The Catalan government and left-wing regional party ERC are in the process of negotiating an agreement which will regulate temporary rental contracts and rental by rooms in the northeastern region.
Nine out of ten tenants in Barcelona now have temporary rental contracts, according to a December 2024 study titled “Renting: insecurity guaranteed by law”, published by the Barcelona Urban Research Institute (IDRA).
Furthermore, three quarters of rental ads in Barcelona are for rooms, which usually also fall under the category of contrato de temporada.
The reason why temporary rental contracts under one year in length have become so common in Barcelona and other parts of Spain is that landlords don’t have to abide by the recent price controls implemented in both Catalonia and other parts of the country, as they’re not deemed long-term contracts.
Barcelona and Catalonia have price controls for 'stressed rental areas' which mean that long-term rentals (even new ones) cannot be above a certain price, and on a national level there’s a rent cap on existing long-term contracts that prevent year-on-year increases of more than around 3 percent, legislation also in place in Catalonia.
Therefore, if a landlord rents out a property to a tenant for between 32 days (anything under is considered short-term rental) and 364 days (anything over is deemed a long-term contract) they don’t have to abide by the Urban Leasing Law (LAU) and above rules, as they’re considered to be temporary rentals.
Furthermore, these rental contracts don’t have to be five years long by law and can thus kick out tenants sooner, the landlords can set the price they want and increase it as they see fit, and estate agencies also exploit the lack of rights of temporary tenants to ask them for fees that long-term tenants cannot be charged.
READ MORE: The pros and cons of signing a temporary rental contract in Spain
More often than not these seasonal or temporary contracts are advertised on portals such as Idealista as being 11 months long.
What Catalonia’s ruling Socialists and the ERC are now looking to do is make sure that any rental contract that is not specifically of a temporary nature due to work, study, medical or any other justified reason must be automatically a long-term rent.
In the words of Elisenda Alamany, secretary general of ERC, this will prevent “some smart arse people from cheating”, breaking the price limit rule and “speculating with housing”.
The measure would also apply to ‘fake temporary contracts’ by rooms that “trick” the system, as tenants usually stay for more than a year, but are at the mercy of price increases that temporary contracts often come with.
Last year, Spain's left-wing national government had planned to tighten its grip on temporary accommodation rentals as a potential means of making more long-term rentals available, but the country's right-wing parties rejected the proposal in parliament in September.
There’s been no sign of any progress on this front since then - only forcing landlords to list their temporary and room rentals on a government register - which has spurred Catalan regional president Salvador Illa to listen to the request of taking the matter of temporary accommodation into the Generalitat's own hands.
“Rent prices in Catalonia as a whole are extortionate,” Alamany stated.
“That means that a big proportion of Catalans have to spend a large part of their salary to pay for them.”
In the last five years, seasonal or temporary rents in Barcelona has multiplied by six, and in Catalonia the average monthly rent has gone from €584 to €1,136 (90 percent more).
“That’s why we must avoid this mockery,” the ERC politician concluded.
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