If you own a place in Spain and never let it out, the question that brings most owners here is whether there is anything to file at all. There is. Spanish law treats a home that is empty or kept for your own use as producing an income, and that notional income is declared on a Modelo 210 every year. For the 2025 tax year the return can be filed at any point during 2026.
What follows is what that return actually asks for, in the order our filing flow asks for it, and where each answer tends to come unstuck.
Yes: an empty property produces taxable imputed income
The AEAT lists this among the cases where the duty to file survives even though nothing has been withheld: "subsiste la obligación de declarar en los siguientes casos… Renta imputada de bienes inmuebles urbanos (sólo personas físicas)". It reaches non-resident individuals who own urban property in Spain that is used for their own purposes or left empty, under article 13.1.h) of the non-resident income tax law.
Two things follow. The tax is not triggered by receiving money — an empty flat receives nothing and is taxed anyway. And it accrues on 31 December of each year (article 27.1.c) of the same law), so every year of ownership is its own separate return.
Work out what you owe with our free calculator — you only pay when you decide to file.
What the calculation needs is your cadastral value
Not the price you paid, not the market value, and not the valor de referencia. The figure the base is built from is the valor catastral, the administrative value the Catastro assigns to the property, and by law it cannot exceed the market value (article 23.2 of the Cadastral Law).
You will find it on your annual IBI (council tax) receipt. If that receipt shows the land (suelo) and the building (construcción) separately, the cadastral value is the two added together. No receipt to hand? The bank record of the IBI payment, a purchase deed with a cadastral certification, or the town hall that issues the bill will all have it.
Why the Catastro can identify your property but not hand over its value
Our flow starts from the address. It resolves the parcel, reads the building's real structure from the Catastro and lets you pick your unit, ending on the 20-character cadastral reference without you having to type it — which matters, because a single parcel can span more than one entrance, and garages and storage rooms appear in the register as units of their own.
The one thing the register will not return is the number the tax is calculated on. Article 51 of the consolidated Cadastral Law classes the cadastral value, and the separate land and building values, as protected data; article 52.1 gives everyone access to their own property's information and to non-protected data only. So the description is public and the value is not, which is why every Modelo 210 tool, ours included, ends up asking you for the IBI receipt.
One coverage note from the same law: it applies across Spain "sin perjuicio de lo previsto en los regímenes forales especiales vigentes en el País Vasco y Navarra" (article 1.2). Our address lookup does not reach those two, and falls back to entering the details by hand.
The 2025 figures: 1.1% or 2% of the cadastral value, then 19% or 24%
Two percentages, applied one after the other.
The first turns the cadastral value into a taxable base. It is 1.1% where the municipality's cadastral values were revised under a general collective valuation procedure that took effect in the tax period itself or in the previous ten tax periods, and 2% for everything else (article 85 of the personal income tax law, which the non-resident rules borrow for this purpose).
The second is your tax rate: 19% for residents of the EU, Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein, 24% for everyone else. The United Kingdom is in neither the EU nor the EEA, so a UK resident pays 24%.
| The 2025 tax year · cadastral value €150,000 · sole owner · owned all year | Values revised within the ten periods (1.1%) | Values not revised in that time (2%) |
|---|---|---|
| Taxable base | €1,650 | €3,000 |
| Tax to pay — EU/EEA resident, 19% | €313.50 | €570.00 |
| Tax to pay — UK resident, 24% | €396.00 | €720.00 |
Leave the revision year blank in our calculator and we apply 2%, the higher of the two. That is a cautious default, not a verdict on your municipality: the year of the last general valuation is published by the Dirección General del Catastro under Ponencias de valores, and it is worth looking up.
Where the AEAT's page and the consolidated law currently differ on 1.1%
This matters only if your municipality's last general revaluation took effect between 2012 and 2014. The AEAT's imputed-income page says that "durante los años 2023, 2024 y 2025" the 1.1% rate applies wherever the revised values took effect from 1 January 2012 onwards — a wider band than the ten-period test. The provision it rests on is the fifty-fifth additional provision of the personal income tax law, and the consolidated text of that provision on the BOE, last updated on 28 February 2026, is headed "durante el período impositivo 2023": the extensions to 2024 and 2025 were made by decree-laws that Congress later repealed. The AEAT's page was last updated on 19 January 2026, before the two 2026 repeals.
We apply the ten-period test, which is the narrower reading of the two. If you are in that 2012–2014 window and filing for the 2024 or 2025 tax year, check your own position before you file.
No expenses come off imputed income, for anybody
The AEAT is blunt about it: "Se tributa por la base imponible antes citada, sin deducir ningún tipo de gasto." Community fees, IBI, insurance, repairs, mortgage interest — none of them reduce an imputed-income base, and that is true of EU/EEA residents as much as anyone else.
The expense deduction people are usually thinking of is a rental-income rule, not an imputed-income one. Our rental income guide covers that side, and Spanish property tax for UK owners after Brexit covers what changed for the UK.
A part-year of ownership is prorated by days
The AEAT states the base as an annual figure that "se reducirá proporcionalmente al número de días, cuando no haya tenido la titularidad durante todo el año, o cuando durante parte del mismo haya estado arrendado". Buy in the middle of the year and you still file for that year — for the days you owned it.
Take the same €150,000 cadastral value at 1.1%, bought on 12 June 2025: that is 203 of the 365 days of 2025, a base of €917.67, and €220.24 of tax for a UK owner at 24%. Our flow asks for the acquisition date and, if you sold, the disposal date, and shows you the day count it is using.
Let the property for part of the year and the year splits between two regimes: rental income for the days it was let, imputed income for the rest. If you are not sure which of those applies to you, the obligations checker settles it in two questions.
Each owner files their own return, and imputed income cannot be grouped
Two rules that between them decide how many returns you are filing.
Ownership. "Si un inmueble es propiedad de un matrimonio o de varias personas, cada una de ellas es un contribuyente independiente que deberá presentar declaraciones separadas", says the AEAT, and the income is attributed to each of them in proportion to their share. A couple owning that same €150,000 flat 50/50 at 1.1%, both UK residents, file two returns for the 2025 tax year: a base of €825 each and €198.00 of tax each.
Grouping. A Modelo 210 can carry several incomes at once, but the AEAT excludes this income type by name: "Salvo en los casos de rentas imputadas de inmuebles y de rentas derivadas de transmisiones de inmuebles, en los demás casos podrán agruparse rentas…". So imputed income is declared property by property — a garage or storage room with its own cadastral reference is a separate property in the register, and it is not folded into the flat's return.
That is why our flow asks how many owners are declaring before it asks anything about money, splits the shares (they must total 100%), and checks for a return already filed for the same taxpayer, property, tax year and type before it lets you submit.
The deadline for 2025 accruals is 31 December 2026
For 2025 and earlier accruals, the filing window is the whole of the following calendar year — so a 2025 return can be filed from 1 January to 31 December 2026. For 2026 accruals onwards the window opens later: 1 April to 31 December of the following year, meaning the 2026 return can first be filed on 1 April 2027 (Orden HAC/623/2026).
One date that is not the deadline and is easy to miss: if you want the AEAT to collect the tax by direct debit, filing has to happen earlier. For 2025 accruals direct debit runs from 1 January to 23 December 2026; for 2026 accruals, from 1 April to 23 December 2027. Miss that and you can still file — you just pay the AEAT yourself.
Our imputed income guide sets the same formula out next to the form fields, and unfamiliar terms are defined in the Spanish tax glossary.
Filing before the AEAT contacts you: a surcharge instead of a penalty
Plenty of owners discover this obligation years after buying. Each tax year is its own return, so earlier years are filed one at a time, and you can start now.
What decides the cost is who moves first. Article 27 of the General Tax Act governs a return filed late on your own initiative — before any formally notified action by the tax authority aimed at recognising, regularising, checking, inspecting or collecting the debt. In that case the charge is 1% plus a further 1% for each complete month of delay, and after twelve months 15% plus late-payment interest. That surcharge "excluirá las sanciones que hubieran podido exigirse" — it excludes the penalties that could otherwise have been demanded.
Once the AEAT has formally notified you of such an action, article 27 no longer applies to what it covers. That, and not the size of any one year's bill, is the reason not to wait.
Filing it with SpainTax
You give us the property details and the figures; we work out the tax, prepare the Modelo 210 and file it with the AEAT. The calculation is always free — you only pay when you decide to file, at a price shown up front on our pricing page.
Start with the free calculator.
This article is general information about how Spanish non-resident imputed income works, not tax advice, and it cannot cover every situation. The figures given are those of the 2025 and 2026 accrual years, as stated above.