Spain's 10% VAT From 1 December: The 30-Day Test

The rate is not the story. The test that decides whether it applies to you is a duration, and it lands on every booking you take from December.

Last updated: October 21, 2026

Spain's draft treatment puts short stays at 10% VAT from 1 December 2026, as published in the draft, and it hasn't finished its passage through the lower house. The rate is the part everyone quotes and the part that decides the least. What decides your case is a duration test, and you answer it on every booking you accept, months before any return is filed.

Key Takeaways

• The rate isn't the decision. The 10% only bites once the duration test puts a stay inside it, as published in the draft.
• The count runs per guest, per stay. Not per year, not per listing, not per channel. Three visits of ten nights are three stays.
• The answer is fixed when you accept. A stay booked for 20 nights that runs to 35 crosses the line while the guest is still in the unit.
• Stays of 30 days or more stay where they are. The change reaches short stays, and a monthly let isn't one.
• Quarterly filings start in 2027. The first return is a record-keeping job before it's a payment.

What the 10% applies to

The rate attaches to the accommodation itself — the nights you sell to a guest who's staying for a short while. It doesn't attach to why they're travelling, which channel they booked on, or whether you let as a company or an individual.

What's less settled is everything around the room. Whether a cleaning charge or a late-checkout fee follows the accommodation rate turns on wording, so it's a question for your adviser and the current text. The same goes for what a platform deducts. That's a commercial term between you and the channel, not a tax test.

It's also worth saying what this change isn't. It's not a new permission and it's not a new ban. Stays under the line were already short lets and they still are. What moves is how they're treated for VAT.

The rate itself has moved once already. An earlier version of the proposal carried a higher figure, and the draft now on the table carries 10%, as published in the draft. Rates in drafts have a habit of shifting before a vote, which is the second reason to treat the number as provisional rather than settled.

Confirm the rate and the start date with your tax adviser and the current text before you change anything downstream.

The 30-day test, measured properly

The test is duration, counted in nights, for one guest's one stay. It isn't the booking window, the notice period or the length of your season. Two guests who each stay 20 nights are two stays of 20 nights, not one of 40, even if the unit never goes empty between them.

Back-to-back bookings are where people slip. A guest who checks out on Friday and another who checks in on Friday are separate stays. The number that counts is each guest's own nights, and the gap of a few hours between them doesn't merge the two.

Extensions are the awkward case. A stay booked for 20 nights that runs to 35 crosses the line while the guest is in the building. The booking was inside the test when you took it and outside it when they left. However your adviser resolves that, you'll want arrival and departure dates recorded as they actually happened rather than as they were booked.

Repeat guests don't accumulate either. Three visits of ten nights in one year are three stays, each measured on its own. And the count is per guest, not per bed: two people staying 15 nights is a stay of 15 nights.

What changes in your booking flow

The practical shift is where the question gets asked. Under a duration test, the answer is set at the point of acceptance, not at the point of filing. If your minimum stay is two nights and your longest guest stays a week, every booking you take falls inside the test and the work is uniform. If you sell both a weekend and a month, you're running two treatments out of one calendar.

That makes the calendar the place where the split shows up. A month-long booking and a three-night booking can sit on adjacent dates and need different handling, and the difference is invisible on a screen that only shows whether a night is free.

localsbnb.com keeps the four connected channels — Airbnb, Booking.com, Agoda and Trip.com — on one calendar, with each channel's source rate and status beside the dates. When what you need is the length of each stay rather than the shape of your month, that's the view you count from.

It doesn't decide the answer for you, and it shouldn't. It shows the nights; the classification stays with you and your adviser.

One consequence is quieter. A booking taken in November for a stay in January sits on a different side of 1 December than the same booking taken in December. If you take a deposit at booking and the balance on arrival, the date that matters is the one when you accepted the stay, not the one when the money landed.

The hardest part isn't the rate. It's that the same unit can now hold two kinds of booking at once, and nothing on a normal availability screen tells them apart.

The filing calendar from 2027

Quarterly returns begin in January 2027, as published in the draft. That's a cadence change more than a rate change. Cadence is what catches small operators: four filings a year instead of one, and the first covers a quarter you'll have to rebuild if you didn't keep records as you went.

The records you'll want are dull. Arrival and departure dates for each booking. The channel it came through. The amount charged, and the amount of anything you treated separately. Start in December rather than April: stay lengths are easy to note when they happen, and miserable to rebuild from a calendar that's already rolled over.

Prices are the other open question. If a rate you publish is quoted inclusive of tax, the number a guest sees may need to move on 1 December, because the tax inside it changes what you keep. If it's quoted exclusive, the guest's total moves instead. Either way the change lands on the channels as well as on your own page, and channels don't all present tax the same way.

None of that is a reason to reprice in a hurry. It's a reason to know, before December, which of your rates are quoted inclusive and which aren't.

A quarter closes faster than it sounds. If you count nights once a month, in the same sitting where you reconcile payouts, the return at the end is a summary of work you've already done. If you count them in April, the return is the work.

FAQ

Does the 10% apply to every booking I take after 1 December?

No. The date sets when the new treatment starts. Duration decides whether a given stay is inside it, so a booking for 30 days or more sits outside whenever it begins. Confirm both the date and the boundary wording with your tax adviser and the current text.

What happens if a guest extends past 30 days mid-stay?

The stay changes sides and the booking you accepted doesn't. Record the dates as they actually fell and ask your adviser how to treat the crossing. Don't assume the length on the original booking settles it, because it doesn't describe what happened.

Do I have to change my published prices?

Not necessarily, but you do have to know what they include. If your rates are quoted inclusive of tax, the 10% changes what you keep rather than what the guest pays. If they're exclusive, the guest's total moves and the channels need to be told.

The rate is easy to quote and hard to apply. The part that decides your case is a number of nights you already hold, in a calendar you already read. If you'd rather spend the afternoon on the stays than on the spreadsheets, localsbnb.com is where the bookings, the channels and the dates already sit together.

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This article is general guidance for hosts and isn't legal, tax or insurance advice. VAT treatment depends on how a stay is documented, on how a rate is quoted and on the text in force at the time. Confirm the rate, the start date and the duration test with your tax adviser and the competent authority before you change a price or a filing.