Spain abolished its Golden Visa, anti-tourism protests reached forty cities, and a 100 percent tax on foreign property buyers was proposed and submitted to parliament. Spanish residential property ended 2025 at the highest appraisal value in the country’s recorded history.
Spain’s housing appraisal index reached €2,230 per square metre in the fourth quarter of 2025, above the €2,101 peak from the 2008 bubble and the highest the series has ever recorded. The year that produced that number was the same one in which Pedro Sánchez declared a national housing emergency, abolished the Golden Visa programme, and submitted a 100 percent tax on foreign property buyers to parliament.
The 18 months that followed produced enacted legislation, proposals that have not moved in parliament, and a counter-policy from Madrid’s regional government that has received almost no international coverage.
Table of Contents
What Spain Actually Changed
In effect as of June 2026:
- Golden Visa abolished. The programme offering EU residency in exchange for property purchases of at least €500,000 closed on April 3, 2025, under Organic Law 1/2025.
- National tourist rental registry. All holiday and seasonal rentals must hold a national registration number before listing on any platform. In effect from July 1, 2025.
- Homeowner vote required for new tourist lets. New tourist-use rentals in residential buildings require approval from at least 60 percent of the homeowners’ association. In effect from April 3, 2025.
- Málaga rental freeze. New holiday rental registrations suspended across 43 districts for three years from January 14, 2025, covering areas where short-term lets already exceed 8 percent of residential buildings.
- Barcelona tourist apartment ban. The city will not renew any of its 10,101 tourist apartment licences when they expire in November 2028. Spain’s Constitutional Court rejected a property-rights challenge from landlords. Mayor Jaume Collboni described the ruling as legal certainty for the policy.
Proposed but not enacted as of June 2026:
- 100 percent tax on non-EU property buyers. Announced January 13, 2025. Draft bill submitted to Congress on May 25, 2025. Not debated as of March 2026, per Reuters’ review of the parliamentary record.
- Outright ban on non-EU non-resident purchases. Announced January 20, 2025. Not submitted to parliament as of June 2026.
The Foreign Buyer Numbers Behind the Campaign
Anti-tourism protests had spread across Spain since 2023, reaching their largest scale in April 2025 when hundreds of thousands marched in forty cities demanding action on housing costs. The political pressure behind the foreign buyer campaign was real. So was the government’s central claim: that foreign purchasers were pricing Spaniards out of the market.
Sánchez put a figure to it himself: around 27,000 properties purchased by non-EU residents in 2023, in a market completing approximately 700,000 transactions a year. CaixaBank Research, drawing on Spain’s Ministry of Housing data, places non-EU non-resident buyers at between 1.6 and 3 percent of annual property transactions across the country.
In 2025, Spain completed 714,000 total transactions, the highest since 2007 according to CaixaBank Research. The non-EU non-resident share fell. Property values set an all-time record.
The national figure, though, sits alongside provincial concentrations that the 1.6 percent average does not reflect:
| Province | Foreign buyer share | Period |
|---|---|---|
| Alicante | 43% of all purchases | Q3 2025 |
| Málaga | 31% of all purchases | Q3 2025 |
| Balearic Islands | 29% of all purchases | Q3 2025 |
| Canary Islands | 25% of all purchases | Q3 2025 |
Source: Spain’s Association of Property Registrars
The concentrations in Alicante and the Balearics are real and press on local markets in ways the national average does not show. Most of those buyers, however, are from within the EU. The proposed non-EU foreign buyer tax would not apply to the majority of foreign purchases in Spain’s most heavily affected provinces.
The 100 Percent Tax That Has Not Moved
Sánchez announced the 100 percent tax at the National Housing Forum in Madrid on January 13, 2025. The government formally submitted a draft bill to the Spanish Congress on May 25, 2025.
By March 2026, Reuters reviewed the parliamentary record and confirmed the bill had not been debated and no vote had been scheduled.
Spain’s government operates on a minority coalition. Junts, the right-wing Catalan separatist party whose support the government depends on in parliament, has confirmed it will vote against the measure. Without enough seats to advance the bill, it remains unscheduled. The most widely reported housing policy Spain announced in 2025 has not, as of June 2026, become law.
What Is Actually Making Expat Life Harder in 2026
By February 2026, Spain’s Foreigners’ Offices, which process TIE residency cards and renewals, were running below recommended staffing levels according to civil-service unions. A large-scale regularisation programme was generating hundreds of thousands of new applications at the same time, pushing wait times into months for existing residents and first-time applicants. For people whose legal status in Spain depends on renewals arriving on schedule, the administrative backlog has been more disruptive than any individual policy change announced from Madrid.
British nationals face a specific set of pressures that predates the housing campaign. Brexit reclassified UK citizens from EU nationals with full freedom of movement into non-EU nationals, placing them directly in the category the government’s proposals most aggressively target:
- The 90/180 rule limits British non-residents to 90 days in Spain within any 180-day period without a visa. A number of property owners have sold rather than manage the restriction long-term.
- UK inheritance tax moved to a residency-based system in April 2025, adding complications for British nationals with cross-border Spanish assets.
- The Digital Nomad Visa requires a minimum income of €2,849 per month for a single applicant in 2026, with application delays reported across multiple offices.
Then there is the housing market itself. Barcelona’s rents rose 68 percent over the past decade, Mayor Collboni said, in statements reported by Reuters and Bloomberg. Rental vacancy in central districts sits below 2 percent. For anyone looking for housing in 2026, the market has been a more immediate barrier than any individual piece of legislation.
Madrid’s Counter-Move
On November 28, 2024, the Community of Madrid published Law 4/2024 in its official gazette. The Spanish press named it the Mbappé Law, after the footballer who had recently joined Real Madrid from France.
The law offers foreign nationals who relocate their tax residence to Madrid a 20 percent deduction on their investment returns. Grant Thornton, the accounting firm, calculated the effective saving could approach half of a person’s total annual tax burden.
Roughly six weeks later, on January 13, 2025, Sánchez stood at the National Housing Forum and announced his intention to impose a 100 percent tax on those same people’s property purchases.
The Mbappé Law is active law. The national proposal, if it ever reaches a vote, would charge the same group 100 percent on any property they buy. Both originate from different levels of the same government.
Spain’s Expat Visa Options in 2026
Several routes to legal residency in Spain remain available to non-EU nationals, each with its own income or employment conditions:
- Non-Lucrative Visa. Allows residence without local employment for applicants who demonstrate sufficient income or savings. No investment threshold required.
- Beckham Law. A flat 24 percent income tax rate on earnings up to €600,000, available to qualifying new residents for six years. Compliance scrutiny has increased in 2026.
- Digital Nomad Visa. Operational for remote workers meeting the 2026 income threshold of €2,849 per month.
- Mbappé Law (Madrid). Tax savings approaching half the annual burden for investors and high earners who move their tax residence to the capital.
The investment-for-residency exchange the Golden Visa represented is no longer one of them. It closed on April 3, 2025.
Where Expats Are Looking Instead
Greece has become the most direct alternative on both the tax and residency fronts. Qualifying new residents pay a 7 percent flat tax on foreign-sourced income for up to 15 years. Spain’s Beckham Law, by comparison, charges 24 percent on comparable income and expires after six years. Greece’s Golden Visa programme remains active with investment entry from €250,000, at a point when Spain’s property-based residency route has closed permanently.
Italy offers qualifying foreign retirees a 7 percent flat tax on non-Italian income for up to 10 years, covering pension and investment income received from outside Italy. The scheme applies to those who relocate to eligible regions and has drawn significant interest from British and Northern European retirees who previously would have looked at Spain’s coast.
Portugal’s Non-Habitual Resident programme, which offered a preferential tax regime for a decade and brought a significant share of European expats to Lisbon and the Algarve, closed to new applicants at the end of 2023. Its replacement, IFICI, targets research and innovation professionals at a 20 percent flat rate. Retirees on foreign pensions are largely excluded from the new scheme.
The UK’s closure of its non-domicile tax status in April 2025 added further pressure. High-net-worth UK residents who previously held non-dom status began weighing European alternatives, and Greece and Italy offer a more competitive package than anything currently available in Spain outside of the Mbappé Law.
The Supply Problem That Nothing Has Addressed
| Indicator | Figure | Comparison |
|---|---|---|
| Spain’s social housing stock | 2.5% of total supply | France: 14% / Netherlands: 34% |
| Bank of Spain housing shortfall | approximately 500,000 units | |
| Annual housing completions | 90,000 to 120,000 homes | |
| Q4 2025 property appraisal value | €2,230/m² | Above the 2008 peak of €2,101/m² |
| Full-year 2025 housing transactions | 714,000 | Highest since 2007 |
Spain’s housing affordability problem is a supply problem, not a foreign buyer problem. The Bank of Spain estimates the country runs approximately 500,000 homes short of what the market requires. Against annual completions of 90,000 to 120,000 units, the gap closes slowly. Social housing accounts for 2.5 percent of Spain’s total stock, well below France at 14 percent and the Netherlands at 34 percent.
None of the legislation passed or proposed since the January 2025 emergency declaration has addressed that shortfall.
What Spain’s housing policies removed were the investor-oriented access points: the Golden Visa, the tourist apartment licence as a rental income stream, the residency permit that required no genuine residency. Those are gone. For people in Spain or planning to move there, the legal routes remain. The cost of using them is another matter. Spain adds 90,000 to 120,000 homes a year to a market running 500,000 units short. The housing index ended 2025 at its highest point on record. The emergency Sánchez declared in January of that year produced policies that filled headlines. The supply deficit produced the prices.
Sources: CaixaBank Research (April 2026), Spain’s Ministry of Housing and INE (Q4 2025 data), Bank of Spain, Reuters (March 27, 2026), Bloomberg, Spain’s Association of Property Registrars (Q3 2025), Grant Thornton, Spain’s Official State Gazette (BOE), Spain’s Constitutional Court ruling on Barcelona’s tourist rental ban, Euro Weekly News (February 2026). Last updated: June 9, 2026.
