Home » Refund battles loom after Supreme Court ruling on Spain’s rental registry

Author: Mark Stücklin
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Spanish Supreme Court (Tribunal Supremo) in Madrid

The Supreme Court may have killed Spain’s national rental registry, but a new battle is just beginning. Property owners who paid registration fees could soon be lining up to demand their money back.

The Supreme Court’s decision to strike down Spain’s national short-term rental registry may have removed one headache for property owners, but it looks set to create another. A growing dispute is emerging over whether hundreds of thousands of landlords should be refunded the fees they paid to register their properties under a system that the court has now declared unlawful.

The registry required owners offering tourist or short-term rentals to obtain a unique registration code, at a base cost of €27.05 per application, before advertising their property on major platforms. During its brief existence, more than 467,000 applications were submitted, with around 374,000 approved.

The question now is simple: if the legal basis for the registry has been annulled, should owners get their money back?

The College of Property Registrars says no. Its position is that the Supreme Court ruling does not have retroactive effect and only invalidates the registration procedure going forward. The registration codes already issued remain valid and can still be used by owners, meaning, in the registrars’ view, there is no justification for reimbursing the fees paid.

Property lawyers take a very different view

According to Alejandro Fuentes-Lojo, a property law specialist and professor of civil law cited in an article at the property portal Idealista, the court’s finding that the regulation breached both constitutional and European law means the annulment should have full retroactive effect. If the obligation to obtain the registration code was unlawful from the outset, then owners should not have been required to pay for it in the first place.

That difference of interpretation could have significant financial consequences. Even at €27 per application, the total amount collected runs into many millions of euros.

Lawyers are already discussing the possibility of individual and collective claims to recover the fees. The issue may be particularly contentious for owners whose applications were rejected after they had paid the registration charges.

The registrars, meanwhile, defend the scheme’s wider impact, arguing that it helped identify more than 100,000 properties operating without complying with all legal requirements. Critics counter that Spain already has regional rental registries and that better coordination between them would be a simpler solution than creating a new national register.

For now, the registry itself may be gone, but the legal and financial fallout appears far from over. Property owners who paid registration fees should keep an eye on developments, as the next battle may be over who ultimately picks up the bill.

Get in touch

If you paid for a rental registry number and are now wondering whether you might be entitled to a refund, I’d like to hear from you. Get in touch and tell me about your experience, especially if you are considering legal action to recover the fees you paid. Fill in the form below.