Your Spanish Will Can Follow Your National Law

Two people can own the identical apartment on the same street in Dénia, die in the same month, and have it end up in completely different hands. Not because one of them was cleverer about tax. Because one of them put a single sentence in a will and the other one did not.

My name is Daniel Bertomeu. I am a tax advisor, and I work alongside my father Juan Bertomeu, a lawyer with offices in Moraira and Dénia here on the Costa Blanca since 1991. We are independent lawyers and tax advisors, and most of the people who sit across from us are British, German, Dutch or Irish, with a house on this coast and a family somewhere else.

So this page is about that one sentence. It has a Latin name, professio iuris, and it comes from European Regulation 650/2012, which governs the succession of everybody who has died on or after 17 August 2015. What it does is let you decide which country's law gets to say who inherits from you. That is a completely separate question from how much tax anybody ends up paying, and I am going to keep the two apart the whole way down, because putting them in the same box is the single most common confusion I see in a first meeting.

So which country's law decides who inherits your Spanish house?

By default, the law of the country where you were habitually resident when you died. Not the country on your passport, and not the country where the property happens to sit.

That is the general rule in article 21 of the Regulation, and it catches people because it is not what they assume. Most foreign owners expect the Spanish house to be governed by Spanish law and everything else by the law back home. It does not work that way. The Regulation picks one law, and that law governs the succession as a whole, not just the Spanish flat.

Now, habitual residence is not a box you tick on a form. It is a factual question. If you sold up in England twelve years ago, moved to Jávea, and your life is here, that points one way. If you spend four months a year in a holiday apartment and your home, your family and your doctor are still in Manchester, that points the other way. In our experience the awkward cases are the ones in the middle, and they are more common than you would think.

And if Spanish law is the one that applies, then the Spanish rules about who must inherit apply with it. Which brings us to the sentence.

Okay, but can you choose your own national law instead?

Well, yes. That is exactly what article 22 of the Regulation exists for.

You can designate the law of the country of your nationality to govern your succession, and if you hold more than one nationality you can pick either one. That is the professio iuris, and for a German, a Dutch or an Irish national with a house on this coast it is often the difference between the plan you wrote and the plan Spanish law writes for you.

What it is not is automatic. Article 22 says the choice has to be made expressly in the will, or else has to follow from the terms of the will itself. A tacit choice is therefore possible, but it is an argument somebody has to win after you are gone, so the advice we give is always the same: say it in plain words, while you are alive and able to make it.

What nobody will do is presume it for you. Nobody at a Spanish notary's office will look at your passport afterwards and decide you would have preferred your own national law. Your nationality on its own does not do it, and neither does where your family lives. Absent a choice they apply the default rule, and the default rule is habitual residence.

If you want to see whether your situation even raises the question, we built a short checklist you can run through in about five minutes at our Spanish will checker. It will not draft anything for you, but it will tell you which of these points actually apply to you before you pay anybody for an hour of their time.

What if you are British, Irish or Danish?

The United Kingdom, Ireland and Denmark did not take part in the Regulation, and that matters a great deal less than people assume.

The reason is that the Regulation has universal character. Article 20 means that the law it points to gets applied here whether or not that law belongs to a participating country. So a Spanish notary is not limited to a menu of EU laws. A British national living in Spain is still caught by the default rule, which points at Spanish law, and can still designate his own national law in the will under article 22, even though the UK stayed out.

One precision matters more here than it sounds. There is no such thing as British succession law. The Regulation sends you, under article 36, to the law of the territorial unit the deceased was most closely connected with, so the real choice is England and Wales, or Scotland, or Northern Ireland. That is not a formality: Scotland keeps legal rights over moveable property and England and Wales do not, so the unit you land in changes the answer.

Now let me be careful here, because this is the point where the answer gets oversold. There is a wrinkle for owners from England and Wales specifically, and it is a real one. English law, when it is asked about immovable property, tends to send the question back to the law of the place where the property is located.

The Regulation closes that door on its own terms. Article 34 excludes renvoi for a law chosen under article 22, so on the face of the text the choice stands. What we will not promise you is how cleanly that plays out over a Spanish house, because it is argued both ways and it turns on how the will is drafted. It is a drafting question, not a shortcut, and it is Juan's side of the desk rather than mine.

And what actually changes if Spanish law applies?

Forced heirship changes. In most of Spain, including the Valencian region where this coast sits and where the Civil Code governs succession, the law contains the legítima: a portion of the estate reserved by law for certain close relatives, and not a portion you are free to hand somewhere else in a will.

For somebody who grew up under the law of England and Wales, or of Northern Ireland, where you can broadly leave your estate to whoever you like, this is the moment the conversation gets serious. The classic version is the couple in a second marriage who want everything to go to the surviving spouse first, and to the children only afterwards. That is an ordinary, reasonable wish in the country they came from. Under Spanish forced heirship it is not that simple.

The exact shares depend on which civil law inside Spain applies, because Spain does not have only one, and for a foreigner with no Spanish vecindad civil which of them applies is itself a question the Regulation answers by closest connection. That is work we do on your file rather than a fraction anybody should publish on a web page.

And here is the part that gets sold backwards. Choosing your national law does not hand you freedom of testation by itself. It changes which country's forced heirship rules apply to you, which is not the same thing. For an English or a Northern Irish client it does broadly lift the restriction. For a German, a Dutch, a Scottish or an Irish client it swaps one set of protected shares for another, because those systems reserve a share too, for different people and in different proportions. Which is why we check the position under your own law before we draft, not after.

Does choosing your national law change the tax bill?

No. Not by one euro, and this is where I have to be blunt, because the two get mixed up in almost every first meeting I sit in.

Succession law and inheritance tax are two different systems that happen to switch on at the same moment. The professio iuris decides who inherits. Spanish tax rules decide what the people who inherit have to pay, and they look at the assets and at where things are, not at which country's succession law governed the estate. Which regional rules apply, and what relief comes with them, is its own question with its own connecting factor, and it does not move because you chose German or English law in your will.

The rates, the reductions and the deadlines are a separate conversation, and we take them end to end, from death certificate to the Land Registry, on inheriting Spanish property as a non-resident.

Why bother with a Spanish will for the Spanish assets?

Because it makes life shorter and cheaper for the people you leave behind, and they will be doing this at the worst possible moment.

A foreign will can be used in a Spanish succession. It just costs your family time. In our experience it means obtaining the original abroad, getting it legalised, getting a sworn translation, and then proving to a Spanish notary what a document written for a different legal system actually means. Every one of those steps is a week and a fee, and all of them happen while nobody in the family can access the house.

A will signed in front of a Spanish notary, covering the Spanish assets, sidesteps most of that. It is registered centrally, and in our experience that means the family locates it from Spain without drama, instead of hunting for a document across a border. And it is the natural place for the choice of law clause to live.

The one thing that has to be handled properly is the relationship between the two wills. A Spanish will and a will back home have to be drafted so that neither one accidentally revokes the other, which is exactly the sort of thing that happens when each is written in isolation by somebody who never saw the other. We go through that question, and the rest, on do I need a Spanish will.

What about the will you already signed years ago?

It depends on one date: 17 August 2015. The Regulation governs the succession of people who die on or after that day, and it treats wills written before it differently from wills written after it.

Take the will made afterwards first, because the rule there is the simple one. If it does not choose a law, the default wins. Nobody is going to reconstruct what you would have wanted from your nationality, your accent or the fact that all of your family live abroad, and if your habitual residence moved to Spain in the meantime, the will never noticed.

Now the older one, and this is the part that rescues people who did everything right at the time. Article 83 carries a transitional rule: if you made the will before 17 August 2015 under a law you could have chosen under the Regulation, that law is deemed to have been chosen. So a British owner who signed an English will in 2010, when there was nothing to choose, is not automatically left with Spanish law just because he later moved to Jávea.

What we will not do is assume the rescue applies to you. It turns on when the will was signed, which law it was actually drawn under and what it says, and a will later than 17 August 2015 is outside the transitional rule altogether. That is a reading of the document you already have, not a redraft, and it is worth doing before you conclude anything in either direction.

So the trigger for looking at this again is not a birthday. It is a move, a sale, a new property, a marriage, a divorce or a child.

What we look at before we draft one

Whatever you decide in the end, these are the points we will not let a client sign around.

• Where you are habitually resident right now, answered honestly rather than conveniently.
• Which passports you hold, and whether that leaves more than one door open to you.
• What you own in Spain and what you own elsewhere, because the choice governs the succession as a whole.
• Whether a will already exists anywhere in the world, when it was signed, and exactly what it says about revoking earlier ones.
• Whether your family shape is one that forced heirship would interfere with.
• For British clients, which part of the United Kingdom you are really connected to, and whether choosing that law would actually reach the Spanish property.

We do this from our offices in Moraira and Dénia, in person or entirely remotely, which is how most of it happens, because our clients are usually somewhere else. A Spanish will is one of the cheapest pieces of work we do, 225 euros plus VAT, with the final fee confirmed before we start, and it is the one clients most often tell us afterwards they wish they had done at the same time as the purchase. You can see how we handle it on our Spanish wills page. If you are looking at one town in particular, we have local sites with the detail that only matters there, for Moraira, Dénia and Jávea.

A quick legal note before you go

One last thing, and Juan makes me say it, because this is a law firm and a law firm has to say it. This article is general information, current as of July 2026. It is not legal advice for your estate, and reading it does not make you our client.

Your nationality, where you actually live, which assets sit where, and the exact wording of any will you already have will change the answer. So before you sign anything, or decide that a will you wrote a decade ago still does what you think it does, get it looked at for your own case. That is what we are here for.