British expats face a 100pc tax penalty on their Spanish property if they leave it empty for three years, under new legislation.
If you leave it empty for a couple of years. And it’s double council tax, just like we have in Dear Old Blighty. So not, in fact, a huge imposition. In fact, it’s less of an imposition because it is on those left empty, not all second homes.
I have never understood the attraction of a holiday home – seems far too much hassle to be worth it.
Having owned multiple homes in the past, in different countries, I can tell you it is a right pain in the knacks.
Even non-holiday homes are a right proverbial. My Mum only just avoided empty property taxes on her place after she moved out as we managed to sell it about two weeks before the exemption expired. We’d managed through various maneuvers (“in hospital”, “in respite”) to stretch it to three years, but that was a hard limit.
Thank you – I own one home which I live in because it is better than renting and that’s enough work. Having to look after another in another country sounds awful I would want footballer wealth before I did that.
If you have a lock and leave modern flat somewhere civilised then it can be done. I have friends who have just such an arrangement and they love it. They spend roughly 4 months at a time in each of their places.
But houses are different : security and maintenance are the problems. The above mentioned couple are lucky because their family spend a lot of time staying in their UK home when they are away. My insurance company started to get very arsey about me not being away longer than 60 days.
I agree except that if you have the cash and can buy in an appreciating market it kind of makes sense. Plus you have somewhere else to go to for long periods of time if you need to. But you need to have the cash.
My 79 year old sister in law has lived in Spain for around 25 years and is in a care home after having a fall. She has been in there for over three years and no one knows if she’ll ever come out, as she is petrified of the same thing happening again with no one around her (my brother passed away in 2015). The small villa she has has been empty except for relatives staying when they visit.
In her case this tax seems harsh……
I know of an opposite situation which is quite sad. The lady won’t go into care and insists on being at home even though she really is frail and can’t get up if she falls. She’s been abandoned by her family and so relies on the good nature of people around her.
The problem is that those who do try to help are mostly in their ’70s and can’t help if she does fall and could do themselves damage if they try. Social services have washed their hands on the basis that she doesn’t want their help and they’ve enough problems to deal with.
My mother was a similar case. Rattled around alone in a house that was far, far too big for her but wouldn’t move. Fell, went to hospital, was palming her tablets and eventually demanded to go home. We got private carers for her – local authority were a waste of time – but she refused to let them clean her, and was rude to and about them. Had zero quality of life, plenty of cash to do something about it, wouldn’t do anything about it. Mad. I found her dead one morning. A relief all round, horrible as it feels to say it.
The person I know is at least in small rented accommodation so she’s not rattling around and seems to have her marbles for now, but I know what you mean.
My Mum’s sole need was to be waited on hand and foot. More realistically, she just needed somebody cooking her food, and doing her laundry and cleaning. It took us ages to get her to accept that she couldn’t look after herself with a home visitor coming for one hour every day.
When she moved to a supported retirement home it transformed her. She was fit, healthy (well, for a 77-year-old), alert, active. All she needed was what I call “hotel care” – waited on hand and foot.
It was only when she started falling and wouldn’t do anything about it that the management (“interfering busybodies”) insisted she move to a supported needs care home. She went from essentially a bedsit bigger than my flat to a bedroom barely bigger than her bed. I had to move the majority of her “stuff” to my place as there was nowhere for it. She was dead in four weeks. But at least she had five wonderful years in her “bedsit” instead of us finding her at the bottom of the stairs one day.
Damn, Interested, that’s awful. We’re going through something similar at the moment. My father in law is not very well, not a huge deal right now but it’s a worry. He’s trying to refuse treatment, living in a big house, won’t even answer phone calls from old friends. We live just round the corner so Mrs Ltw is looking after him daily. At least he’s allowed her to organise people to look after the lawns and garden. A cleaner or delivered meals he doesn’t even want to know about.
She’s looked into government services and would agree with you, useless. Overpriced and with so many conditions even her sister has agreed they’re better with private provision. As far as I’m aware, the cash is there if need be.
We went through this over the past 4 or 5 years with Mother. Dementias. Started slow, got worse, as they do. We used a company called “Help at Home” who may be national, maybe not. Started out just a pop in every day to, well, really, to make sure she wasn’t getting worse too fast. Then as she couldn’t cook doing that, then doing the washing and on. As each task was required just up the hours called in. As pill taking started requiring monitoring and so on. Yes, kids were trekking there and so on. But no one lived close and so that daily work had to be contracted out. Cost a lot but the money was there. Toward the end it was four and five visits a day including a nurse to put her to bed. Right at the end, the last 3 months say of the 4/5 year process into a home. Only when she was already bedridden. When there a couple of months on the dementia floor, then the last few weeks on the dying floor. Seems brutal to put it that way but it is what it is.
Sorry for your loss Tim. So far we’re not at that point. Mrs Ltw is keeping a very close eye on the medication though.
As Big Big Sis remarked, she went out at 92 so couldn’t really complain about having been shortchanged on the life quantity front. As happens with dementias we lost her very much earlier…..
When my Mum was moved to the supported needs home in our gut we knew it was like that scene in All Quiet In The Western Front where a patient is moved out of the general ward. “They’re not coming back.”
A property left unoccupied due to a permanent move into care gets an exemption from Council Tax in the UK. I don’t know the Spanish property tax system, and even then, your s-i-law’s move into care wouldn’t be classed as permanent if she intends to return home.
On a separate point, I think the proposed changes are communist. I’ve got a low threshold for calling someone a commie and UK Councils are infested with them on my definition, which is trying to nick someone’s property off them within your lifetime. A property tax of 2% or more of the value means the Courageous State gets the value of it off you in 50 years. So any Councillors approving that are commies and I’m sticking to that.
It is possible to fall foul of a nasty gotcha on the Council Tax exemption at the point of death in a care home of the home owner. If there is a charge on the property securing a loan due for repayment from a trust to the estate, then the local council may attempt to maintain that the council tax is due immediately rather than recognizing that the estate enjoys the additional normal six month from date of death exemption for probate. This is wrong in law, but getting it corrected it by appeal costs a significant fraction of the saving in additional solicitor’s fees. I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that councils and solicitors were collaborating on this wheeze and splitting the take!
I found out they can charge you double council tax before probate is finished. Gotta punish those evil second home owners even if they can’t sell one of them.
And why does probate take so long? Because the various arms of the State are even more lazy and incompetent since “working from home” started in lockdown. So they delay the paperwork and then charge you punitive taxation rates because they haven’t sorted it out in time.
Bastards.
We got probate through quite quickly for our mum. But two purchases of her flat fell through ( due to other parties ) and it ended up being empty for a year and a bit..
Local council were actually pretty helpful (!) and gave us an extension before double Council Tax kicked in. Luckily it was only two or three months worth.
The housing crisis in Spain is popularly attributed to holiday lets, including Airbnb, with serious protests beginning in April 2024 in Barcelona, Málaga, San Sebastian and the Canary Islands.
Again, no mention of immigration. To the Left, immigrants, at least those from the third world, are magical people who don’t live anywhere, never get ill, never age, don’t claim benefits and certainly don’t have children, in fact impose no costs on the host population at all. Remarkable!
Indeed. There’s around 10,000 Airbnbs in Barcelona, a fifth of which are just rooms in people’s homes. In a city of 1.7m people. OTOH, more than a third of Barcelona residents were born outside Spain.
It turns out that there is a benefit to people buying second homes:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2dxz4nejpo
I can relate to the point about visitors feeling unwelcome. Pre Covid we enjoyed going to Wales and would do a trip a year and felt that people were at worst indifferent but normally welcoming. When we went back after Covid the car parks we’d used in the past were either closed to motorhomes or eye-waveringly expensive. Areas where we had stayed in the past were closed and the signage made it quite clear we weren’t wanted.
Still, their loss because we always shopped local and made a point of eating in pubs and restaurants at least one night in three.
Abersoch is Cheshire-on-Sea; it’s where all the Golden Triangle types have their yachts.
Indeed. My mate had a place in Nefyn for about 20 years and it was his primary residence for a while but that didn’t stop busy body councillors trying to throw him out during COVID.
I used to take my Laser and golf clubs up for a week in Aug. Golf in the morning, sailing in the afternoon and drinking in the evening, an excellent time when the weather permitted.
One year there was a sailing accident at an RYA event in Abersoch when a sailor got trapped in the rigging of an upturned boat and drowned before the safety crew got him out. Needless to say those of us who didn’t have one immediately went out and bought safety knives.
My frail great-grandmother lived in a large house with a live-in nurse. The old girl could be rather difficult so nurses kept resigning. At last Dad found a nurse who could cope with her. Then she too said she wanted to resign. “What” asked Dad, “could persuade you to stay on?” “I’d have to get the house when she dies.”
After due thought Dad agreed. What else was the wealth for but to ensure that the auld biddie could live in some comfort?
For those interested Murphy has been destroyed on his blog on Burnham committing a crime against society.. Old punk rockers will remember Howard Wall as the singer with the Lurkers
Howard Wall says:
October 2 2026 at 12:56 pm
Richard,
Your anger rests on a conflation. The option the Guardian describes for under-25s concerns the Universal Credit health element, not PIP. PIP is the extra-costs benefit, and it is non-means-tested. The UC health element is different: an income top-up for assessed limited capability for work. It compensates for not working, not for the costs of disability. Treating the two as interchangeable lets you defend one with arguments that only apply to the other.
Then consider who is affected. Close to a million 16–24-year-olds are not in education, employment or training, and a growing share cite ill health, mostly mental health conditions. Historically, very few people placed in the no-work-requirement group ever leave it for employment. For a 19-year-old, that is not protection. It is decades of exclusion, with well-documented scarring of lifetime earnings and health. Replacing a cash award that assumes permanent incapacity with intensive, funded support is a refusal to write young people off, not cruelty.
Your macroeconomic argument also cuts the other way. Youth unemployment is indeed high, nearer 15% than the 10% you cite. But hundreds of thousands of vacancies remain unfilled, and that mismatch is exactly what targeted employment support addresses. Demand-side policy and active labour-market policy work together rather than against each other.
Finally, nobody is assuming families will pick up the bill. The proposal replaces cash with a multibillion-pound package. You may dispute its design, but “crime against the people” is rhetoric, not analysis.
+1
Reply
Richard Murphy says:
October 2 2026 at 1:37 pm
I am fully aware of the difference. I considered it when writing. Your patronising and arrogant comment highlights exactly what is wrong. Do not call again.
Excellent. I see he took the schooling in his usual mature way.
Politely describing reality is “arrogant”?
o/t, but this brave man who hurt no one has just got about 3/4 of the sentence given to Henry Nowak’s murderer (who himself is allowed to appeal his paltry sentence): https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-16178581/Ulez-bomber-jailed-15-years-Electrician-turned-extremist-63-blew-roadside-camera-homemade-explosive-device-radicalised-Facebook.html
Yes, but if he’d done that to a neighbours CCTV camera he’d have been given a slap on the wrist. Doing damage to the equipment of the surveillance state is viewed by the woke communists in power as insurrection.
” The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.” – Carl Schmitt
No, its a massive imposition.
Neither you nor Spain would be having issues with housing if you both didn’t highly restrict the price of housing nor important millions.
The only other reason to impose a fine on leaving a property empty is envy. To punish those that can afford one.