The Spanish tax bill that arrives even if you never visit your own house
You paid for the house. You pay the community fees. Spain still sends you a tax bill for a rent you never charged anyone — because you didn't need to earn money from it to owe tax on it.
Pedro Torres6 min read
Most of what's expensive about buying in Spain happens once: the tax on the purchase, the notary, the registry. This one doesn't happen once. It happens every single year, for as long as you own the house.
And it applies even if the property sits empty 50 weeks a year, you never let anyone stay in it, and you earned precisely nothing from it. Spain taxes you on an income it decides you should have earned, not on one you actually did.
Spain invents a rent you never charged, and taxes you on it
If you're a non-resident who owns a Spanish property and doesn't rent it out, the law treats you as if you received a notional income from simply having it available for your own use. It's called renta imputada — imputed income — and it exists purely on paper, win or lose, used or not.
| Situation | Imputed income |
|---|---|
| Catastral value not revised in the last 10 tax years | 2% of the catastral value, per year |
| Catastral value revised in the last 10 tax years | 1.1% of the catastral value, per year |
Ley 35/2006, art. 85.1. The catastral value is a government-assigned figure on your IBI bill — not the price you paid.
Since Brexit, you pay more tax on it than an EU neighbour does
That notional income is then taxed at a flat rate — no allowances, no brackets. For residents of the EU or EEA, it is 19%. For everyone else, including, since the end of the Brexit transition, British owners, it is 24%. Same house, same imputed income, higher tax — purely because of a passport.
On a €250,000 holiday home with a €120,000 catastral value, that's €2,640 of notional income a year (at 2%), taxed at 24% — around €634 a year, for a property that earned you nothing. A French or German owner with the identical house pays roughly €502 for the same thing.
This is on top of the annual town hall bill, not instead of it
This national tax runs alongside a separate, local one — IBI, the annual property tax every town hall charges every owner, resident or not. IBI is set and billed locally, so the rate differs by municipality; the imputed-income tax above is a different bill, from the national tax agency, that you calculate and file yourself.
Nobody sends you this bill either — you file it yourself, within a set window
Like the purchase tax, this is self-assessed: a yearly filing called Modelo 210, with no invoice and no reminder. For income accrued from 2026 onward, the filing window runs from 1 April to 31 December of the following year — so a tax year 2026 filing is made between April and December 2027. Pay by direct debit online and the cut-off moves slightly earlier, to 23 December.
If you rent the property out at any point in the year, this particular regime doesn't apply to those months — rental income has its own rules and its own quarterly filing dates. The imputed-income tax above is specifically for the time the property sits there for your own, unpaid use.
None of this is a penalty for doing something wrong. It's simply what ownership costs in Spain every year, on top of the community fees and insurance you already expected — and it's rarely on the list anyone hands a buyer before they sign.
Do I pay Spanish tax on a property I own but never rent out?
Yes. Spain taxes non-residents on a notional 'imputed income' for simply having the property available for your own use — 2% of its catastral value per year (1.1% if that value was recently revised), even with zero rental income.
What tax rate do UK owners pay on Spanish property income since Brexit?
24%, the general non-resident rate — up from the 19% rate that still applies to EU and EEA residents. The UK stopped qualifying for the lower rate once the Brexit transition period ended.
What is Modelo 210 and when do I have to file it?
It's the self-assessed form non-residents use to declare Spanish property income, including imputed income on an unrented property. For income accrued from 2026 onward, it is filed between 1 April and 31 December of the following year.