Spain taxes you for a rental income you never collect. Any non-resident who owns a home on the Costa del Sol and leaves it empty for the winter is still deemed, in the eyes of the Agencia Tributaria, to be enjoying a benefit equivalent to rent — and is taxed on it. It is the single most misunderstood cost of Spanish ownership, and it is only one line in an annual budget most buyers never see until the year after they complete.
The transaction costs of buying in Marbella are well documented, and we have covered them at length in our non-resident purchase cost guide. What follows is the other half of the picture: what a Costa del Sol home costs to hold, year after year, once the keys are yours. None of these figures is large in isolation. Together, and left unmanaged, they are the difference between a property that behaves the way you expected and one that produces an unwelcome letter from Hacienda in your third year of ownership.
The tax on a house you use yourself
The tax that catches foreign owners is called renta imputada — imputed income — and it is a form of Non-Resident Income Tax (IRNR). The logic is peculiar to Spanish law: if you own an urban property here, are not tax-resident in Spain, and do not rent the home out, the state assumes the property gives you a notional benefit and taxes a percentage of its cadastral value as though it were rental income. It applies whether you visit for six weeks a year or never come at all.
The base is not the price you paid. It is the valor catastral, the official cadastral value printed on your annual IBI bill, which typically sits well below market value. To that base you apply 1.1% if the municipality has revised its cadastral values within the last ten years, or 2% if it has not. The resulting figure is then taxed at 19% for residents of the EU and EEA and 24% for everyone else — which, since Brexit, includes British owners, and also covers American, Swiss and Gulf buyers.
A worked example makes the scale clear. Take a Nueva Andalucía apartment with a cadastral value of €150,000 in a municipality with recently revised values, so the 1.1% rate applies. The imputed base is €1,650. A German owner pays 19% of that — roughly €314 for the whole year. A British owner, taxed at 24%, pays about €396. These are annual sums, not monthly, and they are modest. The danger is never the amount; it is forgetting the obligation exists. As the specialist filing service IberianTax notes, joint owners must each file separately for their share, and a garage or storage room registered as a separate unit needs its own return.
You declare it on Modelo 210, and the deadline for a given tax year is 31 December of the following year — so 2025 income is due by the end of 2026. If you pay by direct debit, file by mid-December, because the bank needs several working days to settle before the cut-off. Miss it and file late voluntarily, and surcharges run from roughly 1% to 15%; wait for the tax office to find you first, and the penalties become fines of 50% to 150% of the tax due. Hacienda now cross-checks utility records, bank data and holiday-let platforms, so the old assumption that nobody notices an empty flat no longer holds.
What the town hall takes: IBI and the rubbish charge
Separate from anything national is the IBI (Impuesto sobre Bienes Inmuebles), the local property tax paid to the town hall — the Spanish equivalent of council tax. Owners frequently assume that paying IBI discharges their Spanish tax duty in full. It does not: IBI and the imputed-income tax above are entirely different obligations, paid to different authorities on different dates. Both are mandatory.
IBI is calculated as a percentage of the same cadastral value, and the rate is set by each municipality. In Marbella the applied rate is around 0.78% of cadastral value, within a legal band that runs from roughly 0.4% to 1.1% depending on property type and location. On our €150,000-cadastral-value apartment, that is a little under €1,200 a year. Marbella town hall offers a discount of up to 5% for paying early by direct debit — a small saving worth setting up once and forgetting.
Alongside IBI sits the basura, the annual refuse-collection charge, which in Marbella generally falls between €100 and €200 a year depending on the property. It arrives as its own bill or bundled with the IBI, and it is easy to overlook when you are living abroad and paperwork lands in a letterbox you visit twice a year. This is the practical argument for a Spanish bank account with everything on direct debit: the sums are small, but a missed municipal payment can attach a surcharge and, eventually, a note against the property.
Community fees: usually the biggest annual line
For most Costa del Sol owners, the largest recurring cost is not a tax at all. It is the gastos de comunidad — community fees — paid to the homeowners association that runs the development. They cover the pool, gardens, lifts, private roads, security, and the fabric of shared buildings. Because so much of Marbella and its neighbours is built as gated urbanisations rather than standalone houses, almost every buyer inherits a share of a communal budget.
The range is wide and tracks amenities almost perfectly. A modest apartment in an older block with limited shared facilities might pay €50 to €100 a month. A typical Costa del Sol complex with pools and landscaped gardens tends to run €120 to €250 a month. At the top of the market — the heated pools, 24-hour manned security, spa, gym and concierge that define new-build luxury in areas like Sierra Blanca or La Zagaleta — monthly fees can pass €500 and, in the most serviced schemes, exceed €1,000. Over a year that single line can dwarf your IBI and imputed-income tax combined.
The lesson for buyers is to read the community budget before you commit, not after. Two apartments at the same price can carry very different running costs depending on how ambitious the shared facilities are and how well the community reserve is funded. A beautifully amenitised scheme is a genuine pleasure to own in; it is also a standing monthly commitment that continues whether you are in residence or not. Ask for the last set of community accounts and the minutes of the most recent owners meeting — a well-run comunidad is one of the quiet markers of a property that will hold its value.
Insurance, utilities and the standing charges
The remaining costs are smaller and more familiar. Buildings and contents insurance for an apartment is typically a few hundred euros a year; a large villa with a pool, extensive grounds and higher rebuild value will cost more, and lenders require cover as a condition of any mortgage. If you financed the purchase, factor in the loan itself — non-resident borrowing on the Costa del Sol is covered in our Spanish mortgage guide — but even cash buyers carry the fixed costs below.
Utilities behave differently from a primary home. Electricity and water carry standing charges that you pay for the connection whether or not you are consuming much, so a property used only in summer still generates modest monthly bills through the winter. Owners who visit rarely tend to add a property-management or key-holding service — someone local to air the home, check for leaks after a storm, meet the pool technician and hold a set of keys. For an absentee owner this is less a luxury than basic risk management, and it usually runs from a manageable monthly retainer upward depending on the size of the home and how often it is checked.
One structural cost deserves a separate mention because it rewards planning. Owners of higher-value homes may also fall within Andalucía's wealth-tax framework, which the region has effectively neutralised for most individuals but which still requires attention at the top of the market. We set out where the thresholds actually bite in our guide to wealth tax for high-net-worth buyers.
Putting the year together
Consider a British couple owning a €600,000 two-bedroom apartment in Nueva Andalucía with a cadastral value near €150,000, in a well-kept community with a pool and gardens. Their imputed-income tax comes to roughly €400 a year across both owners, their IBI to just under €1,200, the basura to around €150, and community fees at €200 a month to €2,400. Add insurance and utility standing charges, and the realistic annual running cost lands somewhere near €5,000 to €6,000 — the great majority of it community fees, not tax.
Scale that to a €3 million villa in Sierra Blanca or Benahavís and the shape changes. IBI and imputed income rise with cadastral value, insurance climbs with rebuild cost, and community fees in a heavily serviced gated estate can run well into five figures a year on their own — before a gardener, pool maintenance or a housekeeper the community does not provide. As a broad planning rule, budgeting around 1% of a property's value per year for total running costs is a sensible starting point for the mid-market, though the true figure depends far more on the community than on the tax office.
A final note on the moving parts. The imputed-income regime is under external pressure: the European Commission has formally challenged Spain's rule that non-residents pay a tax residents avoid on their own main home, and a 2025 Spanish court ruling opened the door for non-EU owners to deduct expenses against rental income. Neither has changed what you owe today, but both are worth watching. And when the time comes to sell, a separate set of exit costs applies, including the buyer's 3% retention against your eventual gain — the subject of our guide to selling as a non-resident. None of this is a reason to hesitate. Costa del Sol running costs are unremarkable by prime-market standards; they simply need to be known in advance and put on direct debit. This is general information, not personal tax advice — every owner should confirm their own position with a qualified Spanish abogado or gestor, and the official rules sit on the Modelo 210 and tax-deadline references.
If you are weighing a purchase and want the running-cost picture for a specific development before you commit — the actual community budget, the cadastral value, the realistic all-in annual figure — that is exactly the sort of detail we work through with buyers. Browse current homes across the coast on our Costa del Sol properties page, or get in touch with Domosmar and we will give you the honest numbers for anything that catches your eye.
