The local taxes on a house in Spain

Three local taxes, and none of them is the modelo 210

The modelo 210 is a national return filed with the Spanish tax agency. This page is about something else: municipal taxes, which arise from owning a house inside one particular town's boundary and are collected from there. There are three, and they are constantly confused with each other and with the 210.

The first is the Impuesto sobre Bienes Inmuebles, the IBI, which is what a British owner means by council tax: annual, payable by every owner, let or empty, resident or not. The second is the refuse collection charge, the basura, which pays for a service rather than taxing an asset, and which in many towns falls inside the same collection window as the IBI. The third is not annual: the tax on the increase in urban land value, the municipal plusvalía, appears on the day the house changes hands.

None of the three replaces the modelo 210, and the modelo 210 replaces none of them. A non-resident owner with an empty house pays the IBI, pays the refuse charge, and files the annual national return as well.

The first of January decides who pays for the whole year

This is the rule that moves the most money and gets explained the least. The IBI accrues on 1 January: whoever is the taxpayer on that day owes the whole year, and the tax is not split into months.

In a year when the house is sold, the effect is brutal. Sell in February and the entire bill for that year is yours, even though you owned the place for five weeks. Buy in February and, as far as the administration is concerned, you do not owe it, even though you enjoy the house for eleven months. Whatever buyer and seller agree between themselves in the deed is a private arrangement: it does not change who the collecting office chases.

The same date governs inheritances and divorces: the person registered on 1 January is the one who gets the bill, even if the house changed names in March.

The base is the cadastral value, and your town hall does not set it

The IBI is not calculated on what you paid for the house, nor on what it would fetch today, but on the cadastral value assigned and notified by the Catastro. That value combines land and building, and it is revised through exercises that cover a whole municipality, not a single home.

Hence the most expensive confusion of all: two separate administrations, each answering for a different thing. If the recorded surface, use or ownership of your house is wrong, that is corrected at the Catastro, not at the office that bills you. If what is wrong is the bill itself, the complaint goes to whoever issued it. Complaining at the wrong counter stops no deadline: the bill keeps falling due while the file travels.

That is why you will find no percentage here. The rate is approved by each town hall within the limits set by law, and there are seventeen different municipalities among the ones we cover. Any figure we printed would be credible and wrong for almost everyone reading it.

Who actually bills you: in Alicante province, hardly ever the town hall

No general guide tells you this, and it changes everything practical. In the province of Alicante, the IBI, the refuse charge and the business tax of every municipality except Alicante and Xàbia are administered by Suma Gestión Tributaria, an autonomous body of the provincial council. The bill does not come from your town hall, and the office you have to write to or visit is not theirs either.

If your house is in Torrevieja, Orihuela, Rojales, Guardamar, Pilar de la Horadada or any of the Vega Baja villages, your counterpart is Suma. If it is in Xàbia (Jávea) or in the city of Alicante, it is the town hall: those are the two exceptions, and they are precisely why a neighbour's advice sends you to the wrong window. In the Region of Murcia the split is different again, town by town.

The voluntary payment window is published each year by whoever collects. The 2026 one, checked on Suma on 14 September 2026, runs from 27 July to 8 October 2026 and covers the IBI, the business tax and the urban refuse charge in a single window. Direct debit for that window could be set up until 23 September, with the account charged on 1 October. Next year's dates are not the same: they are read from the source at the foot of this page.

The bill that never arrives, and the deadline that runs anyway

This is where a foreign owner loses money without doing anything wrong. The bill is put out for collection and notified through the prescribed channels; the house is shut, the letterbox is full, and the voluntary period closes on its own. Nobody checks whether you read it.

When the voluntary period ends unpaid, the debt moves into enforced collection: the surcharges set out in the General Tax Act are applied, late payment interest accrues and costs are added. If the enforcement notice is ignored too, the next step is the seizure of assets, and in practice that means the Spanish bank account the community fees and the electricity are paid from.

The two defences are dull and they work. The first is to set up a direct debit, done once and valid for following years, so the deadline no longer depends on somebody opening an envelope. The second is to hold, on the administration's file, a notification address that someone actually reads, and an account with funds on the charge date: a returned direct debit leaves the debt exactly where it was.

The municipal plusvalía, which turns up just as you were leaving

On the day the house changes hands the third tax comes into play, and it nearly always arrives as a surprise because nobody expects one from the town hall. The municipal plusvalía taxes the increase in the value of urban land that shows up when the property is transferred.

Who owes it depends on how the transfer happens, and it is the one part worth knowing by heart. In a sale, the taxpayer is the transferor, that is the seller. In a gratuitous transfer such as an inheritance, it is the acquirer, that is the heir. Whoever inherits a house in Spain therefore meets two taxes at once: inheritance tax, which is national or regional, and this plusvalía, which belongs to the town.

No figure here either: the calculation allows two methods and depends on the years of ownership, on the land value and on the coefficients each town hall applies. What is fixed is the order of things — the plusvalía is filed with the town hall, or with the body that runs its taxes, and never with the national tax agency.

What this guide cannot tell you

How much you will pay. Which rate your municipality applies this year. Whether any of the exemptions or reductions each town hall approves apply to you. And next year's exact collection dates, which are not published yet.

All four depend on one specific town and on a bill we have not seen. What we can do, free and in writing, is tell you who collects in your village, what the bill that reached you actually says, and which deadline is in front of you.

Frequently asked questions

Services

The other guides

Official sources

• Suma Gestión Tributaria (Alicante provincial tax office) · what the IBI is
• Suma Gestión Tributaria · the voluntary payment window
• Suma Gestión Tributaria · enforced collection period
• Suma Gestión Tributaria · IIVTNU, the municipal land value tax
• Spanish Land Registry (Catastro) electronic office
• Spanish Official Gazette · consolidated Local Finance Act, RDL 2/2004