Housing has been front and centre of Spain's general election campaign so far, following weeks of protests and new housing laws rejected and then brought back into force.
But in truth, housing has been a concern for the Spanish population for several years now, in the face of dwindling stock and spiralling prices.
In 2024 and 2025, the focus was very much on affluent foreign buyers and holiday lets, with the blame for the housing crisis largely directed at them.
This led Spanish Prime Minister to propose a so-called 'supertax' on non-resident buyers which would supposedly dissuade them from purchasing Spanish properties, thus making more homes available to Spaniards.
The bill included plans aimed at limiting the number of tourist apartments in Spain, ensuring the availability of public housing stock, incentivising lower rental prices and, most headline-grabbing of all, curbing home purchases by buyers from outside of the EU.
This threatened Brits looking to buy Spanish holiday homes in particular, as Brexit turned them into non-EU residents unless they moved to an EU country.
You can read The Local's full myth-busting explainer on the proposal here. According to the legal text for the so-called "Complementary State Tax on the Transfer of Real Estate to Non-EU Residents", this levy would "be obtained by applying a 100% tax rate to the taxable base”, which is the value of the property in question.
In practice, this would double the cost of a second-hand property purchase for the buyer concerned.
FACT CHECK: Yes, Spain's 100% tax on non-EU, non-residents doubles property price
Will the 100 percent property tax on foreign buyers ever pass?
In January 2026, a year after the original announcement, the government presented a new housing reform package that created tax incentives for landlords who renew tenancy agreements without increasing the rent, introduced stricter restrictions on holiday lets and room rentals, and a scheme in Madrid which pledged 10,700 affordable homes.
The 100 percent tax, however, was not the focus of the bill.
In fact, despite all the outrage and international headlines, the bill had not been formally debated once by Parliament by the end of March 2026, according to parliamentary records.
There were no readings, no committee, nor any discussion in plenary session.
In early-October 2026, Sánchez announced a further two new housing decrees which seek to help solve Spain’s housing crisis after the Spanish Congress rejected similar bills the week before.
Now that Parliament has been dissolved, it will be the Standing Committee (Diputación Permanente) that will approve or reject these rejigged housing bills.
But again, Spain's so-called 100 percent tax is nowhere to be seen among the housing measures currently in force until review.
Rather than focusing on penalising or disincentivising wealthy buyers from outside of the EU - as planned with the 100 percent tax idea - the thrust of the Spanish government's latest measures was directed much more at large-scale property owners and investment funds known as 'vulture funds'.
Technically speaking, the 100 percent tax could be included in the future policy agenda of a Socialist government, but most polls suggest the Spanish right will win the elections anyway.
With the dissolution of the Spanish Parliament, all bills lapse; hence why the Diputación Permanente is handling the latest housing laws in the meantime, which as stated previously includes nothing about the so-called supertax on foreigners.
What will happen to the property 'supertax' for foreigners under a right-wing government in Spain?
With pollsters predicting that Spain's centre-right Partido Popular (PP) will win the general election, perhaps even in a coalition with far-right Vox, it seems probable that the party would drop the 100 percent tax.
Nonetheless, if the Socialists did manage to pull off another election win, and even if bill was put to a vote and passed by Parliament, there is still a high chance that it could be challenged the Court of Justice of the European Union on the grounds of the free movement of capital.
The Local previously looked at the Spanish right's plans for the property market - and if anything, a PP-Vox government will cut property taxes rather than increasing them.
It's fair to say that as things stand, the Socialists' proposed 100 percent tax on foreign buyers is dead in the water.
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