Who Pays the IBI in the Year You Buy a Spanish Property?

Whoever owned the property on 1 January owes the town hall the whole year of council property tax. Not the part before completion, not a share, all of it. That is the rule, and it does not care that you bought the house in October.

What happens between you and the seller is a separate question, and it has a separate answer. A Supreme Court ruling from 2016 settled it: unless the two of you agree otherwise, the seller who paid the bill can pass on the part that matches the months you were the owner.

And if the seller left earlier years unpaid, that is a different problem with a different answer, and it belongs before the signing rather than after.

My name is Daniel Bertomeu and I am a tax adviser. I work alongside my father Juan Bertomeu, a lawyer with offices in Moraira and Dénia, here on the Costa Blanca, since 1991. We act for the buyer. Not for the agent, not for the seller, and not for whoever drafted the contract you have been handed.

So: how the year of the purchase splits, whose name the next bill carries, and the line in the contract that stops it becoming an argument.

Who does the town hall actually chase?

The IBI falls due on 1 January and the tax period is the calendar year. One date, one owner, one bill.

That means the town hall has a single person on its list for that year, and it is whoever held the property on the first day of it. Sell on 2 January and you are still the one it is looking at for the whole twelve months.

The same law says something else in the same breath. The person on the list can pass the burden he has carried on to somebody else under the ordinary rules of civil law. That is the door the split walks through.

Two questions, then, and buyers mix them constantly. Who the town hall bills is fixed by a date. Who ends up carrying the money is yours to agree.

What the Supreme Court said in 2016

The seller who pays the year's bill may pass the proportional share on to the buyer, matched to the time each of you held the property, and that rule applies where there is no agreement to the contrary.

Read the last part again, because it is the useful bit. It is a default, not a command: if your contract says nothing about the IBI, the seller can quite properly come to you months after completion with a bill and a calculator.

In the files we see, plenty of sellers never bother, and plenty do, especially when a Spanish agency is running the sale. You should not be finding out which kind you have after the deed is signed.

The year of the sale, in euros

Take a flat in Calp. The IBI ordinance published there in 2020 sets the urban rate at 0.867 percent, and it is worth checking the version in force for the year you buy. On a cadastral value of 100,000 euros, that is a bill of 867 euros for the year.

You complete on 1 October. The seller was the owner on 1 January, so the town hall billed him for the whole 867 euros and he paid it in the summer. You owned the property for three months of that year.

Three twelfths of 867 euros is 216.75 euros. That is what he can ask you for if your contract is silent.

It is not a large number, and that is exactly why it turns into a bad conversation. Nobody wants to argue over two hundred euros, so people agree grudgingly or refuse on principle, and it lands in the week you were meant to be enjoying the house. One line in the contract, agreed before anyone has paid anything, and there is nothing left to argue about.

The same arithmetic runs the other way. Complete in February and the share you are asked for is most of the year.

Why the bill still turns up in the seller's name

Because this tax is run by two bodies, not one, and they work to different clocks.

The cadastre, the national body that values property, sets the value and draws up the annual roll of who owns what. That roll is put together once a year and sent to the bodies that collect the tax before 1 March. The town hall then bills and collects on the basis of it, and collection is its own exclusive job, which it is allowed to hand to a provincial agency. Across most of Alicante province it has, to SUMA.

So a change of ownership completed in October will not appear on a bill issued from a roll that closed months earlier. Buyers see the old owner's name on the next receipt and assume something has gone wrong with the purchase. Usually nothing has. It is two registers moving at different speeds.

How do I get the IBI put into my name?

Not by waiting. The bill follows the cadastral roll, and the roll follows a filing: the change of ownership reaches the cadastre through a declaration or a communication made after the deed, and until that arrives the old name stays on the receipt.

So ask at the signing, rather than a year later, who is filing it and when. It is a small question, and it has a name attached: your lawyer, the seller's, or you.

Then two things are yours to do. Check that the following year's receipt carries your name, because that is when you find out whether the filing was made. And arrange your own way of paying it, rather than inheriting an arrangement running on an account the seller is about to close.

That second one is where the damage happens. Nobody chases a foreign owner about a receipt. It goes unpaid quietly, the amount stops being the amount, and the property it is attached to is now yours.

The seller has come back for the IBI two years later. Do I pay?

Read the contract before you read his email again. If it says which of you carries the IBI for the year of the sale, that is the answer, whichever way it points. The default rule only fills a silence.

If the contract is silent, he is probably entitled to the months you owned. Not the whole year, not the months before completion, only your share counted from the handover date.

Before you transfer anything, ask for two things. The receipt showing he actually paid that year, because you are reimbursing a payment rather than settling a bill. And his arithmetic in writing: the year's bill, divided by twelve, times your months.

And if he is reaching a long way back, ask whether he can still claim it at all. This is a claim between the two of you, not something the town hall is chasing, and a claim between two private parties does not stay alive for ever. That is a question worth putting to a lawyer before you pay it, not after.

What if he never asks?

Then nothing happens. The town hall was paid for that year by the person it billed, so it has no interest in you. The ruling gives the seller a right to ask; it does not put you under a duty to volunteer, and there is nothing to declare or regularise later.

The line in the contract that ends the argument

One line settles the split. Say which of you carries the IBI for the year of the sale, and if you are splitting it, say from which date. The handover date is the natural one. Anything you write down beats the default rule, so write it down.

Arrears from earlier years are a different question with a different answer. If the seller left them unpaid the house itself stands behind that debt, and no registry extract will show it, so it gets found and settled before the money moves. What to ask for, and from whom, is in our guide to the charges and debts a Spanish property can carry.

The line about the year belongs in the deposit contract, not in an email. Which contract that is matters too, so it is worth knowing before you sign whether you are being handed an arras contract or an option to purchase.

If you are at the beginning of all this rather than the end, the whole sequence is in our guide to buying property in Spain as a non-resident.

If you are the one selling

The mirror image is short. Get to the signing with the year paid, because a buyer who finds arrears late will either delay the completion or want money held back, and both cost you more than the debt did.

If you want the proportional share of the sale year back from the buyer, agree it in the contract. Sellers who leave it to the default rule end up chasing a couple of hundred euros from somebody in another country who has stopped answering emails.

The rest of the seller's side is a longer list than most people expect, and it is set out in our guide to selling a property in Spain.

Your first IBI bill: how much, and when?

The bill is worked out on the cadastral value of the property, which is an administrative value and not the price you paid. The law sets a band for urban property, from 0.40 percent as the minimum up to 1.10 percent, and each town hall picks its own rate inside it.

Which means the same house is a different bill depending on which side of a municipal boundary it stands on. For scale, inside one province: Calp sets its urban rate at 0.867 percent, and Torrevieja sits at 0.40 percent, the legal minimum.

For Moraira, Dénia and Jávea the rate is the town hall's own and it moves. The number that governs your property is the one printed on your own receipt.

Timing is municipal too, and there is no single national date. In the municipalities that have delegated collection to SUMA, which is most of Alicante province, the second voluntary payment period of 2026 for urban IBI runs from 27 July to 8 October. Confirm the dates for your own municipality before you rely on them, because some councils collect the tax themselves and run their own calendar entirely.

Miss the window and the debt moves into enforcement, where surcharges are added on top. The year you buy is the year that is easiest to forget.

Is the IBI the same as the non-resident tax?

No. The IBI is a local tax on owning the property. The annual return a non-resident files to the Spanish state for the same house is a different tax, a different form and a different deadline, and paying one does not excuse you from the other. That side of it, the rates, the form and the dates, lives on easy210spain.com.

Keep your IBI receipt anyway, because it carries the cadastral value and the cadastral reference of the property, and both are needed for that other return.

This is what an independent lawyer is for

Two hundred euros is not what makes this worth getting right. It is that a sentence nobody wrote down becomes a bad conversation months later, in a language that is not yours, with somebody who has already left.

The estate agent works for the seller. The notary is neutral by design, which is not the same as being on your side. Nobody in that room is checking who carries the year, or whose name the next receipt will land in, unless you brought somebody whose only job is you. That is our conveyancing service, from 1,600 euros plus VAT, in person at our Moraira and Dénia offices or entirely remotely with a power of attorney.

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 August 2026. It is not legal advice on your particular purchase, and reading it does not make you our client.

Every town hall runs its own rate and its own calendar, and every property has its own history. So before you pay a deposit, get your own file checked.

Where these figures come from

Every rule, rate and deadline above comes from these sources:

About this article

Written by Daniel Bertomeu, tax adviser, AEDAF #06838 and APAFCV #3080, for Expat Abogados. The legal points in this article were reviewed by Juan Bertomeu, abogado, ICALI #4643, in practice since 1991 in Moraira and Dénia.

General orientation for foreign buyers and owners of property in Spain, current as of August 2026. The framework is national, but the rate, the calendar and the collecting body are municipal: check yours before relying on any figure here.