What Spanish form 390 is and who is exonerated

Spanish form 390 is the annual VAT summary. In a single document it gathers a whole calendar year of operations, recomputes the result of the full year and sets it beside what you already declared quarter by quarter on your form 303 filings. It settles nothing new. Not a euro is paid or refunded. It does not even have a direct-debit window, because there is nothing to debit.

Its legal basis fits in one sentence. The second paragraph of article 164.Uno.6.º of the Spanish VAT Act says simply that taxable persons must file an annual summary declaration³. Everything else, who, when, how and what happens if you do not, lives in the VAT Regulation and in the Order that approves the form.

The first question is whether you are exonerated

Article 1.2 of Order EHA/3111/2009 places the form on taxable persons obliged to file periodic VAT returns, monthly or quarterly, plus those authorised to file them jointly¹. In practice, everyone who files form 303.

Article 1.3 exonerates two groups:

To those two the form's instructions add taxpayers required to file form 369 under the one-stop-shop regimes⁷. And there is a third case that is not an exoneration but an exclusion at source: the third paragraphs of article 71.1 and 71.7 of the Regulation leave out anyone whose operations are all exempt under articles 20 and 26 of the Act, who files no form 303 either².

What sits behind the exoneration is not a favour. The fourth paragraph of article 71.1 says it plainly: it reaches taxable persons about whom the tax administration already holds sufficient information². It is informational redundancy. If your invoices already reach the tax agency one by one in real time, there is nothing left to summarise in January.

Why closing the business hands form 390 back to you

This is the point almost no page makes, and it runs counterintuitive in the direction that costs money.

The exoneration does not make the information disappear: it moves it. Article 1.4 requires the exonerated taxpayer to complete a reserved section of the form 303 for the last period of the year with the type of activities, the applicable deductible proportion, the separate sectors, the multi-administration percentages and the detail of the total volume of operations for the year¹. A relocation, not a removal.

And from that follows the consequence. The final paragraph of article 1.3 closes both cases with a single sentence: the exoneration does not apply where there is no obligation to file the return corresponding to the last settlement period of the year¹. The tax agency's instructions name the typical cause: having deregistered from the Census of Businesses, Professionals and Withholders before that period began⁷.

Put plainly: if you closed in September there is no fourth quarter; with no fourth quarter there is no section to put the data in; and with nowhere to put it, it comes back to form 390. The year a business ceases to exist is precisely the year it has to file the annual summary it had not filed in a decade.

The reconciliation is the reason the form exists

An annual summary is not there to compute anything new. It is there to make two sums, reached by different routes, come out to the same number.

Section 7 rebuilds the year from its own totals:

Section 9 adds up what you actually declared, quarter by quarter:

And the two sides have to agree: 86 = 95 − 96 − 524 − 97 − 98 − 662. Because the two sums start from different data, the equality is not a tautology: it is the check.

The Spanish tax agency itself publishes a completed declaration with real figures in the annex to chapter 9 of its VAT practical manual, and it is worth walking through⁸. That taxpayer has €88,416 in box 47 and €68,202 in box 64, so box 65 is €20,214; there is no simplified regime and no adjustment, so box 84 is the same €20,214; and €1,500 was carried in from an earlier year, so box 86 is €18,714. From the other side, the quarters came out payable at €4,788, a credit of €2,106, payable at €18,258 and a credit of €2,226: box 95 is €23,046, box 97 is €2,226 and box 662 is €2,106, because those €2,106 were never used. And 23,046 − 2,226 − 2,106 is €18,714. To the cent.

When it does not match, the error is almost always in one of three places: box 85, which subtracts and gets forgotten; box 662, the one fewest people complete; or a negative quarter put into box 95 with a minus sign, which throws the declaration out by twice its value.

Box 108 decides your next year

Section 10 works out the volume of operations of article 121 of the Spanish VAT Act, and the interesting half is the two boxes the formula SUBTRACTS. The form prints it in full: 108 = 99 + 653 + 103 + 104 + 105 + 110 + 100 + 101 + 102 + 125 + 126 + 127 + 128 + 227 + 228 − 106 − 107⁷.

Exempt operations go in, because article 121.Uno includes them expressly. What comes out is what its paragraph Tres lists: occasional transfers of immovable property, supplies of goods classed as capital goods for the transferor, and financial and investment-gold operations that are not habitual to the activity³. On the form those three things are boxes 106 and 107.

So a business that invoiced €5,800,000 and also sold its warehouse for €900,000 has €6,700,000 of income and a volume of operations of €5,800,000. The difference matters because the threshold sits at €6,010,121.04, and above it article 71.3.1.º of the Regulation makes the calendar month your settlement period².

And there a circle closes that deserves saying out loud. If your period becomes monthly, article 62.6 of the Regulation forces you to keep your VAT records through the e-office². And if you keep your records through the e-office, article 1.3.b) of the Order exonerates you from form 390¹. Crossing the threshold means, literally, that the annual summary in which you cross it is the last one you will file.

A nil year is filed too

The second paragraph of article 71.1 of the Regulation requires the periodic returns and the annual summary even where no tax has been charged and no input tax has been deducted².

There is no negative declaration and no dispensation for inactivity: if you are still registered and filing form 303, form 390 goes in with the boxes at zero. It is exactly the opposite of form 347, which is not filed when there is no counterparty to report. Two annual declarations, on the same tax, filed four weeks apart, with opposite rules about emptiness.

When it is really due

Article 8 of the Order sets the first thirty natural days of the month of January following the year reported¹. That is where the "up to 30 January" every page repeats comes from, and it is also where the error comes from, because 30 January is not always a working day.

Article 30.2 of Act 39/2015 makes Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays non-working days, and article 30.5 moves a deadline ending on one of them to the next working day⁶. The form's own instructions say so in those words: deadlines falling on a non-working day are treated as moved to the next working day⁷.

Two consecutive years in which the date everybody quotes is the wrong one, and in one of them the deadline leaves January altogether. For 2025 the correct date was 30 January 2026, and that is where the tax agency's own taxpayer calendar files it, beside the fourth-quarter form 303⁹.

There is one extension only, and it is conditional: article 17.2 of Order HAP/2194/2013 allows filing during the four natural days following the end of the deadline where a technical problem prevents doing it over the internet⁴. It deserves a warning, because article 8 of the form's own Order refers for that purpose to "paragraph 4 of article 4 of this Order", and that article 4 has no paragraph 4 and has itself been suppressed in full since 2023. The earlier version of what the reference was reaching for gave three days; the rule that applies today gives four.

The only thing that costs money is getting it wrong, and it is not what you will read

Since nothing is paid, there is no late-payment surcharge. There is a penalty, and it is a fixed figure:

That is far less than is usually quoted, and the reason is worth knowing. The fourth paragraph of article 198.1, the €20-per-item one with a €300 floor and a €20,000 ceiling, reaches only declarations required in fulfilment of the duty to supply information under articles 93 and 94⁵. And form 390 carries no third-party information: every figure on it is yours, and it was already on your form 303 filings.

The contrast is sharp because the two forms share a list. Article 1.3 of Order HAP/2194/2013 enumerates the informative declarations and places form 390 one line below form 347⁴. Form 347 carries nothing but third-party data, so the €20-per-person scale lands on it; form 390 carries none, so the fixed fine lands instead. Same list, four weeks apart in the calendar, and penalty regimes that diverge by two orders of magnitude.

One last detail almost nobody applies correctly: the 30 % reduction for agreement does not fit here. Article 188.1 grants it to penalties imposed under articles 191 to 197, and these are under 198 and 199⁵. Only the 40 % of article 188.3, for paying on time and not appealing, is left.

A worked example with real numbers

A self-employed woman on the standard regime, with no balance carried in from earlier years. For the year she reported €12,600 of VAT charged and €4,200 of deductions, and all four of her form 303 filings came out payable at €2,100 each.

Annual side: box 65 is 12,600 − 4,200 = €8,400; she has no simplified regime and no adjustment, so box 84 is the same €8,400; and with boxes 659 and 85 empty, box 86 is €8,400.

Liquidations side: box 95 collects the four payable quarters, 4 × 2,100 = €8,400; boxes 97, 98 and 662 stay at zero. Both sides read €8,400 and the declaration reconciles. It falls due on 30 January 2026, and her €60,000 volume of operations leaves her far below the €6,010,121.04 that forces monthly filing.

Now change one figure. Suppose the second quarter came out as a €500 credit that she never used. Box 95 drops to €6,300, because that quarter no longer contributes anything payable; box 662 picks up the €500; and the liquidations side reads 6,300 − 500 = €5,800, while box 86 stays at €8,400. The mismatch is €2,600, and it is not an arithmetic slip: it is the €2,100 the quarter stopped paying plus the €500 left unused. It is the signal that something is missing from the year, or that the credit was used somewhere else.

And a third case, the box 108 one. Had that same activity invoiced €6,700,000 including the €900,000 sale of her premises, box 106 would subtract those €900,000 and box 108 would read €5,800,000: below the threshold, so next year she would still file quarterly. Add the sale in and the answer inverts.

How it fits with the year's other forms

Form 390 is the last piece of the Spanish VAT calendar and it shares its date with the first. On 30 January the fourth-quarter form 303, which does carry money, and the annual summary, which does not, are filed together. Ten days earlier, on 20 January, the fourth-quarter form 111 falls due. And four weeks later comes form 347.

It is worth seeing them side by side, because the four do not follow the same rules:

If your fourth-quarter form 303 came out as a refund claim, the annual summary is also where that is recorded, in box 98. And if your volume of operations crossed the threshold, box 108 of this form is the notice that next year you will be filing monthly.