Landlords remove living rooms to squeeze in more rental bedrooms

More and more shared flats in Spain are being renovated to turn the living room into an extra bedroom, a legal practice that boosts the owner's profitability and leaves tenants without common space. The lack of specific regulation of room-by-room rentals goes hand in hand with the phenomenon.

There is a scene that repeats itself in flat viewings across half of Spain. The tenant walks in, looks for the living room and can't find it. Sometimes there is a narrow kitchen, a hallway and three or four doors. Nothing else. In Málaga, a 20-year-old student named Alba pays **360 euros** a month for a room in a flat where the living room doesn't exist. She recounts it without drama: at first she thought she didn't need it, why would she want a living room when she was going to be home so little anyway. After a few months of living there, she changed her mind. "I've now realized I actually do need it," she says. It's not a luxury complaint. It's the realization that without a common space, living together becomes a mere formality.

In that same flat in Málaga lives Clémentine, 21, an Erasmus student, who pays **410 euros** a month with support from her family and a European grant. She says that during her search she immediately came across flats without living rooms and that, given the stress of finding nothing affordable, she chose that one "to be on the safe side." The third flatmate, Hilal, 21, came from Austria to study automotive computing and pays **450 euros** for a room that should really be the living room. She spends most of her time in her bedroom. She misses something as simple as relaxing on the sofa while looking at her phone. Without a living room, the flat's social life is squeezed into a kitchen where it's already hard for two people to cook at the same time.

## A legal renovation that changes the flat's purpose

Turning the living room into a bedroom is not illegal. It's a renovation that complies with building regulations and one that many landlords have adopted to increase the number of rentable rooms. The result is a flat that, instead of housing a family or two or three tenants with common areas, houses four people who each pay for their own room and share the hallway, bathroom and kitchen. The property's profitability goes up. The quality of life inside goes down.

The phenomenon is best understood through prices. In Málaga, the rental price per square meter stood at **16.5 euros** after rising **2.8%** in 2025, according to Idealista. In Madrid and Barcelona, prices exceed **20 euros** per square meter. With those figures, renting an entire flat becomes unaffordable for a young person, and the landlord who divides the property into rooms finds a demand willing to pay separately what they cannot pay together.

The crisis is not only Spain's. Eurostat published data for 2025 placing the overcrowding rate of the European population aged 15 to 29 at **26.9%**, **0.4 points** higher than in 2024. Across the EU, young people were **10.1%** more likely than the general population to live in overcrowded households. The overall European rate was **16.8%**. In Spain, the overcrowding rate rose from **9.1%** to **9.5%** between 2024 and 2025, while the European rate fell by a tenth. In the 16 to 29 age group, Spain's rate rose from **15.3%** to **16%**, **0.7 points**, more than double the European average.

## Housing prices push people to share and to split up flats

Housing sale price data explain why the rental market absorbs all the pressure. In the second quarter of 2026, housing sale prices in the EU rose by **4.7%**. In Spain, by **12.1%**. The IMIE Local Markets report for the third quarter of 2026, published by Tinsa by Accumin, puts the year-on-year increase in housing prices at **14.7%**, up to **2,129 euros** per square meter. An average family would have to spend **36.9%** of their total income on housing, above the **35%** recommended by international organizations. The Banco de España (Spain's central bank) estimates a shortfall of nearly **one million homes** by 2028.

In this scenario, renting an entire home is out of reach for most young people. Renting alone equals **98.7%** of a young person's average salary, and sharing exceeds **33%**, according to the Consejo de la Juventud de España (Spain's national youth council). Buying would require saving an entire salary for **15.6 years** to acquire a property, with an average market-rate home price of **223,000 euros**. The average age of leaving home in Spain is **30.2 years**, one of the latest in Europe.

In that context, the split-up flat becomes the only way in. And not just in Málaga. In Madrid, a 25-year-old named Lucía was looking for a flat with two friends, all of them working, and found a rental at **650 euros** per room in Ciudad Universitaria. The living room had been removed and the terrace converted into a bedroom. She realized it when looking out the window and noticing that everyone had a terrace except them. Of course: theirs was the bedroom.

## The regulation that never came and the limbo of room-by-room rentals

The Government tried to bring order. Two royal decrees, split up to prevent political disagreements from sinking the whole package, included regulation of room-by-room rentals. The first of the texts, the result of an agreement between PSOE and Sumar, proposed that room rentals fall under the Ley de Arrendamientos Urbanos (Spain's urban leasing law) instead of the Civil Code. Under that framework, the sum of the rents of all rooms rented simultaneously could not exceed the price set for renting the entire home. In areas declared to be stressed residential markets, the total amount had to respect the price caps set by law.

The decrees failed in Congress. Since then there has been no specific regulation for rentals divided into rooms or for temporary contracts of less than a year. That is another formula for circumventing rental regulation, because the rules do apply to long-term leases. The result is a legal limbo in which the landlord can rent by the room without the limits that apply to a full-home contract.

Critical voices on the decrees, from both the construction and the rental sectors, warned that the measures would reduce supply. They argued there was legal uncertainty for owners, who might withdraw their properties from the market, and a halt to management or construction projects under the build-to-rent model due to regulatory uncertainty. Economists, for their part, pointed to the lack of structural measures aimed at expanding the available housing stock, especially social housing.

Meanwhile, life goes on in flats without living rooms. Alba, Clémentine and Hilal share a small kitchen and bedrooms that used to be common areas. It's not a tragedy. It's a discomfort that becomes normalized, that is accepted because there is no alternative, and that has a silent cost: living together becomes harder, relationships between flatmates cool, and the flat stops being a home and becomes a place to sleep. The renovation that improves the landlord's profitability makes the tenant's life worse. And no one argues about it because, in the end, everyone needs a roof over their head.