Renting your Spanish home to tourists: the licence, the neighbours and your visa

The question arrives in almost the same words every time. A couple has bought, or is about to buy, an apartment near the sea. They will use it for part of the year. For the rest, the obvious thought: put it on a platform, let it cover the community fees and the IBI, treat the whole thing as a mildly profitable holiday home. Is that allowed?

The honest answer is that “allowed” is not one decision. It is four decisions, taken by four bodies that do not consult each other and do not share a file: the region, which runs the tourism register; the town hall, which decides whether that use is even compatible with the planning rules for that street; the community of owners, which since April 2025 has a statutory veto; and, if you are a foreign resident, the permit you live on, which may have something to say about who performs the work.

Getting three of the four is not a partial success. It is an unlawful let with better paperwork. This page walks the four gates in the order they actually bite, explains what the Supreme Court did to the national registration scheme in 2026 and what survived it, and sets out the structure we use for owners who want to keep the option open without putting their non-lucrative residence at risk.

“Clients tell me they have ‘the tourist licence’. In Andalusia there is no licence to have. There is a declaration you file yourself, and it is only valid if the town hall already considers that use lawful at that address. People file the declaration, get a registry number by return, and believe a door has opened. Very often the door was never open, and the number is simply a record of them saying it was.”

The short answer

You may let a Spanish property to visitors if, and only if: the municipality permits tourist accommodation use at that address; you have filed a valid declaración responsable and hold the resulting entry in the regional tourism register; the community of owners has not prohibited the activity and, for a new operation, has expressly approved it by the qualified majority now required; and the person doing the operational work is legally allowed to do it.

That last point is where immigration law walks in. Owning and letting is passive. Running an accommodation business is not. The line between them is drawn by services, not by nightly rates, and it is the same line that Spanish VAT law uses to separate an exempt dwelling lease from a taxable hotel-type supply. If your operation crosses it, someone has to be registered as self-employed to carry it on — and on a non-lucrative permit that person cannot be you.

Four gates, four authorities, no shared file

Spanish tourism law is regional. There is no national holiday-let statute, and the rules in Andalusia, Valencia, Catalonia, the Balearics and Madrid differ in substance, not just in wording. Because our practice is in Málaga, the detail below is Andalusian; the architecture, however, is national, and the four-gate structure holds wherever you buy.

What makes it treacherous for a foreign owner is that the gates are sequenced wrongly in every explanation you will read. Agents start with the registry number because it is the only thing that produces a document. In reality the registry entry is downstream of a planning question you were supposed to answer first, and it is the planning question that gets flats shut down.

Gate one: the region and the tourist-use declaration

In Andalusia, dwellings marketed for tourist accommodation are viviendas de uso turístico, governed by the 2016 decree as substantially amended by Decree 31/2024 of 29 January. The owner does not apply for a licence and wait. The owner files a declaración responsable — a self-declaration that the legal requirements are met — which produces an entry in the Andalusian Tourism Register and permits marketing from that moment.

This is faster than a licensing system and considerably more dangerous, because a false or unsupported declaration does not merely fail; it exposes the declarant. The 2024 amendment tightened the content precisely on that point. The declaration must now state that the dwelling is compatible with the applicable planning and territorial rules for tourist accommodation use, and it must state whether the property will be offered year-round or only in identified periods. Dwellings under a public-protection regime cannot be used this way at all, and the amendment reinforced the exclusion of dwellings whose horizontal-property statutes expressly prohibit the use.

Where the operation is handed to a management company, that company appears in the register as the holder of the exploitation and answers to the administration for every dwelling it manages. For a non-resident or a visa-holding owner this is not an administrative detail. It is the mechanism by which the operational role — the part that looks like work — is transferred to somebody entitled to perform it.

Gate two: the town hall decides before tourism does

The planning compatibility that the regional declaration asserts is a municipal matter. Andalusian municipalities have used that lever hard since 2024, and Málaga has been the most visible. The city has applied planning instructions restricting new tourist-use dwellings in saturated districts, and other Andalusian and Spanish municipalities have followed with caps, density limits and requirements such as independent street access.

Three practical consequences for a buyer:

• The answer is address-specific and time-specific. A flat two streets away may be freely lettable while yours is in a restricted zone; a district open when you offered on the property may be closed by completion.
• Existing operations are not automatically transferable. A seller telling you the flat “has been on Airbnb for years” is describing history, not a right that comes with the keys. Where restrictions exist, they commonly protect existing registered operations and refuse new entries, and the change of holder is not always neutral.
• The first-occupation licence matters. The 2024 decree ties the declaration to the dwelling holding a licence of first occupation, or the equivalent, for residential use. Rural builds, converted premises and irregular extensions fail here more often than buyers expect. The base planning problem is explained separately in our guide to unlicensed works and first-occupation licences.

This is a due-diligence item, not a post-completion errand. It belongs in the same conversation as the nota simple and the community debt certificate, and it should be answered in writing by the town hall or by the lawyer running the purchase, before the deposit contract is signed. We cover the wider sequencing in our note on buying property and the non-lucrative visa and on whether to rent or buy before applying.

Gate three: your neighbours got a veto in April 2025

This is the change most foreign owners have not registered, and it is the one that most often ends the conversation.

Until 2025 the position was contested. Communities of owners could “limit or condition” tourist activity by a three-fifths majority, and whether that included an outright prohibition was argued for years until the Supreme Court held, in October 2024, that it did. The fourth final provision of Organic Law 1/2025 of 2 January then rewrote paragraph 12 of article 17 of the Horizontal Property Act, with effect from 3 April 2025, and moved the default.

The new rule requires an express favourable agreement of the community before a dwelling may be devoted to tourist activity. The majority is three fifths of the total number of owners who also represent three fifths of the participation quotas — the same majority that can limit, condition or prohibit the activity, and the same majority that can impose an increased share of common expenses on the flat carrying it on, capped at a twenty per cent increase.

Read that twice. Before April 2025 an owner could let unless the community had acted. After April 2025 an owner cannot let unless the community has acted, in the owner’s favour, with a qualified majority, minuted. Silence used to be permission. Silence is now refusal.

There is a related trap in older deeds. A Land Registry decision of 28 July 2025 dealt with a registrar who suspended the assignment of a short-term rental registration number because the horizontal-property statutes provided that the flats were destined for dwelling use and that no services or industries of any class could be installed in them. That clause was drafted decades before holiday platforms existed. It still bites.

The registration number and the ruling that removed the register

Anyone reading about Spanish holiday lets in 2025 encountered the Registro Único de Arrendamientos, created by Royal Decree 1312/2024 of 23 December in application of European Regulation 2024/1028 on the collection and sharing of data for short-term accommodation rental services. The decree entered into force on 2 January 2025 and deployed its effects on 1 July 2025. From that date, an owner could not market a short-term let through an online booking platform without a unique registration number.

Then, in judgment 620/2026, the Supreme Court partially upheld a challenge brought by the Valencian regional government and annulled the provisions creating the single register, holding that the State lacks the competence to establish an exhaustive national register that overlaps the tourist-accommodation registers the autonomous communities already maintain. The challenge was rejected as regards the digital single window, the obligation of online platforms to transmit data, and the transmission of data for statistical purposes. Those stand.

It would be a serious mistake to read that as deregulation. Three things are simultaneously true after the ruling:

• The European Regulation still applies. Regulation (EU) 2024/1028 became applicable on 20 May 2026. It presupposes a registration number for the unit and obliges platforms to check it and to transmit activity data periodically to the authorities.
• The number is now regional. With the State register annulled for want of competence, the operative registration is the one the region issues — in Andalusia, the tourism register entry produced by the declaración responsable.
• Platform visibility is unchanged. The data pipeline from booking platforms to the administration survived the annulment intact. Whatever else the judgment did, it did not restore anonymity to a listing.

For a foreign owner the practical instruction is unglamorous: hold the regional registration, keep the listing consistent with it, and do not assume that an annulled decree means an abandoned policy. The direction of travel in Spanish holiday-let regulation since 2024 has been one way.

Gate four: where the non-lucrative visa collides with the let

The non-lucrative permit is built for people who live on income they already have. It does not forbid owning assets in Spain and does not forbid those assets producing income; that is the entire premise of using rental income as proof of means. What it forbids is carrying on a lucrative activity in Spain.

A long let sits comfortably on the passive side. A tourist let sits on the boundary, and it is the boundary itself that is misunderstood. The test is not the length of the stay and not the amount earned. It is whether an organised activity with means of production is being carried on, and by whom. A short-term operation involves a changeover every few days, guest communication, keys, cleaning, maintenance calls, pricing, and a legal duty to report each guest to the police within twenty-four hours. Performed by the owner, in Spain, that is an activity. Performed by a contracted operator, it is somebody else’s activity and the owner receives a net amount.

Two further points that decide real files:

• Registration is dateable. If the operation requires you to register as autónomo with the social security system — which a personally run accommodation activity generally does — that registration has a date, sits in a government database, and is the cleanest evidence imaginable that the permit’s central condition was not observed. Our note on setting up as autónomo explains what that entails; the point here is that it is precisely what a non-lucrative holder must not need.
• The reckoning comes at renewal. Nobody inspects a flat mid-permit. But renewal is a fresh examination of a file that by then contains your tax returns, and a return declaring an economic activity is a document you filed about yourself.

If the plan genuinely is to operate an accommodation business in Spain, the honest answer is that the non-lucrative visa is the wrong permit, and the conversation should move to a work-based route or to modifying the permit after the first year. We would rather have that conversation before the flat is bought. Our longer treatment of the line itself is in does managing rental property count as work.

The tax layer, quoted correctly for once

Tax comes last here because it is genuinely the least of the four problems, and because it is the one part of the picture most commonly stated wrongly to Americans.

Before you move. As a non-resident owner you declare Spanish-source rent on form 210. Residents of the EU, Iceland and Norway pay nineteen per cent on the net figure after deducting expenses connected to the income. Residents of the United States pay twenty-four per cent on the gross rent, with no deductions at all — not mortgage interest, not community fees, not the platform commission, not the cleaner. On a flat with real running costs, the effective rate on economic profit can be startling.

After you move. Once you are Spanish tax resident the same rent goes into your IRPF return with expenses deductible, which is normally better. But the sixty per cent reduction that makes Spanish letting attractive applies to lettings of dwellings used as a permanent home; a holiday let does not qualify, and neither do the reduced rates introduced for pressured markets. See our landlord note on rental income tax in Spain.

VAT. Letting a dwelling is VAT-exempt. Letting a dwelling with services characteristic of the hotel industry is not: it becomes an accommodation supply taxed at the reduced ten per cent rate, with the invoicing and quarterly obligations that follow. This is the same services test that decides the immigration question above, arrived at from a different statute — which is a useful sanity check. If your operation is taxable as hotel-type accommodation, do not expect to describe it as passive income anywhere else.

And for US owners there is a second return. The rent is also reportable to the IRS, depreciated on US rules over forty years for foreign residential property, with the Spanish tax credited rather than deducted. The two systems do not measure the same profit, and the mismatch is a recurring source of unpleasant surprises for owners who file each side independently. Our overview for Americans is at US filing obligations after moving to Spain.

You now report your guests to the Ministry of the Interior

One obligation deserves separate mention because it converts a private owner into a reporting entity. Since 2 December 2024, the traveller registration regime in Royal Decree 933/2021 applies in full to tourist dwellings alongside hotels and hostels. Guest data must be transmitted electronically to the Ministry of the Interior platform, within twenty-four hours of check-in, replacing the paper forms once handed to the local police station.

The dataset is far wider than a passport scan — identification, contact details, relationship between travellers where minors are involved, and payment details among them — and non-compliance carries administrative fines with closure of the activity available for repeated breaches.

For our purposes the significance is not the fine. It is that this duty is operational, recurrent and personal to whoever runs the accommodation. An owner performing it, from Spain, every few days, is performing the work of an accommodation business under a permit that says they will not. It is a small task that describes the whole activity.

The structure we actually recommend

For clients on a non-lucrative permit who own a property they want to let to visitors, the workable structure has four features, and it has to be built before the first booking rather than reverse-engineered afterwards. There is also a quieter possession point: if the property will be empty for long stretches between owner use and guest use, keep a local inspection and keyholder system. We cover that separate risk in squatters, empty homes and foreign owners in Spain.

1. Confirm the address, not the concept. Written confirmation of municipal compatibility for tourist accommodation use at that specific dwelling, obtained during due diligence.
2. Clear the community first. Statutes and recent minutes reviewed; where no express approval exists, an item put on the agenda of a general meeting and a resolution obtained by the required majority before any listing goes live.
3. Put a real operator between you and the guest. A management company entered in the tourism register as holder of the exploitation, contracted at arm’s length, performing changeovers, guest communication and the traveller reporting. The owner receives a net remittance and holds no operational role.
4. Make the paperwork say the same thing. Registration, contract, tax returns and the description in your residence file should be consistent. Files fail when the tax return declares an economic activity and the residence renewal describes passive income.

Where the numbers do not survive an arm’s-length operator — and on a single small apartment they often do not — that is a useful result rather than a disappointing one. It means the plan only worked while the owner was doing unpermitted work for free, and it is far better to discover that before completion than at renewal. In many of those cases a long let produces a similar net figure with none of the four gates in the way.

The four gates at a glance

Gate	Who decides	What it looks like	How it fails
Planning compatibility	Town hall	Written confirmation for the address; zoning or district caps	Restricted district, no first-occupation licence, irregular build
Tourist-use registration	Region (Andalusian Tourism Register)	Declaración responsable and a register entry	Declaration filed without the underlying compatibility
Community of owners	Neighbours, since 3 April 2025	Express three-fifths resolution in the minutes	No resolution at all; statutes barring services or industries
Your residence permit	Immigration file, at renewal	Owner passive; operator registered and contracted	Owner runs it personally; autónomo registration appears
Platform listing	Booking platform, under EU rules	Valid registration number displayed; data sent to authorities	Number missing or inconsistent with the register entry
Guest reporting	Ministry of the Interior	Electronic transmission within 24 hours of check-in	Nobody assigned to it; owner doing it personally
Income tax	Spanish tax agency, then the IRS	Form 210 before residence; IRPF after; US return alongside	24% of gross assumed to be 24% of profit
VAT	Spanish tax agency	Exempt lease, or 10% accommodation supply with services	Hotel-type services provided while claiming exempt status

Sources reviewed August 2026: Decree 31/2024 of 29 January of the Andalusian regional government, amending various provisions on dwellings for tourist use, tourist apartment establishments and hotel establishments, on the content of the declaración responsable, planning compatibility, the exclusion of publicly protected dwellings and the position of the managing company in the Andalusian Tourism Register; the fourth final provision of Organic Law 1/2025 of 2 January amending paragraph 12 of article 17 of Law 49/1960 on Horizontal Property, in force from 3 April 2025, on the express three-fifths agreement required to devote a dwelling to tourist activity and on increased common expenses capped at twenty per cent; Royal Decree 1312/2024 of 23 December regulating the Single Rental Registry procedure and creating the Digital Single Window, its entry into force on 2 January 2025 and deployment on 1 July 2025; the Supreme Court judgment 620/2026 partially annulling that decree for want of State competence over an exhaustive national register while upholding the digital single window, the platform data-transmission duties and statistical data transmission, together with the accompanying communication of the General Council of the Judiciary; Regulation (EU) 2024/1028 of the European Parliament and of the Council on the collection and sharing of data relating to short-term accommodation rental services, applicable from 20 May 2026; the resolution of the Directorate-General for Legal Certainty and Public Faith of 28 July 2025 on the suspension of a short-term rental registration number where the horizontal-property statutes reserved the flats for dwelling use; Royal Decree 933/2021 of 26 October on documentary registration and information duties of persons carrying on hospitality and vehicle rental activities, fully applicable from 2 December 2024 through the Ministry of the Interior platform with transmission within twenty-four hours of check-in; the Spanish non-resident income tax rules applied through form 210, at nineteen per cent on net income for residents of the EU, Iceland and Norway and twenty-four per cent on gross income without deductions for other non-residents; and the Spanish VAT treatment of dwelling leases as exempt supplies and of accommodation with services characteristic of the hotel industry at the reduced ten per cent rate. Regional and municipal rules change frequently and differ between autonomous communities; this page is general information and not advice on any particular property.