Renting out a property on the Costa Brava: what changed, and what you must have in place
No new tourist licence can be granted anywhere on this coast, and existing licences expire in November 2028. A sourced briefing on the rules, taxes and town-by-town position for owners in Girona and the Empordà.
Last reviewed: August 2026
This is information, not advice. It sets out what the rules say, when each took effect and where the source is, so you can ask the right questions of the right person. It is not a substitute for a gestor, a lawyer or your ajuntament. Rules in this area have changed repeatedly since 2023 and continue to change. If you are reading this well after the review date above, treat the municipal section in particular as a starting point to verify.
The six things that matter
You cannot obtain a new tourist rental licence anywhere on this coast today. Not in Begur, not in Roses, not in Palafrugell, not in Girona city. That has been the position since November 2023.
If you hold an existing licence, it has an expiry date. Existing tourist dwellings have five years from November 2023 to obtain a new urbanistic licence or stop operating. The deadline falls in November 2028, roughly two years away.
The rule survived its legal challenge. The Constitutional Court upheld it in March 2025. A repeal attempt failed. The softer replacement law that was promised never happened.
Registered stock is falling fast. Girona province went from 20,110 registered tourist dwellings in November 2024 to 17,754 a year later, a fall of 11.7 percent in twelve months.
Compliance is now a real administrative job. Guest data must be reported to the Ministry of the Interior for every stay, and platforms verify registration numbers. Fines for the guest registry obligation reach 30,000 euros.
Costs rose in April 2026. The Catalan tourist tax roughly doubled and municipalities can now add a surcharge of up to 4 euros per night on top.
The tourist licence regime in Catalonia
Catalonia replaced a permissive licensing system with a restrictive one. In 262 named municipalities, a tourist dwelling now needs a prior urbanistic licence from the ajuntament, and no ajuntament can grant one until it has modified its urban plan to expressly permit tourist use and shown that enough land remains for permanent housing.
Status: in force. Decret llei 3/2023, published DOGC number 9036 on 8 November 2023, effective 9 November 2023.
Three features matter.
The ceiling. A municipality cannot exceed 10 tourist dwellings per 100 inhabitants. Most towns on this coast are already well above that, several by a very wide margin.
New licences last five years, renewable, replacing the previous indefinite ones.
Existing licences have a deadline. Five years from entry into force to obtain the new urbanistic licence or cease, which places it in November 2028. A further extension of up to five years exists where an owner can demonstrate patrimonial loss, but that is an exception to be argued, not an automatic right.
Nearly every Costa Brava and Empordà municipality is on the list, including Begur, Cadaqués, Calonge, Castelló d'Empúries, Castell-Platja d'Aro, l'Escala, Llançà, Lloret de Mar, Palafrugell, Palamós, Pals, Roses, Torroella de Montgrí and Girona city.
Why the rules did not get softer
When Parliament validated the decree in December 2023, the governing parties committed to also passing it as an ordinary law with amendments by March 2024. That did not happen. Parliament was dissolved in March 2024 and the draft lapsed. A separate proposal to repeal the decree, tabled in December 2024, was not approved.
In March 2025 the Constitutional Court rejected a challenge brought by more than fifty members of Congress and upheld the decree, including against arguments based on the right to property and local autonomy. The judgment carries a dissenting opinion, but the decree stands.
Status: settled. Constitutional Court judgment 64/2025 of 13 March 2025.
If you have been waiting for this regime to be reversed, you are waiting for something that has already been tested and upheld.
What the towns are doing about it
Nine ajuntaments on this coast have signed a joint manifesto asking for the decree to be revised, arguing that it does not fit municipalities whose economy is built on this kind of accommodation, and noting that the large majority of licences are held by private owners of second homes rather than companies. The signatories are Begur, Calonge i Sant Antoni, Castell-Platja d'Aro, Castelló d'Empúries, el Port de la Selva, l'Escala, Llançà, Pals and Roses. The campaign was consolidated again in late 2025 through the Costa Brava apartment association. No concession has been reported.
The numbers behind their objection are stark. Pals faces a reduction from roughly 1,342 licences to 254. L'Escala has around 3,200 tourist dwellings representing about 70 percent of its accommodation capacity. Roses risks losing 3,365 licences, about 63 percent of its current stock.
Tourist licence status town by town
The floor is the same everywhere on the list: no new licence can be granted. What varies is whether a town also has its own instrument, and how far above the ceiling it sits.
Towns with an approved local regime
Tossa de Mar. A special urban plan, definitively approved around December 2021, caps tourist dwellings at 1,522 and divides the town into five zones with permitted proportions from 0 to 40 percent of dwellings. Most residential areas are 0 percent. The plan is subject to live litigation before the Catalan High Court. It has not been annulled, but it is being contested.
Lloret de Mar. A special plan and municipal ordinance permit tourist use up to roughly 10 percent of the dwelling stock, with zone by zone availability. An ordinance modification was definitively approved on 29 January 2024, published in the provincial bulletin number 35 on 19 February 2024 and in force from 13 March 2024.
Girona city. A modification of the general plan limiting tourist dwellings reached definitive approval in late October 2023. The council has separately announced a tighter framework of 4 percent city wide with 15 percent per neighbourhood. The city does not accept new applications.
Towns that have publicly confirmed the freeze
Begur, Palafrugell, Roses and Pals all state on their own websites that new registrations are not being processed. Only changes of holder, changes of data and de-registrations move. Palafrugell states directly that it exceeds the 10 per 100 ratio and therefore cannot grant new licences.
Two towns are drafting compliant plans
Blanes has a special plan for tourist dwellings in process, which reached the Girona territorial urbanism commission in April 2026 at an early procedural stage. Blanes has headroom under the ceiling, which makes it a plausible first mover.
Sarrià de Ter has a general plan modification for tourist dwellings at initial approval stage, published in the provincial bulletin in 2026.
Neither is approved. No municipality in Girona province has yet completed the adaptation and reopened licensing. The first definitive approval of a compliant plan anywhere in the province will be the signal that the freeze is starting to lift, and it has not happened yet.
Registered tourist dwellings, November 2025
| Municipality | Registered tourist dwellings |
|---|---|
| Roses | 2,034 |
| Castelló d'Empúries | 1,517 |
| Lloret de Mar | 1,481 |
| l'Escala | 1,096 |
| Torroella de Montgrí | 938 |
| Castell-Platja d'Aro | 919 |
| Palafrugell | 880 |
| Girona city | 513 |
Highest share of total housing stock: Portbou 15.22 percent, Cadaqués 12.95 percent, Begur 11.92 percent, Pals 11.13 percent. All are above the 10 per 100 ceiling.
Province wide, 17,754 registered tourist dwellings in November 2025, down from 20,110 a year earlier and 22,106 in August 2020. Places fell from 114,386 to 97,336 in a single year. Girona now has more registered tourist dwellings than Barcelona province, and they represent about 3.5 percent of its housing stock against 0.61 percent in Barcelona province.
These figures come from national statistical estimates of registered and advertised stock, reported through the Girona hospitality federation in February 2026. They measure listings rather than a licence register, so treat them as a trend rather than an exact count. Much of the one year fall is attributed not to planning decisions but to the new registration number requirement, which caused platforms to remove listings that lacked one.
If your town is not named above
We could not verify a bespoke municipal instrument for a number of smaller municipalities, including la Bisbal d'Empordà, Llançà, el Port de la Selva, Sant Pere Pescador, Colera, Portbou, Mont-ras, Regencós, Palau-sator, Forallac, Ullastret and Madremanya. They are on the list, so the freeze applies, but their local position is genuinely open. The same is true of the status of Cadaqués's own 2022 suspension, which has passed its maximum legal life and whose fate we could not confirm. The last section shows you how to check any of these yourself.
The compliance obligations
Three separate obligations now sit on top of the licence.
Reporting guest data
Accommodation providers, including private owners, must collect detailed guest and transaction data and transmit it to the Ministry of the Interior. Records are kept for three years.
Status: in force and enforced. The underlying decree took effect in January 2023. The reporting obligation became mandatory from 2 December 2024.
Penalties run under public security legislation: minor infractions from 100 to 600 euros, serious infractions from 601 to 30,000 euros, including failure to communicate guest data within the required window.
A separate risk sits alongside it. The Spanish data protection authority has fined hosts for improperly photographing or scanning guest identity documents. Collecting the required data and copying the document are not the same thing.
The registration number
Spain created a national registration system for short term lets in December 2024, requiring a number before a property could be advertised. In May 2026 the Supreme Court annulled the national layer of that system, finding that the state could not superimpose a national register over the regional tourism registers.
Status: partially annulled, and genuinely unsettled. The practical position is that the operative number in Catalonia is the tourism register code for the dwelling. At the same time the specific penalty regime required by European law had not been approved as of mid 2026, which leaves a gap.
This is the one area where there is no clean answer today. If you advertise on platforms, make sure your Catalan register code is correct and displayed, and expect further change.
European rules
A European regulation standardising short term rental registration requires platforms to verify registration numbers, display them, report activity data to a national entry point and remove listings that do not comply.
Status: applies from 20 May 2026. It is not a European cap or ban on short term letting. It is an enforcement and transparency mechanism, and its practical effect is that advertising informally becomes much harder.
Tax: the tourist tax and income tax
The Catalan tourist tax
The tax on tourist stays roughly doubled, and for the first time every municipality can add its own surcharge of up to 4 euros per night. For tourist dwellings outside Barcelona the regional rate rises from 1.10 euros to 1.65 euros, and to 2.20 euros from April 2027. A quarter of the regional revenue is earmarked for housing policy.
Status: in force from 1 April 2026. Law 2/2026 of 6 March, published DOGC number 9621 on 10 March 2026.
You collect it from the guest and remit it, filing twice a year. It must appear itemised on the invoice even where the guest paid through a platform. The municipal surcharge varies by town and is set in each town's fiscal ordinance, so check yours locally.
Income tax if you are not resident in Spain
The rate depends on where you live. Residents of the European Union and European Economic Area pay 19 percent and may deduct expenses, including mortgage interest, local property tax, community fees, insurance, repairs and building depreciation. Residents outside the EU, which since Brexit includes the United Kingdom, pay 24 percent on gross income with no deductions.
For most owners on this coast, who are French, German, Dutch, Belgian or Scandinavian, that means the lower rate with deductions. For British owners the effective burden is often close to double.
Filing for rental income moved from quarterly to annual from the 2024 tax year.
One point that catches owners out: the 60 percent reduction available on residential letting does not apply to tourist or seasonal lets, because they do not meet a permanent housing need.
A 2025 ruling by the Audiencia Nacional found the different treatment of non EU residents to breach European free movement of capital. It is not final and the tax authority continues to apply gross taxation pending higher review, which could take years.
If you let outside the tourist model
Owners squeezed by the licence regime often look at seasonal or monthly letting instead. Catalonia closed much of that route.
Any lease whose purpose is to meet a housing need, including work, study, medical or provisional stays, is now treated under residential letting rules, which includes rent caps in designated stressed market areas. Genuinely recreational holiday letting is excluded, but the contract must state its purpose and the tenant's permanent residence. Chaining contracts without genuine cause can convert a lease into an indefinite one.
Status: in force from 1 January 2026, applying to contracts signed after that date. Law 11/2025 of 29 December.
Stressed market designations matter here. A first group of 140 municipalities took effect on 16 March 2024 for three years and includes Figueres, la Bisbal d'Empordà, Blanes, Lloret de Mar and Girona.
A comparable national proposal for seasonal and room rentals exists but stalled in parliament and is not law.
Three things that are not true
All three are being repeated to owners on this coast regularly.
"There is a 100 percent tax on property purchases by foreigners." Proposed in January 2025, submitted in May 2025, never debated or voted, and dropped from the January 2026 housing package. It is not law, and it would only ever have applied to non resident buyers from outside the European Union. It does not affect the typical buyer here.
"The end of the golden visa changes this market." The investor residence route was abolished with effect from 3 April 2025. On the Costa Brava the practical effect is close to nil. Of the golden visas issued in Catalonia in the eleven months to November 2024, almost all went to Barcelona, leaving a handful for Girona and Tarragona combined.
"The licence rules will be reversed." They were challenged in the Constitutional Court and upheld in March 2025. The replacement law meant to soften them lapsed. A repeal proposal failed.
Dates ahead
| When | What |
|---|---|
| In force since 2 December 2024 | Guest data reporting to the Ministry of the Interior |
| In force since 1 January 2026 | Seasonal and room letting brought under residential rules |
| Since 1 April 2026 | Higher Catalan tourist tax, plus municipal surcharges |
| Since 20 May 2026 | European registration and platform verification rules apply |
| 15 March 2027 | First group of stressed market designations reaches its three year point |
| April 2027 | Tourist tax rises again for tourist dwellings outside Barcelona |
| November 2028 | Existing tourist dwellings must hold a new urbanistic licence or cease |
How to check any of this yourself
Everything here comes from public sources you can read directly.
Your town's licence position. The provincial bulletin of Girona publishes every municipal suspension of licences and every plan approval, and publication is what gives them legal effect. Search by your ajuntament's name together with terms such as "suspensió de llicències", "habitatges d'ús turístic" or "pla especial urbanístic", and narrow by year.
Planning documents. Catalonia's register of urban planning holds the actual plans and modifications for every municipality, searchable by town.
Whether a property is registered. The Catalan tourism register publishes registered establishments by municipality and address with their registration number.
The list of affected municipalities. The Generalitat publishes the annex naming all 262 municipalities where the restrictions apply.
Your ajuntament directly. Each town's electronic office publishes its notice board and council minutes, which is where a decision appears before it reaches the bulletin.
Frequently asked questions
Can I get a new tourist rental licence on the Costa Brava?
No. Since November 2023, no new tourist dwelling licence can be granted in any of the 262 Catalan municipalities covered by Decret llei 3/2023, which includes almost every Costa Brava and Empordà town. A municipality can only resume granting licences after modifying its urban plan, and as of August 2026 no municipality in Girona province has completed that step.
What happens to my existing tourist licence in 2028?
Existing tourist dwellings have until around November 2028 to obtain a new urbanistic licence from their ajuntament or stop operating. An extension of up to five further years is contemplated where an owner can demonstrate patrimonial loss, but it must be argued rather than assumed.
Do I have to report my guests to the police in Spain?
Yes. Since 2 December 2024, accommodation providers including private owners must collect and transmit detailed guest and transaction data to the Ministry of the Interior, and keep records for three years. Serious infractions carry fines from 601 to 30,000 euros.
How much is the tourist tax in Catalonia in 2026?
For tourist dwellings outside Barcelona, the regional rate is 1.65 euros per night from 1 April 2026, rising to 2.20 euros from April 2027. Each municipality can add its own surcharge of up to 4 euros per night, set in its own fiscal ordinance.
What tax do non residents pay on rental income in Spain?
Residents of the EU and EEA pay 19 percent and can deduct expenses. Residents outside the EU, including the United Kingdom, pay 24 percent on gross income with no deductions. The 60 percent reduction available for residential letting does not apply to tourist lets.
Is there really a 100 percent tax for foreign buyers in Spain?
No. It was proposed in 2025, never debated or voted, and dropped from the government's housing package in January 2026. Had it passed it would have applied only to non resident buyers from outside the European Union.
Sources and method
This briefing draws on primary sources: the DOGC and the Catalan legal portal, the BOE and the Constitutional Court, the provincial bulletin of Girona, Catalonia's register of urban planning, individual ajuntament publications, the Girona territorial urbanism commission, and national and Catalan statistical bodies. Stock figures come from national statistical estimates reported through the Girona hospitality federation in February 2026.
Catalan and Spanish press was used only to locate documents and dates, which were then checked against official sources where possible. Anything that could not be verified is marked as such above.
Corrections are welcome and will be reflected in the next revision. If you know something here has changed, tell us.
Reviewed August 2026. Reviewed quarterly.
Mar y Mas is a creative studio in Girona working with properties on this coast: photography, video and drone, brand identity, direct booking websites, and the objects that shape a guest's stay. We wrote this because owners kept asking us the same questions and the answers were scattered across bulletins, notice boards and court rulings.
hola@marymas.studio
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