What the Spanish modelo 111 is: withholding tax, box by box

What the modelo 111 actually is

A small business in Spain files up to three self-assessments every quarter, and the three point in different directions.

The modelo 303 settles VAT: money you collect from customers on the state's behalf. The modelo 130 advances your own income tax on your own profit. The modelo 111 does neither: it pays over other people's income tax.

When you pay a gross salary of 1,500 euros and transfer 1,290, that 210-euro difference has not stayed in your business. It belongs to your employee, withheld on their account against a tax they will declare in June. The same goes for a professional's invoice: if they bill 1,000 euros plus VAT with 15 % withheld, you pay 850 plus the VAT and keep 150 that is not yours either.

The modelo 111 is the vehicle that gets that money to where it belongs. The practical consequence of the distinction is not theoretical: an unfiled modelo 111 is treated far more severely than a modelo 130 in the same position, because the second delays a payment of your own and the first holds on to someone else's money.

The first question is not how much, it is whether you file at all

This is the part most pages summarise badly, and they summarise it badly because the article has two halves and almost always only one gets quoted.

The final paragraph of article 108.1 of the Spanish income-tax Regulation reads:

The retainer or person obliged to make an ingreso a cuenta shall file a nil return where, despite having paid income subject to withholding or an ingreso a cuenta, no withholding or ingreso a cuenta was due by reason of its amount. A nil return shall not be filed where no income subject to withholding or an ingreso a cuenta was paid during the filing period.

Read it twice, because the test is not what you withheld, it is what you paid:

• You paid income subject to withholding and withheld something: you file an ordinary modelo 111.
• You paid income subject to withholding and withheld nothing, because the amounts were too small: you file a nil return, which is still a filing.
• You paid none of that income: you file nothing. Not even an empty form.

The Agencia Tributaria makes the same point from the other side in the instructions: modelo 111 self-assessments must not be filed with every box of the settlement section left blank.

And here is the contrast worth fixing in your head: the modelo 130 works the other way round. Its article 111.1 requires a nil return every quarter for as long as you stay registered, even with no invoices at all. Two forms for the same tax, on the same calendar, with the rule inverted.

The withholding rate is not a number, it is a menu

This is where the errors concentrate, and not through carelessness: the right percentage depends on what you are paying and to whom.

Economic-activity income (article 95).

The 7 % for a professional starting out has two conditions that get forgotten. The first is that they carried on no professional activity at all in the year before the start date. The second is that they tell the payer, who must keep the communication duly signed. Without that piece of paper, the person who has to justify the rate to the tax authority is you.

The agrarian 2 % and the forestry 2 % apply to gross receipts excluding current and capital subsidies and indemnities. That is not a small detail on a holding that lives partly on CAP payments.

Employment income with a fixed rate (article 80.1).

The second row is the most expensive thing to get wrong on the whole form. Withholding 35 % from a director-shareholder of a company turning over 80,000 euros a year is a sixteen-point error on their pay, and the second paragraph of article 80.1.3 has been there since 2015. If the last tax period lasted less than a year, the turnover is annualised for the comparison.

The remaining sections, all at 19 %: prizes from games, competitions, raffles and random draws (article 99.1), neighbours' gains from forestry harvesting in public woodland (article 99.2), and the ingreso a cuenta on image-rights payments to non-residents under article 92.8 of the Act (article 107). The assignment of the right to exploit image rights, when it comes from an economic activity, takes the 24 % of article 101.1.

The payroll rate is not worked out from a tariff

For ordinary employment income, article 80.1.1 refers to article 86, and that article is the output of a procedure spanning articles 82 to 88: the whole year's pay is estimated, expenses and reductions are deducted, the employee's personal and family minimum is computed, the scales are applied, and the result is divided by the expected pay, to two decimals.

It is a per-employee, per-year calculation, not a percentage that can be derived from a single payment. That is why the figure in box 03 comes from your payroll or your accountant, and no honest calculator can invent it for you.

What is worth knowing, because the summaries leave it out, are the two floors of article 86.2:

• A 2 % minimum on contracts or relationships lasting under a year, and on the special employment relationship of performing, audiovisual and musical artists and the technical or auxiliary staff their activity needs.
• A 15 % minimum on other special dependent employment relationships.
• In Ceuta and Melilla those two minimums are 0.8 % and 6 %, and the article writes them down that way itself.

They are floors, not rates: where the general procedure produces a higher percentage, the higher one applies. And there are two express exceptions: the 6 % and 15 % minimums do not reach income earned by prisoners in penal institutions or income from special employment relationships affecting people with a disability.

Payments in kind, and the article that reads backwards

Payments in kind carry no withholding but an ingreso a cuenta. For this form they are the same thing: they add into box 28 identically.

Article 102.1 says the ingreso a cuenta is computed by applying the relevant article 80 rate to the value determined under article 43.1 of the Act. And here is a reading trap that catches a lot of people: article 43.2 requires that the ingreso a cuenta shall be added to that value, unless its amount has been passed on to the recipient of the income.

Anyone reading article 43 in order concludes that the base of the ingreso a cuenta includes the ingreso a cuenta itself, which would be circular. It is not, because 102.1 refers to 43.1 and not to 43.2: the base of box 05 is the clean valuation. The 43.2 uplift affects only the income the employee declares on their own return, and only where the ingreso a cuenta was not passed on to them.

How the form is completed, box by box

The settlement section has five parts, and each splits into cash and in kind with the same three-box structure: number of recipients, amount paid, and amount withheld.

The three closing boxes:

• Box 28. The sum of the withholding and ingresos a cuenta entered, on every count, in the sections above. Meaning 03 plus 06 plus 09 plus 12 and so on to 27.
• Box 29. Only on a supplementary return, the result of the return or returns already filed for this same year and period. Outside that case it is zero.
• Box 30. The result. On a supplementary return, says the instruction, it must always be a positive amount: if the correct figure is lower than the one already declared, the route is not a supplementary return but an application to rectify the self-assessment, which is a different procedure.

One detail in section V that is easily confused: box 26 collects payments made to non-residents subject to the article 92.8 ingreso a cuenta. The assignment of image rights arising from an economic activity does not go there; it goes in section II at the 24 % of article 101.1. Two different things with the same name.

Quarterly or monthly, and why the REDEME does not count

Article 108.1 requires monthly filing from retainers in whom the circumstances referred to in numbers 1 and 2 of paragraph 3 of article 71 of the VAT Regulation concur, and article 3.1.a of the Order repeats it.

That cross-reference is selective, and that is the detail:

• Number 1: previous calendar year's volume of operations above 6,010,121.04 euros.
• Number 2: having acquired all or part of a business as a going concern, where the two volumes together exceed the same threshold.
• Number 3, the VAT monthly-refund register: not in the cross-reference.
• Numbers 4 and 5, the group-of-entities regime and fuel tax warehouses: also not.

The consequence is counter-intuitive and no page states it: a company on the REDEME register files the modelo 303 every month and the modelo 111 every quarter. Registering to get VAT refunds sooner does not drag the modelo 111 along with it.

Public administrations, the Social Security included, whose last approved annual budget exceeds 6 million euros also file monthly, and only in respect of the income in letters a, b and e of article 2.1.

One last quirk of the monthly calendar: the July period has a window of its own. It is filed throughout August and in the first twenty calendar days of September, so July and August fall due on the same day. It is also why August does not appear in the list of direct-debit months in article 3.2.

The dates, and the ten days that separate this form from the other two

Article 3.1.c of the Order gives the first twenty calendar days of April, July, October and January. There is no fourth-quarter exception.

Compare that last row with the modelo 130's and the modelo 303's: both reach 30 January. Anyone filing all three therefore has two different due dates in the same month, the 111 on the 20th and the other two on the 30th, and it is one of those things that gets discovered late.

The final paragraph of article 3.1 adds a rule the calculator applies rather than quotes: deadlines falling on a Saturday or a non-working day shall be understood as moved to the next working day. At national level that means weekends and, once every several years, Good Friday, which moves between 20 March and 23 April and can land exactly on 20 April. Regional and local holidays move it too, because article 30.6 of Act 39/2015 makes a day non-working if it is non-working either where the taxpayer lives or at the seat of the authority; for that, the calendar the Agencia Tributaria publishes is the authority.

What does not belong on the modelo 111

Article 2.2 of the Order puts it plainly: withholding on income other than that listed in its article 2.1 is not declared here, but on the form matching the nature of the income.

And shortly after the fourth quarter the modelo 190 is filed: the annual summary setting out, recipient by recipient, what was paid during the year, with their tax number, income code, amount and tax withheld. Two points are worth getting straight. The first is the deadline: article 5 of its Order takes it to 31 January for anyone filing online, and that 31st moves to the next working day where it falls on a non-working one, so the 2025 summary fell due on 2 February 2026 and the 2026 one falls due on 1 February 2027, eleven and thirteen days after the fourth quarter. The second is the reconciliation: the total withholding on the 190 must match the sum of box 28 across the four modelos 111 and the comparison is automatic, but the income totals do not have to match, because the modelo 190 also reports exempt income and travel allowances within the exempt limits, which were not withheld from. How each payment is sorted into the twelve codes, and what exactly accounts for that difference, is in the form 190 income codes.

A territorial detail that is shorter than it looks

The 60 % reduction for income qualifying for the Ceuta and Melilla deduction of article 68.4 of the Act appears in the Regulation in two places, and only two: article 80.2, for employment income, and the final paragraph of article 95.1, for the professional-activity percentages of that paragraph.

It is not repeated in article 95.4 for farming and livestock, nor in 95.5 for forestry, nor in 95.6 for módulos, nor in articles 99, 101 and 107. So the agrarian 2 % is still 2 % in Ceuta and the 19 % on a prize is still 19 %.

It is worth noticing, because article 110.2, in the same regulation fifteen articles later, does reduce every instalment percentage of the modelo 130 without distinguishing them. Two neighbouring articles, two different scopes, and a difference a summary flattens easily.

Now do it with your own figures

The conceptual part ends here. What is left is arithmetic: which percentage matches which key, what box 28 adds up to on what you paid this quarter, whether you file at all, and which day is your last depending on whether you pay by direct debit.