Spain income tax calculator

Spanish income tax is two scales added together

IRPF is not one scale. It is a state scale, identical everywhere, plus a regional scale approved by each comunidad autónoma. Both apply to the same taxable income and the results are added.

The state scale runs 9.5%, 12%, 15%, 18.5%, 22.5% and 24.5%. On its own it means nothing: nobody in Spain pays only that.

On €35,000 of general taxable base in Madrid the state half is €3,806 and the regional half is €3,315 — €7,121 in total, an effective rate of 20.3%. The two halves are close in size, and that is typical rather than exceptional.

Fifteen regions set their own scale under the common regime. They differ in the entry rate, in every threshold, and in the number of bands: Madrid has five and the Comunitat Valenciana has eleven.

The Basque Country and Navarre are not on that list. They are foral territories with their own income tax laws, and this one does not apply there — an omission by law rather than by choice.

The spread between regions, on the same salary

On €35,000 of general base, the cheapest region is Madrid at €7,121 and the most expensive is Cataluña at €7,793. That is €673 a year on an identical income.

On €60,000 the gap widens to €1,371, between Madrid and Extremadura. Nothing about the taxpayer changes; only the postcode does.

The differences are structural rather than cosmetic. Entry rates run from 8% in Extremadura and La Rioja to 9.5% in five regions. Top regional rates run from 20.5% in Madrid to 29.5% in the Comunitat Valenciana — a spread of nine percentage points at the margin.

Some regions deflate their thresholds annually against inflation and others do not, which means the gap widens quietly even in years when no region announces a change.

Only one region, Castilla-La Mancha, reproduces the state scale exactly. For everyone else, using the state scale as a proxy for half the tax is wrong in a direction that depends on where they live.

The mínimo is worth the same to everyone, and that is deliberate

The mínimo personal y familiar is €5,550 for a taxpayer, plus €2,400 for a first child, €2,700 for a second, €4,000 for a third and €4,500 for each further one, with €2,800 more for a child under three.

It is not deducted from income. Article 63.1.2º says the scale is applied to the full taxable base, the same scale is applied separately to the mínimo, and the second figure is subtracted from the first. Article 74.1.2º says the same for the regional half.

The consequence is the point. Because the mínimo is always run through the bottom of the scale, it is worth the lowest rates to everybody. A taxpayer in Madrid saves €999 from it whether their income is €25,000 or €250,000.

A conventional deduction from income would behave in the opposite way: €5,550 off the base would be worth around 18% of itself to a middle earner and around 45% to a top earner.

So Spain uses a rate-schedule device to achieve what Ireland, Canada and the Netherlands achieve with credits. The mechanism is unusual and the outcome is the familiar one — which is exactly the kind of thing a rate table cannot show.

What "base liquidable general" means

The scales run on the base liquidable general, and the distance between that and a gross salary is substantial.

Social security contributions come off first — roughly 6.5% of gross pay up to a contribution ceiling, covering common contingencies, unemployment and vocational training. They are deductible in full.

Then comes the reduction for employment income, which is largest at low salaries and tapers away, plus the general expenses allowance. Then any further reductions: pension plan contributions, alimony to a former spouse, and others.

Savings income is not in this base at all. Interest, dividends and capital gains go into the base liquidable del ahorro and are taxed on a separate and much flatter scale, which this page does not model.

So the figure here is the tax on a stated general base for someone with only employment income. It is the number that appears on a Spanish return as cuota íntegra, before the deductions from the tax that come after it.

The same income in four regions

€45,000 of general taxable base, one taxpayer, no children. Only the regional scale changes.

Madrid: €5,649 state plus €5,036 regional — €10,684, an effective rate of 23.7% and a marginal rate of 35.9%.

Cataluña: €5,649 state plus €5,888 regional — €11,536, an effective rate of 25.6% and a marginal rate of 37.5%.

Comunitat Valenciana: €5,649 state plus €5,631 regional — €11,279, an effective rate of 25.1% and a marginal rate of 38.5%.

Andalucía: €5,649 state plus €5,608 regional — €11,256, an effective rate of 25.0% and a marginal rate of 37%.

The state column is identical in all four, which is the whole point: every euro of difference between them comes from the regional scale, and any calculator that shows one national number for Spain is averaging away the largest variable in the system.

How Spain compares with the rest of this site

Against Canada, the closest structural relative. Both add a sub-national scale to a national one, both let the sub-national unit set its own bands, and in both the two halves are comparable in size. Canada's provinces publish alongside the federal scale; Spain's regions publish in fifteen separate regional laws.

Against Switzerland, the sub-national share is similar in importance and very different in depth. Spain stops at fifteen regions; Switzerland goes down to the commune.

Against the United States, the resemblance is closest of all — federal plus state, with the state layer varying enormously — except that no Spanish region can opt out of income tax the way nine US states do.

Against Ireland and the Netherlands, the mínimo does the same job as their tax credits and reaches it by a different route: applying the scale to the relief instead of granting a fixed amount.

What Spain has that none of the others do is that device itself. Running a relief through the rate schedule to make it worth the same to everyone is elegant, obscure, and almost never explained in the calculators that implement it.

Four ways a Spanish estimate goes wrong

Using only the state scale. It is roughly half the tax. Every Spanish taxpayer under the common regime also pays a regional scale that the state table says nothing about.

Deducting the mínimo from income. The law applies the scale to it and subtracts the result from the tax. Deducting it from the base overstates the relief for anyone above the first bands.

Feeding the scale gross salary. Social security contributions and the employment-income reduction come off first, and together they are thousands of euros.

Assuming the Basque Country and Navarre work the same way. They have their own income tax laws with their own scales, deductions and administration, and none of the figures here apply there.

Fifteen scales, and how differently they are shaped

The regional scales differ in far more than their rates. They differ in how many bands they have, where the bands start, and whether the thresholds move with inflation.

Band count runs from five — Andalucía, Castilla-La Mancha, Castilla y León, Galicia, Madrid, Murcia — to eleven in the Comunitat Valenciana, which slices the range between €12,000 and €200,000 into ten steps.

Entry rates run from 8% in Extremadura and La Rioja through 8.5% in Cantabria and Madrid to 9.5% in five regions that kept the state figure.

Deflation is where the quiet divergence happens. Aragón, Canarias, Galicia and Madrid carry thresholds with decimals — €13,073, €13,748, €12,985, €13,362 — which is the fingerprint of a scale being indexed to inflation year after year. Regions that leave round numbers in place are letting fiscal drag do the work instead.

Only Castilla-La Mancha reproduces the state scale exactly. Everywhere else, the assumption that the regional half mirrors the state half is wrong, and wrong by a different amount in each direction.

What comes off after the scale

The figure this page produces is the cuota íntegra — the tax the two scales produce, after the mínimo. Several things come off it before anyone pays.

State deductions include the one for investment in a habitual residence for purchases before 2013, for donations, for investment in new or recently created companies, and the deduction for taxpayers resident in Ceuta and Melilla.

Regional deductions are where the fifteen regions diverge again, and they are numerous: for birth or adoption, for childcare, for school supplies, for rent for the young, for care of dependants, for living in a depopulated municipality. Each region has its own list, its own income caps and its own amounts.

Withholding is then credited. Spanish employers withhold monthly at a rate the employer computes from the employee's declared circumstances, and the annual return settles the difference between June's estimate and the year's reality.

Because the regional deductions are as varied as the regional scales, a family with young children can find the ranking of cheap and expensive regions reversed once they are applied. This page compares scales, which is the part that is comparable.

Savings income, on a different scale entirely

Spain splits taxable income in two. Employment, pensions, business income and rental income go into the base general, taxed on the scales above. Interest, dividends and capital gains go into the base del ahorro, taxed on a separate and much flatter one.

That savings scale is national — it does not vary by region in the same way — and it climbs from a first band in the high teens to a top rate in the high twenties across a handful of steps. It never reaches the 45%-plus combined marginal rates the general base produces at the top.

The consequence is the familiar one across Europe: a euro of salary and a euro of dividend are taxed very differently, and the gap widens the higher the income.

The split also affects the mínimo. It is set against the general base first and only against the savings base to the extent it is not used up, which is a detail that matters for someone with a small salary and substantial investment income.

This page models the general base only. For anyone whose income is mostly from savings, it is answering a different question than the one they are asking.

The Basque Country and Navarre, which this law does not reach

Two Spanish territories run their own income tax entirely. The Basque Country does it through its three historical territories — Álava, Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa — each with its own Norma Foral, and Navarre through its own Ley Foral.

They are not regions with an unusual scale. They are separate tax jurisdictions: their own law, their own bands, their own deductions, their own administration, their own returns. The state IRPF law does not apply, so nothing on this page does either.

The arrangement comes from the Concierto Económico with the Basque Country and the Convenio with Navarre, which predate the current constitutional settlement and are protected by it. The foral territories collect their own taxes and transfer a negotiated quota to the state, rather than the other way round.

In practice their scales are broadly comparable to the common-regime ones and their deductions are often more generous, particularly for families and for housing. But comparable is not the same, and anyone in those territories needs a foral calculator rather than this one.

That is stated here rather than quietly omitted, because a Spanish calculator with a dropdown listing fifteen regions and no explanation reads as though the other two were forgotten.

Which year these scales belong to

Spanish income tax is declared for the calendar year, between April and June of the following one. The scales on this page are the ones AEAT publishes consolidated for the 2025 tax year, declared in 2026, and they are the most recent complete set covering all fifteen common-regime regions.

That completeness matters more than recency here. The state scale has not moved in years; the regional ones change constantly, and they change one region at a time in fifteen separate regional laws with different timetables.

Several regions had already legislated changes taking effect after this set — the AEAT's own pages carry notes to that effect for Asturias, Canarias and La Rioja among others. Where a region has moved, its figure here will be the previous one.

The rest of this site treats that situation the same way: publish the scale the authority publishes, name the law it came from, record the date it was read, and say what is known to be pending. The alternative is to mix a verified set with an unverified one and present the result as though it were homogeneous.

Every region's entry on this page carries the article and law that fixes its scale, so anyone can check a single region against its own regional legislation without re-verifying the other fourteen.

Questions

How much IRPF do I pay on €35,000 in Spain?

It depends on your region, which is the whole point. In Madrid it is €7,121 — €3,806 state plus €3,315 regional, an effective rate of 20.3%. On the same income the range across the fifteen common-regime regions runs from €7,121 in Madrid to €7,793 in Cataluña.

What is the Spanish state income tax scale?

Six bands on the general base: 9.5% to €12,450, 12% to €20,200, 15% to €35,200, 18.5% to €60,000, 22.5% to €300,000 and 24.5% above. Article 63.1.1º of the IRPF law. It is only half the tax — a regional scale applies on top.

Which Spanish region has the lowest income tax?

Madrid, which has both the lowest entry rate at 8.5% and the lowest top regional rate at 20.5%. The highest regional top rate is the Comunitat Valenciana's 29.5%, with La Rioja at 27% and Asturias at 26% behind it. On €60,000 the spread across the fifteen regions is €1,371.

What is the mínimo personal y familiar?

€5,550 for the taxpayer, plus €2,400, €2,700, €4,000 and €4,500 for the first, second, third and each further child, and €2,800 more for a child under three. It is not deducted from income: the scale is applied to it and the result is subtracted from the tax, so it is worth the same at every income.

Why is the mínimo worth the same to everyone?

Because articles 63.1.2º and 74.1.2º apply the rate scale to the mínimo itself and subtract that figure from the tax. Since the mínimo always sits in the lowest bands, it is always relieved at the lowest rates. In Madrid it saves €999 whatever your income — a deduction from the base would instead be worth your marginal rate.

Do the Basque Country and Navarre use these rates?

No. Both are foral territories with their own income tax laws, their own scales and their own tax administrations. They are not missing from this calculator by oversight — the state law simply does not apply there.

Is savings income included?

No. Interest, dividends and capital gains go into the base liquidable del ahorro and are taxed on a separate, much flatter scale. This page computes the tax on the general base, which is where employment income goes.

Is this gross salary?

No. The input is the base liquidable general — taxable income after social security contributions of roughly 6.5% of gross up to a ceiling, after the reduction for employment income, and after any other reductions such as pension contributions. Gross salary run through these scales would substantially overstate the tax.