Owning a home in Spain as a non-resident — what Modelo 210 really costs you every year

Thousands of people across Europe own a second home in Fuerteventura, and a remarkable share of them are quietly non-compliant without knowing it. Not because they hide rental income — many never rent at all — but because Spain taxes non-resident owners on something most other countries don't: the imputed income of simply owning a property available for use.

No letter arrives to remind you. The obligation is yours to know, the form is Modelo 210, and when the tax agency does eventually write — often when you sell, when an inheritance is processed, or after a data cross-check — it writes about several years at once, with surcharges. Here is how the system actually works in 2026, and how to be effortlessly on the right side of it.

The tax on doing nothing: imputed income

If you are not tax resident in Spain and you own Spanish property that is not rented out, the law deems you to receive a notional income from it: 2% of the cadastral value — or 1.1% where your municipality's cadastral values have been revised recently (the cut-off year is fixed by law year by year; the cadastral value is printed on your IBI bill). That notional income is then taxed at:

• 19% for residents of the EU, Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein;
• 24% for everyone else — which, since Brexit, includes the UK owners who make up a large share of Fuerteventura's non-resident community.

Concrete example: cadastral value €90,000, revised. Imputed income 1.1% = €990. A German owner pays 19% → €188. A British owner pays 24% → €238. Per owner: spouses owning 50/50 each file their own 210 on their half. Not a frightening amount — which makes the years of accumulated non-filing all the more unnecessary.

Imputed income is declared once a year in arrears: the return for 2025 can be filed at any time during 2026, up to 31 December. From the 2026 tax year the window moves — it opens on 1 April of the following year and still closes on 31 December (Orden HAC/623/2026), so the 2026 return is filed between 1 April and 31 December 2027. Nine months in which to forget.

When you do rent: real income, two very different regimes

Rent the property out — long-term or as a holiday let — and the real income replaces the imputed income for those periods (empty periods still generate their proportional imputation). The two regimes could hardly be further apart:

• EU/EEA residents: 19% on the net. Mortgage interest, IBI, community fees, insurance, repairs, agency and platform fees, amortisation — deductible in proportion to the days actually let, with receipts to back them.
• Non-EU residents (UK included): 24% on the gross. No deductions at all. A UK owner grossing €12,000 with €5,000 of genuine costs pays tax on the €12,000. This single rule reshapes the arithmetic of British-owned holiday lets, and it is routinely discovered only after the first full year.

The same order rewrote the rental side: from the 2026 tax year, rental income with tax to pay is declared once a year, in the first twenty days of April of the following year (quarterly filings survive only for rent accrued up to September 2026), and every 210 filed from 1 January 2027 uses a redesigned form with a per-category annex of deductible expenses — one more reason we advise owners not to drive this form from memory. If you operate a holiday let, the wider 2026 rulebook — Canary registration, municipal quotas, IGIC — sits on top of all this.

The rest of the annual bill, for honesty's sake

Modelo 210 is the piece owners miss, but the full picture of holding a Fuerteventura property as a non-resident is: IBI (the local property tax, charged by the ayuntamiento) and the basura waste charge — these arrive as bills rather than returns; wealth tax only above generous thresholds most second-home owners never reach; and, on the day you sell, the buyer's obligatory 3% retention on the price (Modelo 211) against your capital-gains position, plus municipal plusvalía. Nothing in that list is alarming; all of it rewards being known in advance — our property sales team briefs sellers on the exit numbers before listing, not after.

The mistakes that actually generate letters

After years of regularising files for owners across the island, the same five errors account for nearly everything: properties inherited or bought years ago with no 210 ever filed ("nobody told us"); one spouse filing for both; using the 2% imputation when 1.1% applied or vice versa; UK owners still deducting expenses post-Brexit; and holiday-let owners declaring rental weeks but forgetting the imputed income of the empty weeks. Every one of them is cheap to fix voluntarily and expensive to fix after a requerimiento — voluntary late filing carries modest surcharges; a tax-agency letter starts a different conversation.

Make it a non-event

This is, genuinely, the easiest tax obligation on the island to outsource: give us the escritura, the IBI bill and — if you rent — the income and expense records, and our tax advisory team files your 210s every year, correctly split, correct rate, correct base, with past years regularised once and never thought about again. Book a consultation or write to us — we reply within one business day.

Common questions

I never rent my apartment and it earns nothing. I really have to file?
Yes. The imputed-income charge exists precisely for unrented property available to its owner. It is usually a small amount — but it is due every year you own the home.

I haven't filed for six years. How bad is it?
Manageable — if you move first. The tax agency can reach back four years; filing voluntarily limits the damage to surcharges and interest, without the penalties that follow a formal demand. We do this regularisation routinely.

Does my home country's double-taxation treaty save me from this?
No — treaties give Spain the right to tax income from Spanish real estate, imputed income included. What your home country typically offers is a credit or exemption on its side, so you are not taxed twice on the same rental income.

Rules and rates verified in August 2026 (IRNR law, AEAT filing calendar, Order HAC/623/2026). Individual cases vary — take advice on yours.