Buying a property in Spain: documents, costs and checks

Buying a property in Spain is taxed by the region: a resale is charged transfer tax at 7% in Andalucía and 6% in Madrid as at August 2026, and a new build is taxed instead at 10% IVA. This site explains the documents, prints the numbers, and sells nothing.

You are buying a home to live in

You need the sequence, the total cost and the documents. Start with how a Spanish purchase actually runs, which links to everything else. Then what buying a property in Spain costs for the worked example, the deposit contract for the moment your money stops being yours, and the NIE number, because nothing proceeds without one.

You are buying a property to let

The purchase taxes are the same and the ongoing costs are not. The same four pages apply, and two more matter more to you than to somebody buying a home: the land registry extract, because a charge on the property follows it into your hands, and who checks a Spanish property, because you are unlikely to be standing in the building.

What is inside a nota simple

The document Spain's property register issues about one property tells you who owns it, on what share, and what is charged against it. That last section is where purchases fail: a mortgage that was never cancelled, a seizure noted by a creditor, an easement that belongs to the neighbour rather than to the neighbour's goodwill, a tax charge that attaches to the property itself.

The UK government tells you to obtain one and then never says what is in it. On the nota simple we have built an example document — an invented one, with identifiers that deliberately do not check out — carrying six instructive defects at once, each with the plain-English explanation beside it. There is nothing else like it in English, and it is the artefact this site is built around.

What it costs

A resale is charged regional transfer tax: the Junta de Andalucía publishes 7%, the Comunidad de Madrid 6%, and the rate rises to 9% in the Comunitat Valenciana. A new build is charged 10% IVA instead, plus the region's stamp duty on the deed. The notary and the registrar are not free-market fees at all — both sit on published statutory scales, and on a 300,000 euro purchase they come to under 600 euros between them.

The whole thing, worked line by line on one stated price with a sterling equivalent, is on what buying a property in Spain costs.

Who we are, and what we do not do

We are BSI OÜ, a small Estonian company. We have no office and no establishment in Spain, the United Kingdom or Ireland.

We sell nothing. There is no report, no subscription and no price list. We look nothing up: we hold no property data, we query no register on anybody's behalf, and the address box on this site starts an email rather than a search. We are not lawyers, not abogados, not gestores and not surveyors, and we are not regulated as any of those things because we do none of them.

What we do is read primary sources — the BOE, the registers, the tax authorities, gov.uk — and print what they say, with the date we read them. Where we do not know, the page says so.

You can leave an email address and we will tell you when a figure, a fee, a rate or a procedure on this site changes. One confirmation email first, nothing else until you click it, at most one a month afterwards, and one click stops it. What happens to your address is set out in the privacy notice.

Every Spanish word on this site is explained in the glossary.