Renting versus buying in Spain
ITP is set by each comunidad autónoma and runs from 4% to 10% on a normal purchase, which is the widest domestic spread of any country in this tool. Pick your comunidad above; the 8% default is a general figure and matches no region exactly.
Cataluña sits at the top of that range. On a €230,000 home, 10% ITP is €23,000 of tax before a single fee, exactly the size of a 10% deposit. Push the deposit any lower than that and the tool warns you that the entry tax has outgrown the equity you are putting in.
And Spain still breaks even inside a decade, in year seven on the 8% default rate and year eight at Cataluña's 10%. It has the worst entry cost here and one of the better answers, because the price-to-rent ratio is about 19 years of rent to buy and the mortgage rate is around 3%. If you take one thing from this page, take that: the transfer tax is the most visible cost and not the one that decides the question.
Reduced rates for young buyers, large families and social housing exist in most comunidades and are not modelled here, so those buyers do better than the figures above. A new-build is not subject to ITP at all, it pays 10% VAT plus AJD instead, so a purchase of obra nueva is a different calculation from this one.
IBI is a municipal rate on the cadastral value, which sits well below market price; 0.5% of the purchase price is a common outcome. There is no mortgage insurance in Spain: lenders normally finance 80% of the lower of price and valuation and require home insurance assigned to the loan.