Every non-resident who sells a property in Spain walks out of the notary''s office with less than the agreed price in their account — by law. The buyer is obliged to hold back 3% of the sale figure and pay it straight to the Agencia Tributaria before the seller sees a cent of the balance. On a €1.8 million villa in Nueva Andalucía, that is €54,000 withheld on the day of signing, held by the Spanish state as a deposit against a tax bill that has not yet been calculated. Selling a Marbella home is, fiscally, nothing like buying one, and the owners caught out by it are almost always the ones who only ever read the buying-side guide.
The mechanics of purchase are well documented — we set them out in our complete tax and cost guide to buying property in Marbella. The exit is the part most foreign owners never plan for, and after years of price growth across the Costa del Sol, the sums involved have grown with the market. What follows is how the numbers actually fall when a non-resident sells, from the retention at the deed to the four-month window to claw money back. None of it replaces advice from a qualified Spanish abogado or gestor on your own transaction; it is the map, not the route.
The three per cent that never reaches your account
When the seller is a non-resident, Spanish law turns the buyer into a tax collector. At completion the buyer retains 3% of the declared sale price and pays it to the tax authority using a form called Modelo 211, handing the seller a stamped copy as proof. The buyer has one month from the deed to make that payment. This is not a separate tax on top of everything else — it is an advance, a payment on account of the capital gains tax the seller may ultimately owe.
The detail that surprises people is that the retention is blind to whether there is a profit at all. Sell at a healthy gain and the 3% is a down payment on your bill. Sell at a loss — entirely possible for someone who bought a new-build off-plan at the top of a cycle — and the 3% is still taken, leaving you to reclaim it afterwards. The withholding is simply built into the completion statement, so the figure that lands in your account is the price minus that slice, minus any mortgage cancellation and minus your own selling costs.
Scale matters here because Marbella prices have run hard. A frontline apartment on the Golden Mile changing hands at €3 million means €90,000 sitting with the Agencia Tributaria from the moment the pen lifts. That money is recoverable, but only by filing the right return, on time, and only into a bank account the authority will pay.
What you actually owe: capital gains under the IRNR
The real liability is Non-Resident Income Tax (IRNR) on the capital gain, and the rate depends on where you are tax resident. If you live in the EU, Iceland or Norway, the gain is taxed at 19%. If you are resident anywhere else in the world, the rate is 24%. That distinction is not academic on the Costa del Sol: since Brexit, a British owner selling a Marbella home is, for these purposes, a third-country resident, and many are startled to find their gain assessed at 24% rather than the 19% they had assumed, according to Marbella tax advisers Ríos Espinosa.
The gain itself is the difference between two figures, and getting both right is where money is won or lost. The transfer value is the sale price less the costs of selling — estate agency commission, your lawyer''s fee, and the plusvalía where you have borne it. The acquisition value is what you originally paid plus everything you spent to acquire it: the transfer tax or VAT on purchase, notary and land registry fees, legal costs, and any capital improvements you can document with proper invoices. A reformed kitchen, a new pool, an added bedroom — all of it lifts the acquisition value and shrinks the taxable gain, but only if you kept the paperwork. The original escritura and a folder of renovation invoices are, in tax terms, worth real money.
It is worth knowing how differently residents are treated, if only to avoid applying the wrong number to yourself. A Spanish tax resident pays on a progressive savings scale that runs from 19% on the first €6,000 of gain to 28% above €300,000. A non-resident escapes that ladder entirely and pays a single flat rate — 19% or 24% — on the whole gain. For a large gain, the non-resident flat rate can even work in your favour; for a small one, it rarely does.
Reclaiming the difference: Modelo 210 and the four-month clock
The retention and the real tax meet on a single form. Within four months of the sale, the seller files Modelo 210, declaring the actual gain and the actual tax, and crediting the 3% already withheld. The official filing instructions sit on the Agencia Tributaria site, though in practice almost every non-resident has a gestor handle it.
From there the arithmetic is simple. If your real tax comes to less than the 3% withheld, you reclaim the difference. Take that €1.8 million Nueva Andalucía villa with €54,000 retained: if the calculated capital gains tax is €30,000, you are owed €24,000 back. Sell at a loss and you reclaim the entire €54,000. If, instead, the gain is large enough that 3% did not cover it, the same return is where you pay the shortfall.
The catch is time and patience. Miss the four-month deadline and you can forfeit the right to a refund and invite penalties. Even filed correctly, refunds from the Spanish authority have a reputation for moving slowly — months, not weeks — and they need an account they will pay into. Treat the 3% as cash you will not see again for a year, budget around its absence, and any refund is a bonus rather than a shock to your cash flow.
Plusvalía municipal — and the twist that makes your buyer liable
Layered on top of the national capital gains tax is a local one: plusvalía municipal, formally the tax on the increase in the value of urban land (IIVTNU), charged by the town hall — Marbella, Estepona, Benahavís — on the rise in the land value, not the building, over your years of ownership. It is governed by Royal Legislative Decree 2/2004, but the version that matters today was rebuilt after the Constitutional Court ruling of 26 October 2021 struck down the old calculation, prompting an urgent reform through Royal Decree-Law 26/2021, as the non-resident tax specialists at IberianTax document in detail.
The reform left sellers with a genuine choice. You may calculate the tax by the objective method — the land''s cadastral value multiplied by a municipal coefficient and the years held, capped at 20 years — or by the real method, based on the actual difference in land value between what you paid and what you sold for. You take whichever produces the lower bill, and crucially, if there has been no increase in land value at all, no plusvalía is due. Municipal rates run up to a legal ceiling of 30% of that taxable base, with the precise percentage set by each town hall.
Then comes the twist specific to foreign sellers. Normally the seller pays the plusvalía. But where the seller is a non-resident, the law names the buyer as "substitute taxpayer" — the person legally obliged to declare and pay it on the seller''s behalf, within 30 working days of the deed. In practice this means a buyer purchasing from a non-resident will often withhold the plusvalía from the price too, alongside the 3%, or insist it be settled at completion. It is one more reason the headline price and the money that reaches your account are two very different numbers, and one more line to model before you ever agree terms.
The exemptions that rarely apply, and the loss you must still declare
Spanish law does offer ways to avoid capital gains tax, but read the fine print before counting on them. The reinvestment exemption lets you defer the tax when you sell your main home and put the proceeds into another main home within two years. The over-65 exemption removes the tax on the sale of a primary residence altogether. Both hinge on the property being your habitual residence — which, for the owner of a Marbella holiday villa or a let investment apartment, it is precisely not. For most non-residents these reliefs simply do not reach the transaction, however attractive they sound.
Selling at a loss does not let you off filing. If the sale price is below your adjusted purchase cost there is no gain and no real plusvalía to pay, but you must still submit the Modelo 210 to recover the 3% retention and to formally register the loss, which can then be carried forward against future gains for four years. There is also the question of your home country: most of Spain''s double-taxation treaties give relief so that the same gain is not taxed twice, but how that credit works depends entirely on where you live, which is exactly the kind of cross-border detail a qualified adviser exists to handle.
None of the above is personalised tax advice, and it should not be treated as such. Rates, coefficients and reliefs change, municipalities differ, and every ownership history is its own puzzle. Before you list, commission a tax estimate from a Spanish abogado or gestor so you know your net proceeds rather than discovering them.
Why the exit deserves as much planning as the entry
The reason all of this matters more in 2026 than it did a decade ago is the market itself. The Nagüeles–Milla de Oro stretch of the Golden Mile averaged €6,789 per square metre in February 2026, up 6.9% in a year; Los Monteros reached €8,772 per square metre (up 11.9%) and Nueva Andalucía €5,654, both at historical highs, according to idealista. Owners who bought five or ten years ago are sitting on substantial paper gains — which is another way of saying substantial tax. The seller who models the 3% retention, the 19% or 24% IRNR and the plusvalía before agreeing a price keeps control of the only figure that counts, the net.
Whether you are preparing to sell a Costa del Sol home or buying your next one and want to understand the full lifecycle of costs before you commit, it pays to work with people who handle both sides of the deed every week. Browse our Marbella and Costa del Sol properties to see what the current market offers, and get in touch with the Domosmar team for grounded, local guidance from search to completion — and beyond it.
