How to find your property's cadastral value and calculate IBI tax in Spain
The 18-digit code is not the cadastral value, and the IBI bill can take years to arrive. How to work out your tax before the surprise hits.
English · Original discussion in Spanish · Published
How to find the cadastral value of a new-build property
At the height of the property boom, with cranes still on the horizon, buying a new-build home in Spain came with fine print nobody mentioned at the estate agency or the notary's office: the property's cadastral value could take more than a year to appear. And without it, paying the IBI (a local property tax) becomes a guessing game with your local council.
The 18-digit code is not the value
What buyers see in the deed is an 18-character alphanumeric code. It is not the cadastral value; it is the cadastral reference. When you enter it on the Cadastre website, what may appear is the entire plot the building stands on: some 250 square metres of unbuilt land, while the flat you bought is 60 built square metres and 54 usable. What's missing is the horizontal division, the procedure that separates each dwelling in the registry and allows an individual value to be assigned. And that procedure gets stuck all too easily.
The wait can be measured in years
The consequences are slow in coming, but they do come. Some people recount how they went five years without paying a single IBI bill because of the developer, only to receive five letters at once, one for each tax year. Take the example doing the rounds: a cadastral value of 15,025.30 euros, a municipal rate of 0.65% and a resulting bill of 97.66 euros. The formula is simple; the problem is getting the base figure.
And when the Cadastre updates the value, the bill can be a shock: with a market valuation of 400,000 euros, the official valuation table usually sets the base at half that, but with an extended rate of up to 1.10%, the bill reaches 2,000 euros. In cities that have carried out cadastral revisions, the increase is phased in over up to nine years to let taxpayers digest the blow. A 2006 study by Consumer Eroski already showed that the IBI was not the same in any of the 18 provincial capitals analysed. The million-dollar question still has no single answer: when will each homeowner find out what they owe?
At the height of the property boom, with cranes still on the horizon, buying a new-build home in Spain came with fine print nobody mentioned at the estate agency or the notary's office: the property's cadastral value could take more than a year to appear. And without it, paying the IBI (a local property tax) becomes a guessing game with your local council.
The 18-digit code is not the value
What buyers see in the deed is an 18-character alphanumeric code. It is not the cadastral value; it is the cadastral reference. When you enter it on the Cadastre website, what may appear is the entire plot the building stands on: some 250 square metres of unbuilt land, while the flat you bought is 60 built square metres and 54 usable. What's missing is the horizontal division, the procedure that separates each dwelling in the registry and allows an individual value to be assigned. And that procedure gets stuck all too easily.
The wait can be measured in years
The consequences are slow in coming, but they do come. Some people recount how they went five years without paying a single IBI bill because of the developer, only to receive five letters at once, one for each tax year. Take the example doing the rounds: a cadastral value of 15,025.30 euros, a municipal rate of 0.65% and a resulting bill of 97.66 euros. The formula is simple; the problem is getting the base figure.
And when the Cadastre updates the value, the bill can be a shock: with a market valuation of 400,000 euros, the official valuation table usually sets the base at half that, but with an extended rate of up to 1.10%, the bill reaches 2,000 euros. In cities that have carried out cadastral revisions, the increase is phased in over up to nine years to let taxpayers digest the blow. A 2006 study by Consumer Eroski already showed that the IBI was not the same in any of the 18 provincial capitals analysed. The million-dollar question still has no single answer: when will each homeowner find out what they owe?
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Summary of a discussion on Burbuja.info - Foro de economía, actualidad y política., translated from Spanish and reviewed before publication. Read the full discussion (23 replies).
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