In 2025, Spain’s government made international headlines when it announced plans to introduce a tax that would double the price of Spanish properties for some non-resident buyers. Is the measure still going ahead?
Spain’s proposed 100 percent tax on foreign property buyers caused some controversy and misinformation when it was first announced back in early-2025.
The bill included plans aimed at limiting the number of tourist apartments in Spain, ensuring the availability of public housing stock, incentivising lower rental prices and, most headline-grabbing of all, curbing home purchases by buyers from outside of the EU.
You can read The Local’s full myth-busting explainer on the proposal here, but according to the legal text for the so-called “Complementary State Tax on the Transfer of Real Estate to Non-EU Residents”, this tax “will be obtained by applying a 100% tax rate to the taxable base”, which is the value of the property in question.
FACT CHECK: Yes, Spain’s 100% tax on non-EU, non-residents doubles property price
Therefore a 100 percent tax on a property worth €200,000 would mean buyers who are “non-residents of the European Union” would have to pay €400,000 for it.
By comparison, standard Spanish property tax (ITP) is around 8 percent on the taxable base or value of the property.
READ ALSO: Who exactly would have to pay Spain’s 100 percent property tax?
However, since the original announcement in January 2025 and the presentation of the draft law in Congress last May, there have been few concrete developments on the proposals.
In fairness to the government, Spain has had its fair share of distractions since then, notably extreme weather, deadly train crashes and the political fallout from the mass regularisation of over half a million undocumented migrants.
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Some would say this is understandable. Cynics and critics of Sánchez would point out that this is in keeping with a trend and that housing has consistently been the major policy failure of his government.
Nonetheless, the slowdown hasn’t stopped various groups from across the country renewing their calls for limits on foreigners buying property in Spain.
The Spanish government has asked the European Commission to authorise it to limit the purchase of homes in the Canary Islands that are not intended for residential use.
The Canary Islands is considered one of Spain’s hardest hit regions in the housing crisis. More than a third of the homes sold on the islands are purchased by foreigners, and prices have soared by more than 50 percent in the last decade.
On the mainland, the regional coordinator of Izquierda Unida in Andalucía, Toni Valero, announced in January 2026 that his party will request that legislative measures such as those promoted in the Canary Islands be applied in Málaga to limit the purchase of housing for non-residential use.
“We will ask the government to do with Málaga what it has done with the Canary Islands, which is to request that the European Union prohibit speculation in the province, prohibit purchases for speculative purposes, and restrict purchases to those homes that are going to be used for living.”
In late-2025, even Spain’s hard-right party Vox submitted a proposal in Congress to increase taxes for foreign property buyers in Spain, with the aim of using the money to give tax breaks for Spanish citizens and promote the construction of subsidised housing.
READ ALSO: Spain’s Vox proposes taxing foreigners more to give housing benefits to locals
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Legal doubts
As The Local has covered, the 100 percent tax proposal has raised some legal doubts. Some experts say the proposal, in its current form, might run up against European legislation.
READ MORE: ‘Spain’s 100% tax on foreign buyers will end up in EU courts’
However, some crucial context. According to Spanish property portal Fotocasa, “the proposals have focused on non-EU non-resident foreigners, not on all buyers”.
The website sees tax tinkering as a more likely outcome than a new law expressly banning non-EU foreigners from buying property in Spain.
Crucially, it notes: “A general ban is legally complex; tax measures are more likely.”
As Mallorca-based lawyer Alejandro Del Campo of DMS Consulting told The Local Spain that the 100 percent tax “would flagrantly violate EU law, specifically Article 63 TFEU, which prohibits any restriction on the free movement of capital not only between Member States but also between Member States and third countries”.
Of course, none of this has become law yet.
“It is important to emphasise that this 100 percent tax has not been approved and is not currently applied in Spain,” Fotocasa adds.
“It is a proposal that is part of the debate on how to limit the purchase of housing for investment purposes, but it has not become an actual tax obligation”.
READ MORE: Are non-EU property buyers really to blame for Spain’s housing crisis?
