The 10 % VAT on tourist stays of up to 30 nights now has an uncertain start date: Congress voted the decree down on 2 October 2026, and the outer limit is July 2028. This is what applies meanwhile: VAT, income tax, platform commissions and the registrations.

The 10 % VAT on short stays: what the decree said and where it stands

Royal Decree-law 26/2026 of 29 September, published in the BOE (Spain's official gazette) on 30 September, rewrote the letting exemption in Article 20.Uno.23 of the Spanish VAT Act. A furnished home let to the same tenant for no more than 30 nights was to stop being exempt and carry VAT at the reduced rate of 10 %, the same as hotels, from 1 December 2026; stays of more than 30 nights without hotel-type services stayed exempt, and so did the home in which the landlord has their habitual residence. On 2 October 2026 Congress voted it down, by 178 votes to 172, so the decree lapses and its date goes with it. The start date is now uncertain; the outer limit comes from Directive (EU) 2025/516, which treats short-term accommodation letting like the hotel sector and provides for its regime from 1 July 2028. Until a new rule arrives, a holiday let without hotel-type services remains exempt, whether the owner is resident in Spain or not.

When it does come in, you will register for VAT on Modelo 036, invoice each stay, file Modelo 303 every quarter and deduct the VAT on your costs. Today you still declare the income (personal income tax if you are resident, Modelo 210 if not) and deal with platform commissions, which already mean a Modelo 303 of their own. The detail is in our guide to the 10 % VAT on holiday lets.

Where the hotel-services line sits, and why it still decides

The line below decides today whether a holiday let is exempt or taxed at 10 %, short stays included. The rejected decree would have made it irrelevant for stays of up to 30 nights, and that is the direction the directive points in. It also bears on whether the income is property income or a business.

Does not break the exemption	Does
Cleaning before arrival and after departure	Cleaning during the stay
Fresh linen on arrival	Changing linen during the stay
Key handover or smart lock	Reception or concierge
Fixing a fault during the stay	Breakfast, meals, laundry service

Cross that line, on a stay of any length, and the letting is subject to VAT at 10 % with quarterly returns.

The underlying idea is worth holding on to, because it decides the borderline cases better than any list can. What the exemption asks is whether you are letting a property or running an accommodation business. Work done before the guest arrives and after the guest leaves is preparing the property. Work done for the guest while the guest is in it is a service, and services of that kind are what hotels sell.

Two practical points follow. First, offering a service and providing it are the same thing for these purposes: advertising a mid-stay clean has consequences whether or not anybody books it. Second, the line is not crossed by services someone else supplies independently — a guest who books a cleaner of their own, directly and on their own account, is not buying anything from you. Where it becomes genuinely difficult is with packages, keyholder arrangements and buildings that provide a reception for everyone, and those are cases to look at one at a time rather than to decide from a table.

The upside when it comes: input VAT becomes deductible

While holiday lets are exempt, there is a trap inside the exemption: a business whose supplies are exempt has no right to deduct the VAT it is charged, so the Spanish VAT on the furniture, the refurbishment, the appliances, the utilities and the letting agent's fee is simply part of the cost of the property. Once short stays are taxed, that VAT becomes recoverable, provided each invoice is made out to you with your tax number. If the same property also takes lets of more than 30 nights, which would remain exempt, the VAT on shared costs is recovered only in proportion.

That also changes the arithmetic of the reverse charge described below. Self-charging VAT on a foreign commission and deducting it in the same return nets to nothing for a taxed holiday let. For an exempt letting, which is the position today unless you provide hotel-type services, it does not: the VAT is declared and paid, and that is the end of it. The obligation is the same, the cash consequence is not.

Beyond tax: the three registrations that hang over a holiday let

None of these is our line of work, but they arrive together and they tend to surface in the same letter, so it is worth knowing they exist.

• The regional tourism registration. Letting to tourists is regulated by each autonomous region, and operating without the registration its rules require is a matter for the regional authority, with its own penalties, entirely separate from anything the tax office does.
• The single rental registry number. Since mid-2025 a registration number obtained through the land registry system is required for a property to be advertised on the booking platforms, which are obliged to display it and to withdraw listings without it.
• Traveller registration. Guest data has to be collected and transmitted to the authorities for each stay, under rules that were tightened at the end of 2024.

And your income is no longer something the tax office has to come looking for. Booking platforms report their hosts' earnings to the tax authorities under the European exchange rules, which is why so many enquiries now open with a figure the recipient did not know anyone had.

Only the nights you let: apportioning the costs

Where costs are deductible at all, they are deductible in proportion to the days the property was actually let, not for the whole year. The days in between are not a business cost: they are the days that produce imputed income instead.

The apportionment applies to everything that relates to the property as a whole — the IBI, the community charge, the insurance, the utilities, the mortgage interest, the depreciation of the building at the statutory annual percentage of the construction value, excluding the land. Costs that belong to a specific let, such as the cleaning between two bookings or the commission on one reservation, are not apportioned: they are deducted in full, because they exist only because that booking existed.

Two reductions people expect and do not get: the reduction available for letting a property as somebody's home does not apply to holiday lets, and there is no allowance for the weeks you used the property yourself. If you are resident in Spain, the income is normally property income rather than business income; it only becomes a business activity if you employ someone full time for it, or if you have crossed into hotel services.

Your case, in two minutes

What applies to your holiday let, in two minutes

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Platform commissions: you account for the VAT

Airbnb invoices from Ireland and Booking from the Netherlands. Under the reverse charge, the Spanish VAT on their commission is accounted for by you, which means registering for an EU VAT number (ROI/VIES) and filing Modelo 349. This applies today, with the letting exempt, and it is the obligation we most often find unmet. The difference the 10 % VAT will make is that the VAT on the commission becomes deductible on the same return.

The 10 % VAT: what to do now

Royal Decree-law 26/2026 would have applied its VAT measure from 1 December 2026, but Congress voted it down on 2 October 2026. No new date has been set; the outer limit is July 2028, under Directive (EU) 2025/516. Our system treats the VAT regime as a setting on your file, so the returns will calculate at 10 % from whatever date the new rule fixes. Meanwhile we keep filing what is already due today: the Modelo 303 for the reverse charge on platform commissions, and the Modelo 349.

The decision worth having ready is price. If you hold your rates once the VAT applies, they will include it: of every 110 € a guest pays, 10 € is tax. If you raise them by 10 %, the guest bears it. Bookings taken before the start date for later stays will deserve a separate look when that date is known; keep them listed by payment date and stay date.

The owners' association can now stop you

This is the risk that has overtaken tax as the most common reason a holiday let ends, and it has nothing to do with the tax office.

Since 2025 the Spanish law on horizontal property allows the owners of a building to approve or refuse holiday letting as an activity by a three-fifths majority of owners, who must also represent three fifths of the participation quotas. The same three-fifths majority can instead set conditions, and a separate long-standing rule lets the meeting increase the share of common expenses borne by a property used for tourist letting, up to a statutory ceiling.

What this means in practice is that a single meeting, called for a Tuesday evening in the low season, can change the economics of your property permanently. A few things are worth knowing before that happens:

• The majority is double. Heads and quotas both have to reach three fifths, and in buildings with large commercial units on the ground floor those two counts can point in opposite directions.
• Absent owners are counted in a particular way. How votes not cast at the meeting are treated is a technical question and it decides close votes more often than the debate does.
• Agreements have to be properly minuted and notified to be enforceable, and the period for challenging one is short, which cuts both ways depending on which side of the vote you are on.
• Whether a ban reaches an activity already lawfully being carried on is the live question. The better view is that it does not operate retroactively against a use that was already in place, but this is being decided case by case and we do not present the outcome as settled to anyone.

If your building is heading for that vote, it is a legal matter and not a compliance one, and it is handled as such: reading the deed of division and the statutes as they actually stand, checking how the meeting was convened and how the majority was counted, and advising on whether an agreement is open to challenge. That work is quoted separately from the monthly fee, and we will tell you when we think a fight is not worth having.

So what does a holiday let owner actually have to do?

If you are resident in Spain	If you are not
Declare the income in your annual income tax return, apportioning the costs to the nights let	File Modelo 210 for the rental income, grouped annually, and separately for the imputed days — see non-resident property tax
Register on the census through form 036, and handle the reverse charge on platform commissions	The same reverse-charge obligation applies, and it is the one most often missed
Keep the record of nights let, the bookings and the invoices	Keep the same records, plus a valid certificate of tax residence, which is what fixes your rate

Our part is the recurring half of that list: the census registration, the returns, the reverse charge, the night count and the apportionment, with the figures shown to you before anything is filed. The rest — a licence problem, a meeting of the owners, a letter from the tax office — is legal work, and it is a lawyer who does it.