic from Málaga, keep occupancy alive when the beach does not. For the accounts this is good news: the share of your annual costs that becomes deductible follows the nights actually let, so a property working nine or ten months carries far more of its community fees, IBI, insurance, utilities and building depreciation into the return than one working the summer only.
It also means the calendar needs to be kept properly. Nights let, nights blocked for your own use and nights genuinely empty are three different things for tax, and only the first supports deductions while the others feed imputed income if you are not resident.
The neighbours have a vote
Since 2025 a community of owners can limit or condition tourist letting with three fifths of the votes. Torremolinos is a town of apartment blocks, many of them mixed between permanent residents, long-stay winter visitors and holiday flats, and that mix is exactly where the three-fifths vote gets proposed. Read the statutes and the last minutes before you buy or refurbish, and if a resolution has already been taken, get it looked at before assuming it binds you, because the effect depends on what was voted, how it was recorded and when.
The other municipal variable is planning use. Several Andalusian councils distinguish residential use from lodging use in their plans, with consequences that run separately from your tourism licence. It is an address-by-address question and we check yours rather than generalise.
When a tourist let stops being one
A Torremolinos flat let to the same Scandinavian visitor from November to March is not, in substance, a tourist let, and it should not be reported as one. The tourism register covers short stays marketed to tourists; a season-long stay under an ordinary lease sits outside it and is taxed on its own terms, with different rules on reductions and on what has to be declared. Owners who run both patterns through the same channel and report them identically are creating a mismatch that is easy for the tax office to spot, because the platform data and the rental amounts do not fit the pattern they claim. The fix is dull and effective: decide what each stay actually was before it happens, paper it accordingly, and split the year in the accounts. We do that split as a matter of course for the owners here, since the winter season is what makes this town different from the rest of the coast.
What we do for owners here
Recurring tax compliance, month in and month out: we take the platform statements and the invoices, apportion by nights, prepare the return, show you the draft and file it, and we flag the municipal bills that look wrong. From 60 € a month plus VAT, and no minimum term. Pricing · Tell us about your case.
Ingrid in Gothenburg: a studio two streets back from the Carihuela
A 38 m² studio in a 1970s tower, bought in 2015 with the idea of spending springs there. Today its owner barely uses it. She lists it almost all year and runs it from Sweden with a local cleaner and a key safe by the entrance: young couples at summer weekends, retired northerners from November to March who stretch their stay to three weeks. The result is more than two hundred nights a year, exceptional in most coastal towns and fairly ordinary here. Living in Sweden, Ingrid files no Spanish income tax return; she files Modelo 210 as a non-resident, and being resident in the EU she pays 19 % and may deduct costs. Her 2026:
- Income. 200 nights at an average of 73 €: 14,600 €.
- Costs that exist only because of guests, deductible in full: platform commission at 15 %, 2,190 €, and fifty departure cleans at 40 €, 2,000 €.
- Year-round costs: community 1,200 €, IBI 480 €, insurance 260 €, electricity, water and internet 1,400 €, and depreciation of 2,340 € (3 % of the 78,000 € of her price that the IBI bill assigns to the building). They total 5,680 €, of which only the 200 let days count: 5,680 × 200 / 365 = 3,112.33 €.
- Net income: 14,600 − 2,190 − 2,000 − 3,112.33 = 7,297.67 €. At 19 %, 1,386.56 €.
- Imputed income for the other 165 days: 70,000 € cadastral value × 1.1 % = 770 €, which over 165 days is 348.08 €. At 19 %, 66.14 €. Had the cadastral value not been revised in the last ten years, the percentage would be 2 %.
| 2026 | Owner living in Sweden | Owner living in the UK |
|---|---|---|
| Taxable rent | 7,297.67 € (net of costs) | 14,600 € (gross) |
| Rate | 19 % | 24 % |
| Tax on the letting | 1,386.56 € | 3,504.00 € |
| Tax on the 165 idle days | 66.14 € | 83.54 € |
| Year total | 1,452.70 € | 3,587.54 € |
Over two thousand euros apart, for the same studio and the same nights, purely because of where the owner lives. That is why keeping invoices for Modelo 210 is pointless for someone in Manchester and valuable for someone in Gothenburg. Each deductible line is explained in deductible costs of a tourist let, and you can run your own numbers with the Modelo 210 calculator.
A Nordic owner's filing year
The 2026 rent goes on one annual return filed between 1 and 20 April 2027, or by 15 April if the payment is direct-debited. The imputed income for the idle days is filed between 1 April and 31 December 2027 (23 December with direct debit). Alongside, a Swedish certificate of tax residence proves that the 19 % band applies; without it the tax office can insist on 24 % however obvious the address. How to obtain one is in the residence certificate for Modelo 210.
Breakfast from the bar on the ground floor
In the beachfront towers some owners have agreed with the café downstairs to include breakfast in the nightly price, and in doing so have changed regime without noticing: breakfast is a hotel-type service, and with it the letting becomes subject to VAT at 10 % with quarterly returns. Without the breakfast a short stay is still exempt: the decree that would have taxed it either way never took effect. Where exactly the line runs, with examples, is in hotel-type services and VAT.
When the owner lives in town
Not every owner is foreign. Local residents who inherited a flat in Playamar and let it have no Modelo 210 to file: the profit, with the same costs apportioned by days, and the imputed income for the idle days both go into their own income tax return. If they pay commission to Airbnb or Booking they also need to be on the intra-EU operators register (the ROI) and file Modelo 349, as explained in Modelo 349 for platform commissions.