Spanish corporation tax payments on account: form 202

The short answer

A Spanish company does not pay its corporation tax once a year. It pays four times: three prepayments in April, October and December, and a settlement the following July that subtracts what was already prepaid. Those three prepayments are the pago fraccionado, they are made on form 202, and they are computed in one of two ways¹:

• The prior-tax method. 18% of the tax of a year already filed, reduced by credits, reliefs and withholdings. This is the one that applies by default.
• The current-base method. A percentage applied to the taxable base of the year in progress, measured at each payment date. It is opted into in February, and it is compulsory above six million euros of turnover.

What sets this form apart from its neighbours is that its arithmetic depends on a date that lives in another law. And that dependency produces the hardest-to-believe fact about the three instalments.

The April instalment looks at an older year than the other two

Article 40.2 does not say “the tax of the last year”. It says the gross tax of the last tax period whose filing deadline had expired on the first day of the twenty natural days of the payment month¹. That is a condition about a deadline, not about a calendar, and that is why the answer changes from one instalment to the next.

For a company with a calendar year end, form 200 is filed within the twenty-five natural days following the six months after the year end, that is at the end of July. So:

In April 2026, a company that closed 2025 on 31 December computes its instalment on the 2024 tax bill, because the 2025 form 200 is not due until 27 July 2026. By October it computes on 2025.

This has real consequences and nobody spells them out. A company that had an excellent 2024 and a bad 2025 prepays in April 2026 on the good year, and does not get that difference back until the July 2027 settlement. Conversely, a company that took off in 2025 underpays until October. The lag corrects itself, but it takes two instalments to do it.

There is a way out: a company expecting the current year to be worse can switch to the current-base method, which computes on what is happening now rather than on what happened. The price is that it has to have been asked for in February.

The percentage is not written in the law

Under the prior-tax method it is: 18%, and that is that¹. Under the current-base method, article 40.3 does not give a number, it gives an operation: “the percentage that results from multiplying by five sevenths the tax rate, rounded down”.

Five sevenths of 25 is 17.857, and rounded down, 17. That is where the 17% printed on almost every page about this form comes from. But that 17 is the answer for the general rate, and there are more rates than that one.

Here is the second fact that ages any guide written two years ago badly. The reduced rates in the middle column are not the ones printed in the body of article 29: they are the ones in transitional provision forty-four, which has been phasing them in since 2025³. A small company was taxed at 24% in 2025, is taxed at 23% in 2026 and will reach 20% in 2029. Its instalment percentage therefore goes 17%, 16% and eventually 14%, without article 40 being amended once. The number to look for is not in the instalment rule; it is in the rate rule.

And from ten million euros the rules change twice

Additional provision fourteen adds two specialities for companies with at least ten million euros of turnover in the twelve months before the period began, and both point the same way².

The first is the percentage. It stops being five sevenths rounded down and becomes nineteen twentieths rounded up. On the general rate: 25 × 19/20 = 23.75, and rounded up, 24%. Against the 17% the same company would pay if it turned over one euro less than ten million. It is worth pausing on the fact that the two fractions in the same statute round in opposite directions, each in the one that suits whoever wrote it.

The second is the minimum instalment: the amount payable cannot be lower than 23% of the positive result of the profit and loss account for the period, or 25% for the banks and hydrocarbons entities of article 29.6.

What gives that minimum its bite is not its percentage, it is what it does not deduct. The general figure under article 40.3 subtracts reliefs, withholdings, payments on account and the instalments already made¹. The minimum subtracts “exclusively the instalment payments made previously”². Neither withholdings nor reliefs. That is why a large company can have a general result of zero and owe the minimum in full, which is precisely the effect the provision was written to achieve.

A worked example with real numbers

A Spanish limited company with 12 million euros of turnover in 2025 makes the October 2026 instalment under the current-base method, which in its case is compulsory.

• Taxable base from January to September: €1,000,000.
• Percentage: it pays the general rate of 25%, and because it reaches ten million, nineteen twentieths rounded up applies, 24%. Instalment before deductions: €240,000.
• Reliefs, withholdings and the April payment, already borne: €250,000.
• Article 40.3 result: 240,000 − 250,000, which cannot be negative, so €0.

So far the company would pay nothing. But its profit and loss account for those nine months shows a positive result of €1,200,000, and of the €250,000 it deducted, only €50,000 were earlier instalments:

• Additional provision fourteen minimum: 23% of 1,200,000 = 276,000, less the 50,000 of earlier instalments, €226,000.

It pays €226,000, not zero. The withholdings and reliefs that erase the general result do not touch the minimum, and that difference is the entire amount payable.

The deadline for that October 2026 instalment is 20 October, and the direct-debit window closes on the 15th.

Who files form 202, and who does not

Here is an asymmetry that surprises anyone coming from the self-employed forms. Article 1.3 of Order HFP/227/2017 says it in two consecutive sentences⁵: filing is compulsory for anyone whose turnover exceeded six million euros in the twelve months before the period began, even where nothing is payable; and “for every other entity”, where no payment is due, it is not compulsory.

Compare it with its neighbours in the same system:

Three different rules about the empty return across four forms in one system. And a fourth category: collective investment schemes taxed at 1% and pension funds taxed at 0% make no instalment payment and file no return for it at all, under the second paragraph of article 40.1¹.

Tax groups under the consolidation regime do not use this form either: article 1.2 of the Order sends them “in every case” to form 222, on the same dates⁵.

The deadlines, which are computed rather than copied

Article 5.1 of the Order gives the first twenty natural days of April, October and December, and article 5.4 closes the direct-debit window on the 15th of those same months⁶. Where the 20th falls on a Saturday, a Sunday or a national holiday, article 30.5 of Law 39/2015 moves it to the next working day¹⁰.

In 2026 that happens once, and it is worth noting down: 20 December is a Sunday, so the third instalment falls due on Monday the 21st. This is not our reading: the Spanish Tax Agency’s taxpayer calendar publishes forms 202 and 222 under the heading “Hasta el 21 de diciembre”, and there is no “hasta el 20 de diciembre” page in that calendar at all⁸. The April and October instalments do fall due on the 20th, which in 2026 are working days⁹.

Regional and local holidays are outside this calculation, because article 30.6 of the same law refers them to each administration’s own calendar¹⁰.

And there is a foral speciality almost nobody mentions, because it reaches few companies, but for those it changes the whole year: a company subject to Navarre’s foral rules and taxed jointly by both authorities files only in October, during the first twenty natural days. One subject to the Basque Country’s rules has twenty-five days in October instead of twenty⁶.

What happens afterwards to what you paid

None of this is an extra tax. Article 41 makes withholdings, payments on account and instalments deductible from the tax due or, where it applies, from the minimum tax; and where those exceed the tax, “the tax authority shall refund the excess of its own motion”⁴. The instalment brings the tax forward and smooths the Treasury’s cash over the year. In the end the account balances on form 200.

What is worth deciding in good time is the method, because the window for it is February and the choice carries: opting for the current-base method binds “in respect of the payments corresponding to the same tax period and the following ones, until it is renounced”, and the renunciation goes on the same census return in the same month¹.