Plusvalía tax when selling in Altea or Albir: who pays it and how it is calculated

What the plusvalía tax is

Its official name is the Impuesto sobre el Incremento de Valor de los Terrenos de Naturaleza Urbana, a municipal tax on the increase in value of urban land. It taxes how much the value of the land under your home has risen while you’ve owned it, up to a maximum of twenty years.

Note the word land: the building itself doesn’t count. That’s why the calculation starts from the cadastral value of the land, shown on your IBI (council tax) bill, and not from the sale price.

Don’t confuse it with the tax on your profit that you pay to the Spanish Tax Agency, which for non-residents is non-resident income tax. They are two separate taxes, and both are due.

In both Altea and l’Alfàs del Pi the plusvalía is managed by Suma, the tax body of the Alicante Provincial Council. Both bylaws use a declaration system: you file a declaration with the deed, and you’re then sent an assessment with the amount and the payment deadline.

Who pays the plusvalía

• On a sale, the seller.
• On an inheritance or a gift, the person who receives the home: the heir or the recipient.
• If the seller is an individual not resident in Spain, the law makes the buyer a substitute taxpayer: the buyer is the one answerable to the town hall.

You can agree in the contract that the buyer will pay it, but that agreement only binds the two of you. As far as the town hall is concerned, the seller is still the one liable.

How it’s calculated: the two methods

Since November 2021, following a ruling by Spain’s Constitutional Court, the law offers two methods and you use whichever gives the lower taxable base.

The objective method

Cadastral land value × coefficient for the full years you’ve owned the home = taxable base. The town hall’s rate is then applied to that base.

Only full years count. If you’ve owned it for less than a year, the coefficient is pro-rated by full months.

The real-gain method

This starts from your actual gain: sale price minus purchase price, as shown in the deeds. Costs and taxes on the purchase and sale aren’t deducted. As the tax only applies to land, the gain is multiplied by the share of land in the home’s total cadastral value.

If the real gain is lower than the objective base, you’re taxed on the real gain. And if there’s no gain at all, there’s no tax.

The coefficients in force in October 2026

The law sets maximum coefficients, and each town hall approves its own without going over them. The maximums in force are those that have applied since 1 January 2024. There have been several attempts to update them (in 2025, January 2026 and September 2026), and Congress has voted all of them down.

The latest, a decree-law of 6 October 2026, sets a new table from 1 December 2026, but at the time of writing it’s still waiting for Congress to ratify it. If it does, the Alfaz del Pi coefficients would change from that date, along with any Altea coefficient above the new maximum.

L’Alfàs del Pi applies the legal maximum directly and updates automatically. Altea has its own table, lower for almost every period.

If an Altea coefficient ever ends up above a new legal maximum, the legal maximum applies until the town hall amends its table. Both the law and Altea’s own bylaw say so.

Altea and Alfaz del Pi: rates and reliefs

The legal ceiling for the rate is 30%. Alfaz del Pi applies the maximum from the sixth year; Altea stays at 27% for every period.

A word of warning on the Alfaz del Pi relief: if you inherit and then sell within four years, the town hall will claim back the relief with interest. If that’s your situation, see also selling an inherited property in Spain.

A worked example (hypothetical figures)

All the figures below are made up to show how the sum works. Yours come from your IBI bill and your deeds.

You bought a house in March 2014 for €300,000 and sell it in October 2026 for €420,000. That’s 12 full years. Its total cadastral value is €150,000, of which €75,000 is land (50%).

Now imagine you bought in 2022 for €400,000 and sell four years later for €406,000. In Altea, the objective method gives 75,000 × 0.060 = €4,500. The real gain is €6,000, and the land share of it is €3,000. That’s lower, so you’re taxed on €3,000: €810 instead of €1,215.

And if you sell for less than you paid, there’s no gain and no plusvalía to pay.

Deadlines and when it isn’t due

• Sale: 30 working days from the date of the deed.
• Inheritance: six months from the date of death, extendable to one year if you ask.
• No gain: nothing to pay, but you must still file the declaration with both deeds within the deadline. The Alfaz del Pi bylaw treats failing to do so as an offence.

Whatever you pay in plusvalía then counts as a selling cost when your gain is worked out for the Spanish Tax Agency. If you live in the UK, Scandinavia or elsewhere in Europe, read how to go about selling your property in Spain from abroad. And if you don’t yet know what to ask for your home, start with a valuation.

Frequently asked questions