How Spanish property tax is calculated: from cadastral value to bill, step by step

What the IBI is and who owes it

The Impuesto sobre Bienes Inmuebles is a direct municipal tax charged on holding title to property. It is governed by articles 60 to 77 of the consolidated Local Government Finance Act, approved by Royal Legislative Decree 2/2004, and it is the main source of own revenue for most Spanish councils.

It is worth starting with a point that gets overlooked: the person liable is not always the owner. Article 61.1 lists four rights and ranks them in order of precedence:

1. Holding an administrative concession over the property or over the public services it serves.
2. Holding a surface right.
3. Holding a usufruct.
4. Holding the right of ownership.

The order matters because, under paragraph 2 of the same article, meeting the charge through one of those rights leaves the property outside the others. In plain terms: where a usufruct sits over a home, the IBI falls on the usufructuary and the bare owner owes nothing. That is the classic case of a widow keeping the usufruct of the family home while the children are already bare owners.

And timing decides as much as the right does. Article 75 charges the tax on the first day of the tax period, which is the calendar year. In other words: it is owed by whoever is on the register on 1 January, even if they sell the house on 2 January.

Where the IBI sits among the other Spanish property taxes

If you reached this page by searching for "Spanish property tax", it is worth saying plainly that there is no single Spanish property tax. The IBI is the annual one, and it is one of six or seven separate charges that land at different moments and go to different authorities. Which of them apply to you depends on what you are doing with the property, not on where you live.

When you buy. A resale home is charged the transfer tax, whose rate each comunidad autónoma sets for itself, and whose base since 2022 is the Catastro's reference value rather than the price you paid, unless the deed price is higher. You can work the bill out in the transfer tax calculator. And if the seller is a non-resident, the obligation falls on you: the buyer withholds 3 % of the price and pays it over on form 211, which the form 211 calculator prices.

While you own it. The IBI is the one this page is about, and its base is the cadastral value, a different figure from the reference value above. Since the 2022 waste law, most councils also bill the municipal waste fee separately rather than inside the IBI, which is why a second envelope started arriving. If your net assets pass your comunidad's threshold there is the wealth tax. And a non-resident owner pays tax on imputed income even when the flat sits empty, filed on form 210.

When you sell. Two different taxes, to two different authorities. The town hall charges the plusvalía municipal on the increase in the land value, and the Treasury charges capital gains tax on the gain itself.

When it passes on. Inheritance tax is set by the comunidad of the deceased, not of the heir, and the differences between them are large. The plusvalía municipal is also charged on an inheritance or a gift, not only on a sale.

One figure that is not a tax but is asked for by all of them: the cadastral reference, the twenty-character code that identifies the property.

The four steps of the calculation

The statute chains four operations, and each has its own article.

Step 1: the cadastral value

Article 65 does not hedge: "the taxable base of this tax shall consist of the cadastral value of the properties".

That value is set by the Dirección General del Catastro from the municipality's ponencia de valores, and it combines the value of the land with that of the building. As a general rule it may not exceed market value, and in practice it lands well below it.

Two confusions worth clearing up straight away:

• Cadastral value is not market value. It is an administrative valuation, made without visiting the property, revised only every many years.
• Cadastral value is not the valor de referencia. The reference value is a different figure, calculated by the Catastro each year from notarised sale prices, and it drives the ITP transfer tax and inheritance tax rather than the IBI.

Your cadastral value is printed on the IBI bill itself, and can be looked up in the Catastro online office.

Step 2: the reduction, and why your bill rises on its own

Here is the answer to the question most people are actually asking, and the one almost no council website explains.

When a municipality goes through a general collective valuation procedure (what everyone calls a cadastral revaluation) and values rise, article 67 requires the increase to be cushioned, and article 68 says exactly how:

The reduction shall apply over a period of nine years counted from the entry into force of the new cadastral values. […] The reducing coefficient shall have the value of 0.9 in the first year of its application and shall fall by 0.1 annually until it disappears.

The amount that coefficient applies to is called the componente individual, defined in paragraph 4 as the positive difference between the new cadastral value in the first year it is in force and the base value, which article 69 defines as the net taxable base of the year immediately before the revaluation.

What that mechanism does is easiest to see with numbers. A flat whose cadastral value goes from 55,000 € to 90,000 €, in a municipality charging 0.66 %:

The bill rises by 23.10 € a year without anyone doing anything: the council has not touched the rate, the Catastro has not changed the value. It is the statute running itself. And in the tenth year comes the final step up, when the reduction disappears altogether.

Two limits on the mechanism, both in the statute:

• Article 67.3 excludes from the reduction any increase coming from the updating coefficients in the annual Budget Acts. Those rises go straight into the base.
• Article 67.4 leaves out properties of special characteristics, which never get a reduction.

If there has been no revaluation in your municipality, this step does not exist: the net taxable base equals the cadastral value.

Step 3: the rate

This is where your council decides. Article 72.1 sets the band:

The minimum and fallback rate shall be 0.4 per cent for urban property and 0.3 per cent for rural property, and the maximum shall be 1.10 per cent for urban and 0.90 per cent for rural property.

Properties of special characteristics, meaning motorways, dams, power stations or ports, have their own rule in article 72.2: a 0.6 % fallback and a band of 0.4 % to 1.3 %.

Within that band the rate is set by each of Spain's 8,131 councils in its ordenanza fiscal, approved and published every year in the provincial gazette. That is why two identical flats separated by a municipal boundary pay different amounts, and why a "national average IBI" is of no use to anybody.

Why a bill can show 1.27 % and still be lawful

The 1.10 % is not the real ceiling. Article 72.3 lets councils increase the paragraph 1 maximum by these percentage points, and they may be combined:

Adding all four takes the ceiling to 1.30 % on urban and 1.22 % on rural property. A provincial capital with an urban bus network and services beyond the compulsory ones can lawfully sit at 1.29 %, and anyone reading article 72.1 alone will assume there has been a mistake.

At the other end, article 72.5 lets municipalities that have just revalued apply reduced rates for up to six years, with a floor of 0.1 % on urban and 0.075 % on rural property.

Step 4: the reliefs

They come off the gross tax, never off the base, and they fall into two very different families.

Compulsory (article 73). They exist throughout Spain whether or not the by-law mentions them:

Discretionary (article 74). These exist only where your council has created them in the by-law, which also fixes the actual percentage, the duration and the conditions:

The solar relief in paragraph 5 was widened in March 2026 by article 44.1 of Royal Decree-Law 7/2026, which added the option of grading the percentage where space is made over to energy communities. It deserves a note, because a virtually identical wording was in force in June 2025 under Royal Decree-Law 7/2025 and was left without effect when Congress repealed that decree-law in July. It is the same pattern already seen with the plusvalía municipal: a decree-law is not settled law until Congress ratifies it.

Almost all the discretionary reliefs have to be applied for, and nearly always within an annual window. Not asking means not getting.

The empty-home surcharge

This runs in the opposite direction to the reliefs: instead of subtracting, it adds. Article 72.4, in the wording given to it by final provision 3 of Housing Act 12/2023, lets councils add a surcharge to the net tax on empty homes. The scale has three cumulative steps:

• Up to 50 % where the home has stood empty continuously and without justified cause for more than two years, and its owner holds four or more residential properties.
• Up to 100 % where the period of vacancy exceeds three years, and it may be graded by how long.
• Up to 50 further percentage points where the owner has two or more empty homes in the same municipality.

Together the ceiling is 150 % of the net tax. The surcharge is charged on 31 December and requires the council to formally declare the property vacant, after hearing the owner.

The statute itself lists the justified causes that block it, and they are broader than commonly assumed: a temporary move for work or training, a change of address for dependency, health or social emergency, a second home for up to four years, a property under building or renovation work, a pending legal dispute, a home on the market to sell for up to one year and a home advertised to let for up to six months.

Because the surcharge is calculated on the net tax, any relief is applied first and reduces the surcharge base as well.

How it is paid and how it is appealed

The IBI is administered by register: the council (or the provincial authority on its behalf) issues the annual list of bills, puts it on public display and collects during a window each municipality sets in its by-law, usually between May and November. There is no return to file; it arrives on its own. Direct debit is the norm, and many councils give a small discount for it or allow the payment to be split.

If it is not paid, enforcement proceedings begin, with a surcharge of between 5 % and 20 % plus late-payment interest. And there is a consequence that surprises many buyers: article 64 declares the property charged with the IBI debts of the year of transfer and the four preceding years, so the seller's debt can end up following the house. Asking for a debt certificate before signing is cheap and avoids the problem.

To appeal you have to pick the right door, and this is the confusion that sinks most appeals:

Telling the council that your cadastral value is excessive achieves nothing: the council did not set it and cannot change it.

What this calculator does not do, and why

Our IBI calculator asks you for the rate rather than knowing it. That is not a technical limitation, it is a decision: there are 8,131 councils, each with its own by-law revised most years, and no national register of those rates that can be cited as a source. Giving you an invented figure would be worse than asking, and your rate is printed on your bill.

What the calculator does do is check that the rate you enter fits inside what articles 72.1, 72.3 and 72.5 allow, apply the article 68 reduction with the correct coefficient, and project the tax across all nine years, which is the part nobody else is going to show you.