Royal Decree-law 26/2026 of 29 September would have applied VAT at 10 % from 1 December 2026 to every let of a furnished home that does not exceed 30 nights for the same tenant, with or without hotel services. Congress rejected it on 2 October and it never took effect. Until that rule returns, with July 2028 as the outer limit under Directive (EU) 2025/516, the checklist below decides the VAT on every stay, and whether, for income tax, you run a business. See the 10 % VAT on holiday lets.
The line itself
Article 20.Uno.23 of the Spanish VAT Act exempts the letting of dwellings. The exemption does not apply where the landlord undertakes to provide services of the kind proper to the hotel industry. That is the whole test, and everything else is interpretation of what "proper to the hotel industry" means.
The workable distinction in practice is when the service happens. Things done before a guest arrives and after they leave are preparation of the property: they do not break the exemption. Things done for the guest during the stay are hotel services: they do. Cleaning the flat between bookings is preparation. Cleaning it on Wednesday while the family is staying is a service.
Service by service
| What you provide | Which side of the line |
|---|---|
| Cleaning before arrival and after departure | Does not break the exemption |
| Clean linen and towels laid out on arrival | Does not break the exemption |
| Key handover, a lockbox or a smart lock | Does not break the exemption |
| Repairing a broken boiler during the stay | Does not break it. Maintaining the property is the landlord's obligation, not a hotel service |
| Information about the area, a welcome pack, a bottle of wine | Does not break it, unless it amounts to a genuine reception service |
| Cleaning during the stay, scheduled or on request | Breaks it |
| Changing linen or towels mid-stay | Breaks it |
| Reception, concierge or staff available on the premises | Breaks it |
| Breakfast, meals, room service | Breaks it |
| Laundry of guests' own clothes | Breaks it |
Where the exemption is broken the letting becomes subject to VAT at the reduced rate applicable to accommodation, with a quarterly return, full registers and the right to deduct the VAT on your costs. Where it is not, no VAT is charged on the rent and none of the VAT on your costs is recoverable. Once the short-stay rule arrives, stays of up to 30 nights will be at 10 % in any case and the table will go on deciding longer lets.
The checklist, in order
- Read your own listing as a guest would. Whatever you promise there, you have undertaken to provide. A listing advertising a mid-stay clean has answered the question, whatever your intentions were.
- Read your contract with the management company. If a manager provides services to your guests in your name, you provide them. Outsourcing changes who does the work, not who is supplying it.
- Take each service in turn and ask when it happens. Before arrival, after departure, or during. That single question resolves most cases.
- Ask whether it is offered or merely possible. A cleaner whose phone number is on the fridge, whom the guest may engage and pay directly, is not you supplying a service. A clean included in the price, or charged on your invoice, is.
- Look at the bookings, not the theory. Stays of two or three nights with no mid-stay service look like letting. A property with staff on site, daily housekeeping and a check-in desk does not, whatever the regional licence calls it.
- Write down your conclusion, dated, with the reasons. Keep it with the listing as it stood and the manager's contract. If the question is ever raised three years later, a contemporaneous note of the facts is worth a great deal more than a reconstruction.
Being registered as tourist accommodation in a regional register, or holding a licence that uses the word hotel or apartment, does not settle the VAT question. Neither does the activity code on your census registration, although an inconsistency between the code and the reality is exactly the kind of thing that prompts a review. VAT follows what is actually supplied.
The commission trap, which is separate and applies either way
Whatever side of the line you fall on, the commission you pay to a platform established elsewhere in the EU carries Spanish VAT that you must account for yourself under the reverse charge. On exempt lets you owe it and cannot deduct it. On lets with hotel services, and on short stays once they carry 10 %, you owe it and can. Either way it requires an EU VAT number, a quarterly return and an EC sales list, as set out in joining the EU VAT register. This is the obligation most often missing from the files we take over.
What happens if you have it wrong
If you have been charging no VAT while genuinely providing hotel services, the output tax is due, with interest, and the deduction of input tax has to be reconstructed to arrive at the real figure. The same will hold for stays of up to 30 nights left uncharged once their VAT is in force. Corrected voluntarily, it stays in surcharge territory, 1 % plus 1 % per complete month, 15 % and interest past a year. Found first, it is penalties.
If you have been charging VAT on a let that is genuinely exempt, the position is worse than it sounds: VAT charged has to be paid over, deductions taken on exempt activity are disallowed, and correcting invoices issued to guests who have long gone home is close to impossible.
Two cases that look alike and are not
The owner with a manager. A management company handles the keys, the cleaning between guests and the occasional emergency, and invoices the owner a percentage. Nothing is supplied to the guest during the stay. That is an exempt letting with an outsourced operation, whatever the length of the stay, until short stays are taxed at 10 % in their own right; and the manager's own invoice to the owner is a cost, subject to VAT in the ordinary way.
The owner in an aparthotel. The same flat sits in a building with a reception desk, daily housekeeping available and a breakfast service, and the operator markets the units together. Here services proper to the hotel trade are being supplied during the stay, and the question is only who is supplying them and under what contract. The answer determines both the VAT treatment and, frequently, whether the owner is receiving rent from an operator rather than income from guests. They are different tax positions arising from buildings that look identical from the street.
And if you genuinely have a choice
A small number of owners are designing the service from scratch and can decide which business they are in. That is a commercial decision with a tax consequence, not a tax trick, and the arithmetic — how much input VAT you have, what a furnishing or renovation programme would recover, what the administrative load costs — is worked through in exempt or with hotel services. What nobody should do is declare hotel services that do not exist in order to recover VAT on a renovation. That is not planning; it is a false declaration, and the person signing it is you.
The background — the 10 % VAT on stays of up to 30 nights, whose start date is now uncertain, and the exemption that applies in the meantime — is on our holiday let tax page.
Nuria and Pablo: identical flats in Conil, different VAT
Nuria and her brother Pablo own two identical flats in the same building in Conil de la Frontera. Nuria leaves hers clean before each arrival, hands over the keys through a lockbox and does not reappear until departure. Pablo, to stand out on the platform, offers "a mid-stay clean and fresh sheets every three days" and a breakfast left in the fridge. From the street they are the same. For VAT they are not: Nuria's letting is exempt, and Pablo's supplies services typical of the hotel trade. If he has not declared it that way, what he is exposed to is VAT on all his income since that listing went up.
| Nuria | Pablo | |
|---|---|---|
| During the stay | Nothing: keys by lockbox, clean before and after | Mid-stay clean, linen every three days, breakfast |
| VAT on the rent | Exempt | Taxable at 10 % |
| Quarterly VAT return and annual summary | Only for the platform commission | Yes, for everything |
| VAT on costs | Not recoverable | Recoverable |
Pablo took the mid-stay clean and the breakfast off his listing, and regularised the VAT for the eighteen months during which he had offered them.
Bringing the census into line
If working through the six questions shows that your census entry does not describe what you actually do, correct it with a 036 modification, as set out in registering a holiday let with the tax office. Doing it before a review begins is very different from doing it after.
The surcharge on a voluntary correction also carries a 25 % reduction if it is paid within the period given — one more reason to be the one who moves first.
Finally, the arithmetic of both columns will change the day stays of up to 30 nights carry 10 % VAT, hotel services or not, because the VAT on costs will then be deductible for Nuria too. That day is not fixed, since the decree naming it was voted down in Congress, and it can fall no later than July 2028. More in hotel services and VAT and on the holiday let tax page.