Capital Gains Tax in Spain: What You Pay When You Sell

What Actually Gets Taxed

Spanish tax law treats the profit from selling property as an increase in your wealth, and it wants its share. This is not a separate, standalone property tax with its own name and its own rulebook. For residents, the gain is added to your IRPF return and taxed inside the savings base, the same bucket that holds interest and dividends. For non residents, it is declared and paid through a different route, but the underlying idea is the same: only the profit is taxed, not the amount you sold for. If you sold for less than the property cost you once every expense is added in, there is nothing to tax at all.

How the Gain Is Actually Calculated

The formula sounds simple, and mostly it is. You take the sale price, subtract what the purchase actually cost you at the time (plus any genuine improvements since), then subtract what it costs you to sell now. What is left is the gain, and that is the figure that gets taxed.

What counts toward your acquisition cost

Your acquisition cost is not just the price on the original deed. It also includes the purchase taxes you paid at the time, ITP if you bought a resale property or IVA if you bought new, plus notary and land registry fees. On top of that, you can add proven improvement works, a new kitchen, rewired electrics, an extension, as long as you have the invoices to show for it. Routine maintenance and repairs do not count, and neither does furniture.

What counts toward your selling costs

On the way out, you can deduct the agency commission if you used one, the plusvalía municipal if you, the seller, ended up paying it (this is negotiable between buyer and seller, and increasingly the buyer picks it up, but when the seller pays it, it comes off the gain), and legal fees connected to the sale.

Take a Dutch couple who bought an apartment in Alicante in 2015 for 180,000 euros. They paid 10% ITP on top, 18,000 euros, plus around 2,000 euros in notary and registry fees. A few years later they gutted the kitchen and had the work properly invoiced, another 15,000 euros. Their acquisition cost comes to 215,000 euros. In 2026 they sell for 320,000 euros, paying a 6% agency commission, 19,200 euros, and covering the plusvalía municipal themselves, 1,500 euros, for a total of 20,700 euros in selling costs. Their gain is 320,000 minus 215,000 minus 20,700, which comes to 84,300 euros. That is the figure that gets taxed, not the 320,000 euros that landed in their bank account.

If You Are a Resident, the Gain Joins Your Savings Base

If you are a Spanish tax resident, your share of the gain is folded into your IRPF savings base alongside any interest and dividends you earned that year. This runs on a national scale that applies the same way whether you live in Madrid, Andalucia or the Balearics, the autonomous community makes no difference here, unlike the general income scale. For 2026 the bands are:

• 19% on the first 6,000 euros of the gain.
• 21% on the portion from 6,001 to 50,000 euros.
• 23% on the portion from 50,001 to 200,000 euros.
• 27% on the portion from 200,001 to 300,000 euros.
• 30% on anything above 300,000 euros.

Worth flagging: that top band used to sit at 28%, it moved up to 30% from 1 January 2025, so if you are working from an older article, or a conversation with a neighbour who sold a few years back, the number you are quoted may already be out of date.

Back to the Dutch couple. Suppose instead of a holiday home they had become Spanish tax residents by the time they sold, and the property was jointly owned in equal shares. Each of them would declare half the gain, 42,150 euros, on their own return. Under the savings scale, the first 6,000 euros is taxed at 19%, 1,140 euros, and the remaining 36,150 euros falls into the 21% band, 7,591.50 euros. Each of them owes 8,731.50 euros, so 17,463 euros between them. Because Spanish tax is assessed per owner, splitting a jointly held property across two returns is one reason couples often end up with two moderate numbers rather than one large one.

If You Are a Non Resident, You Pay a Flat Rate Instead

Non residents skip the savings scale entirely and pay a flat rate on the gain. If you are tax resident in another EU or EEA country, the Netherlands, Germany, France and so on, the rate is 19%. If you are tax resident anywhere outside the EU or EEA, the rate is 24%. This catches a lot of British sellers off guard, since the United Kingdom left the EU and no longer qualifies for the lower rate, whatever rate applied on a previous sale years ago.

Take that same 42,150 euro half share. A Dutch seller, an EU resident, pays 19%, 8,008.50 euros. A British seller in the same position, no longer inside the EU or EEA, pays 24%, 10,116 euros, over 2,000 euros more on an identical gain. The flat rate structure is simpler than the resident scale, but simpler does not always mean cheaper.

One more thing non resident sellers should know about, even though it really deserves its own explanation: when a non resident sells, the buyer is legally required to withhold 3% of the sale price and pay it directly to the Agencia Tributaria, as an advance against this exact tax. You do not receive that slice of the money at completion, and the real bill is settled afterwards through a separate return, with money coming back to you if the 3% withheld turned out to be more than you actually owed. It catches people by surprise at the notary if nobody has mentioned it beforehand.

One more wrinkle worth flagging: if a property is jointly owned by a resident and a non resident, perhaps one spouse moved their tax residency to Spain while the other did not, each half of the gain follows its own set of rules. The resident's share goes into their savings base, the non resident's share is taxed at the flat rate that applies to them. It is a common enough situation among binational couples that it is worth checking early, rather than assuming both halves will be treated the same way.

Why Holding Period Makes No Difference

Plenty of countries reward patience. Own an asset long enough and the tax authority softens the blow, a lower long term rate, a taper, sometimes a full exemption after enough years. Spain does not work that way. There is no short term or long term distinction anywhere in this calculation. Sell an apartment in Torrevieja six months after buying it, flipped after a quick renovation, and you follow exactly the same rules, at exactly the same rates, as a family selling a home they have owned since the 1990s. The only things that change the maths are your residency status and the size of the gain itself.

Why This Often Surprises People

Two things tend to catch sellers off guard. First, the idea that a property sale gets lumped in with interest and dividends as savings income, rather than treated as its own separate category with its own rules, feels unfamiliar if you are used to a different system back home. Second, the absence of any reward for a long hold surprises people who assumed that owning a home for twenty or thirty years would earn them some kind of discount. It does not. A gain is a gain, whether it built up over six months or over a generation, and it is taxed the same way either way. This is general information rather than personal tax advice, and the real numbers depend on your own paperwork, your residency history and how the property was owned, so it is worth checking your own circumstances with a professional before you rely on any of the figures above for your own sale.