Buying property in Spain: the whole process, step by step

In a Spanish transaction nobody at the table is working for you except the lawyer you hire yourself. The agent is paid by the seller and that fee depends on the sale going through. The notary is a public official: he checks title and charges, but he will not tell you that the price is too high or that the extension is illegal.

We are an estate agency (who we are) and our work is finding properties, viewings and coordinating the transaction — that is what we do. We do not do the legal checks, and we do not recommend taking a lawyer that we ourselves have found for you. That sentence costs us money and it is the most important thing on this page.

The trap closes before the notary: by the time you get there you have already signed the private contract and paid 10%, and almost every serious problem is findable before that signature and very expensive after it. A lawyer pulls the registry extract (nota simple), and a fresh one immediately before completion, the town hall's planning certificate and the community's certificate of no debt together with the minutes of the last two years' meetings, and checks the cadastral reference value before the price is agreed. Ask for the lawyer's bar association (colegio) and registration number and check them against the national register. There is no official tariff: the 1% + VAT with a floor of €1,200–1,800 that gets repeated across the market is market practice, and we could not confirm it from any official source. Notary and registry fees, by contrast, are fixed by regulation.

NIE (Número de Identidad de Extranjero) is a foreigner's identification number. It is not a residence permit and it does not make you a resident. Everyone who goes on the title deed needs one — a couple needs two. The application is made on form EX-15, with a state fee of €9.84. The EU citizen's “green certificate” (EX-18, €12) is a different thing altogether, meant for people staying in Spain longer than three months; if you are not moving, do not get one, because it creates a tax-residence risk.

At the embassy in Tallinn you need a hand-signed EX-15, proof of identity, proof of address and the paid fee; the embassy says the NIE is issued in two weeks on average. The same embassy notes that a NIE issued in Tallinn has a temporary validity of three months — practitioners read that as applying to the certificate rather than to the number, but we could not verify how notaries in Alicante and Murcia treat an older certificate. Do not apply until the purchase is within three months.

The application can be filed through a representative with an adequate power of attorney. In Spain the statutory deadline for a decision is five days, but the real bottleneck is the appointment slot, and the national system publishes no waiting-time statistics for it. Anyone who tells you “three weeks” is guessing.

No provision of Spanish law governs the reservation contract. It is a device the agencies invented, and its effect comes only from the wording on the paper: whether the reservation fee is refundable depends solely on what the contract says. Market practice — not a rule — is €3,000–6,000 for 14–30 days. Insist that the money is held by your lawyer and that the contract allows the fee to be returned in full if the checks turn up charges, planning breaches or debts.

Arras, the deposit, gets one sentence in the statute — article 1454 of the Civil Code: where a deposit has been given, the contract may be terminated by the buyer accepting the loss of it or the seller returning it twofold.

And this is where foreign buyers get it wrong. Spanish courts do not presume penitenciales deposits: article 1454 is read narrowly and a deposit is treated as a part payment unless the contract clearly provides for a right to withdraw. We found no verifiable Supreme Court ruling on this, so take it as the shared understanding of practitioners. The consequence is concrete: a buyer who has paid 10% can find a claim for completion coming back at him. Have the private contract state that the deposit is penitencial within the meaning of article 1454, and insist on a resolutive condition tied to the loan: if the financing does not come through, the contract unwinds.

Ownership passes at the notary: the escritura pública is the document that transfers it. The notary requests a fresh extract from the registry, requires the seller to confirm that the property is free of tenancies and occupants, requires the community's certificate, and records in the deed how the price was paid. The buyer chooses the notary, and if you do not speak the language an interpreter has to be present. The custom is a bank draft drawn on a Spanish bank in the seller's name, handed over at the signing table; a Spanish bank account is not required in order to buy, but it is required for the draft and for the direct debits afterwards. If the seller has a mortgage on the property, make sure that it is also removed from the registry.

After the signature the notary files the deed with the registry electronically the same day, which blocks the registry against later entries such as seizures. That is your single most important protection — ask for confirmation that it was done. Ownership that has not been registered is not good against third parties, and the protection of a good-faith purchaser arises at the moment of registration, not of signature. The registrar has fifteen days to make the entry; the deadline for the tax return is one month in the Valencia region and 30 working days in Murcia.

The rules on guaranteeing off-plan stage payments changed on 1 January 2016, and this is where most guides go wrong. The old statute was repealed. Today the developer must secure the return of the sums paid, together with taxes and interest, through insurance or a bank guarantee, but that obligation only runs from the granting of the building licence, whereas the case law under the old regime protected money paid before the licence as well. One rule follows from this: pay the developer nothing until the building licence has been granted and an individual guarantee policy has been issued in your name. The construction warranty is one year on finishes, three years on habitability and ten years on the structure.

The right to occupy is no longer a licence. In the Valencia region and in Murcia alike, taking a property into use is now handled by a declaration of responsibility (declaración responsable) that the developer files himself — it is not a licence and it can be annulled later. Ask for the declaration bearing the town hall's registration stamp, and for the certificate of completion of the works. And in the Valencia region every change of owner triggers the obligation to file a second-occupation declaration, which needs a certificate from a technician — and an unregistered extension is exactly the thing that stops the technician signing.

Three things most guides get wrong:

• In the Valencian Community, which Alicante province belongs to, the resale transfer tax ITP is 9%, not 10% — and 11% where the value exceeds €1,000,000.
• In the Region of Murcia the ITP is 7.75%, not 8%. On the day we checked, the Murcian tax authority's own FAQ still said 8% — official pages lag behind.
• The tax is not calculated on the price you pay, but on the higher of the price and the cadastral reference value (valor de referencia). If you buy for €180,000 a property whose reference value is €210,000, you pay 9% on the larger figure — €2,700 more. Look the reference value up free of charge on the cadastre's online service before the price is agreed.

A resale apartment at €200,000 in Alicante province, no mortgage:

In Murcia the same apartment would come to ≈ €20,120, or ≈ 10.1%, because the ITP is 7.75%. On a new-build you pay VAT at 10% instead of ITP and stamp duty AJD at 1.4% in Valencia or 1.5% in Murcia, which takes the total to ≈ 13.8%. Rules of thumb: resale 11–13% in Alicante province and 10–12% in Murcia, new-build 13–15% in both. The taxes, and the tariff bases for the notary and the registry, are set by law; the actual invoices, however, come out higher, and our “roughly double” multiplier is an observation, not a measurement. Lawyers and gestorías have no official tariff at all.

The region decides the rate. Torrevieja and Guardamar del Segura are in Alicante province: 9%. San Pedro del Pinatar is in Murcia: 7.75%. The border runs between towns that look identical from the beach, and at €200,000 the difference is €2,500.

A straightforward cash purchase takes roughly 6–12 weeks from reservation to notary. The slow steps are the NIE, if you leave it to last; the town hall's planning certificate, because registry data comes back at once and town hall information does not; moving the money, which goes through compliance checks; and August, when town halls, notaries and registries all run at reduced capacity.

IBI is the town hall's property tax, charged on the cadastral value (valor catastral), which is not the same thing as the reference value the purchase tax is based on. The statute allows 0.4–1.10% on urban property and each town hall picks its own rate. On a €200,000 coastal apartment reckon on €350–800 a year — that is an illustration, not a verified figure: we could not verify the rate in force in any specific municipality. Ask the seller for last year's IBI bill. For community fees there is no official source; ask for the latest budget and the minutes of the last two years' meetings, because those show the special levies that have been voted through and that a “no debts” certificate will not show.

IRNR: the tax that catches almost every buyer out. Spain taxes a non-resident on imputed rental income even when the apartment stands empty all year and earns nothing at all. The taxable amount is 2% of the cadastral value, or 1.1% where the cadastral value comes from a general revision that took effect in the current tax year or the ten preceding ones; the rate for an EU resident is 19% and no expenses may be deducted. A cadastral value of €70,000 gives €146 or €266 of tax a year. Each co-owner files their own return on form Modelo 210 — if some guide tells you to use “Modelo 212”, it is fifteen years out of date. Imputed income for 2026 is declared between 1 April and 31 December 2027.

One honest warning: the tax authority's guidance and the text of the statute are currently in conflict with each other over which years the more favourable 1.1% test applies to. We are not going to pretend this is settled — confirm it with your adviser.

1. Unregistered building work. The recurring pattern: a villa whose enclosed terrace, basement or pool appears neither in the registry nor on the building licence. The registry protects you only to the extent of what it actually says.

• In the Valencia region the town hall can require legalisation or demolition for 15 years from the completion of the works. And the passing of those 15 years legalises nothing at all — it only rules out a demolition order, and in the meantime what was built may not be rebuilt or extended; and on undevelopable land (suelo no urbanizable) there is no time limit whatsoever.
• In Murcia infringements time out after four years, but the right to require the lawful state of affairs to be restored is expressly not subject to any time limit in the statute.
• If you have been reading about AFO certificates: that is an Andalusian instrument, and it does not exist in Valencian or Murcian law.

Compare the building against the registry description and the building licence: a discrepancy in the floor area is the warning sign.

2. Community debt. The buyer is liable through the flat itself for the previous owner's debts covering the elapsed part of the current year and the three preceding calendar years; older guides say “one year”, but that changed in 2013. The seller must produce the community's certificate, and without it the notary may not authorise the deed unless the buyer waives it. Never waive it.

3. The seller is a non-resident, and then two obligations become yours. You have to withhold 3% of the purchase price and pay it to the treasury within one month; if you do not, the property itself stands behind the liability. And where the seller is a non-resident individual, the buyer becomes the substitute taxpayer for the plusvalía municipal, the town hall's tax on the increase in land value. The line “the seller pays the plusvalía” is wrong in precisely the situation that is most common on the Costa Blanca.

4. The coast. The protection zone is 100 metres and building a dwelling inside it is prohibited, but on land that was already classified as urban in 1988 the zone is 20 metres. And one thing we deliberately do not do: we will not tell you cautionary tales — named horror stories are exactly the material we could not trace back to a verifiable source.

There are two routes to financing, and the choice is about where the risk sits. LHV describes buying abroad openly: a loan secured on your Estonian property, up to 70% of its value, from 2.99% + Euribor, with the mortgage registered against your Estonian property — read that twice. SEB likewise requires collateral located in Estonia and lends up to 60% where that collateral is not your own home; Swedbank and Coop Pank say nothing at all about buying abroad. “From 2.99%” is a margin, not an interest rate: on 31 March 2026 the 6-month Euribor stood at 2.529%, so around 5.5% all in.

The average rate on new Spanish home loans was 2.98% in May 2026, but that is an average built on residents, not an offer to a non-resident — no Spanish bank publishes its non-resident terms, and the widely repeated 60–70% loan-to-value is unconfirmed. The honest summary: the Estonian route is not automatically cheaper — its advantages are speed and the standing of a cash buyer, and the price is that the risk is carried by your home in Estonia. More on the financing page. English-language guides that talk about currency risk were written for the British buyer: inside the euro area, moving the money is an ordinary SEPA transfer.

Tax in two countries. Under the tax treaty, Spain taxes income from property and gains on sale; Estonia is not excluded and eliminates double taxation by giving a credit. Rental income has to be declared in Estonia — the Tax and Customs Board says outright that being taxed abroad does not release you from declaring it — and the tax paid in Spain is credited up to the amount of the Estonian tax, so keep every year's Modelo 210 and the proof of payment. We are not printing the table number on the Estonian return, because we could not confirm where foreign rental income goes on the 2026 form. Modelo 720 is an obligation of Spanish tax residents, not yours.

Healthcare, driving licence, flights. The European Health Insurance Card is valid only in public healthcare — it covers neither a private doctor nor transport back to Estonia; a pensioner who is genuinely relocating applies to the Health Insurance Fund for an S1 certificate. An Estonian driving licence is valid in Spain for as long as it is valid at home. And one thing worth being ready for: on 30 July 2026 neither Alicante nor Murcia was on Tallinn Airport's list of destinations. Getting to the Costa Blanca means a connection; we are not saying which, because we could not verify which airlines currently fly from the neighbouring countries.