Furnished vs unfurnished rentals in Spain 2026: yield and payback

Three tiers cover almost everything sold on this coast. The gap between them is less about quality than about how much of the tenant's daily life you have thought through.

Tier	What it covers	Cost, 2-bed 79 m2
Budget	Flat-pack sofa, two bed frames and mattresses, dining table and four chairs, fridge, washing machine, oven and hob, microwave, basic lighting, curtains, minimum kitchenware. Delivery and assembly included.	EUR 4,500 to EUR 6,500
Mid-range	The same list at better quality, plus dishwasher, freestanding wardrobes where none are built in, television, terrace table and chairs, blinds or mosquito screens, proper mattresses, crockery and cutlery for six.	EUR 8,000 to EUR 12,000
Rental-ready package	Mid-range plus two full linen sets per bed, towels, duvets, iron, hairdryer, kettle, toaster, vacuum, safe, wall art, welcome pack, photographed inventory and a cleaning handover. This is what a Northern European tenant expects to walk into.	EUR 13,000 to EUR 18,000

Two things distort these quotes. Furniture-pack companies on the Costa Blanca often price net of IVA, so add 21% unless the quote says otherwise. And if the flat has no split air conditioning, add EUR 1,200 to EUR 1,800 per room installed. That is not furniture, but no tenant paying summer rent in Alicante province treats it as optional.

For the arithmetic that follows we use EUR 5,500 for budget, EUR 10,000 for mid-range and EUR 15,000 for a rental-ready package.

The rent premium and the payback arithmetic

Unfurnished, the model flat lets at about EUR 820 a month on a standard residential contract. Furnished to mid-range, roughly EUR 900. That is a premium of EUR 80 a month, near 10%, which sits inside the 5% to 15% band the coast actually pays. Idealista's rental price reports are the cleanest free check on whether your own town supports the asking rent you have in mind.

The premium is not free income. A furnished flat needs contents insurance, roughly EUR 80 a year more, and your letting agent's percentage applies to the higher rent too. Then tax takes a cut, and here the two landlord types split hard.

Fit-out tier	Extra rent per month	Extra rent per year	Simple payback	Payback, EU-resident landlord at 19%	Payback, non-EU landlord at 24%
Budget, EUR 5,500	EUR 55	EUR 660	100 months	127 months	186 months
Mid-range, EUR 10,000	EUR 80	EUR 960	125 months	145 months	217 months
Rental-ready, EUR 15,000	EUR 100	EUR 1,200	150 months	164 months	253 months

Here is the mid-range line worked through. Gross extra rent is EUR 960 a year. Extra contents insurance costs EUR 80 and the extra agency fee at 10% costs EUR 96, leaving EUR 784. An EU-resident landlord may write off the furniture at 10% a year, so EUR 1,000 of deduction lands against EUR 784 of extra income and the annual tax bill actually falls by about EUR 41. Net benefit: EUR 825 a year, or EUR 68.75 a month. Divide EUR 10,000 by that and you get 145 months.

A non-EU-resident landlord runs the same flat differently. There is no depreciation to claim, and 24% falls on the full EUR 960 of extra rent, which is EUR 230. Net benefit drops to EUR 554 a year, or EUR 46.13 a month, and payback stretches to 217 months.

Notice that every after-tax payback is longer than the simple one. The extra insurance and the agency's cut on the higher rent cost more than the depreciation shield saves. That pattern holds at all three tiers. For the wider picture on what these flats actually clear each month, see our breakdown of realistic buy-to-let income on the Costa Blanca.

The tenant you target decides this, not the arithmetic

Spanish and resident tenants generally want a flat unfurnished. They own furniture, they are moving it, and they intend to stay. Under the LAU a private landlord faces a tenant extension right of up to five years, which sounds like a trap until you price the alternative: three to five years with no turnover cost, no changeover cleaning and nothing to replace. Unfurnished tenancies are the cheapest tenancies to run in Spain.

The problem is supply of that tenant. Across the 77 flats and houses we hold in Pilar de la Horadada, and in Torre de la Horadada and Los Alcazares alongside it, most of the housing stock exists for people who are not there in February. The year-round working population is far smaller than the number of flats, so an unfurnished listing in those towns can sit for two months. Inland the picture inverts. In Bigastro, Cox, Dolores and Torre Pacheco the year-round tenant is the market, and a flat like WES-2372, a 2-bed 80 m2 apartment in Bigastro at EUR 179,900 makes more sense bare than furnished.

Northern European snowbirds are the opposite case. A Norwegian, Dutch or British couple wintering from October to April arrive with two suitcases. They will not buy a sofa, will not open a utility contract, and will not look at an unfurnished listing at any price. Our 73 listings in Los Alcazares sit in exactly this market, and buyers take something like WES-2099, a 2-bed 84 m2 apartment at La Serena Golf for EUR 265,000 almost exclusively with that tenant in mind. Remote workers behave the same way over six to twelve months, with one extra demand: a real desk, a proper chair and internet you have tested yourself. That costs about EUR 400 and moves a listing more than another EUR 2,000 of sofa ever will.

You normally paper a defined winter stay as a contrato de temporada, an arrendamiento para uso distinto del de vivienda, which needs the purpose and the dates written into the contract and is not a tourist let. Marketing the same flat for short holiday stays is a different regime with a licence attached, covered in our guide to where you can still get a vacation rental licence.

	Unfurnished, long let	Furnished, long let	Furnished, seasonal snowbird
Fit-out cost	EUR 0	EUR 10,000	EUR 15,000
Achievable monthly rent	EUR 820 for 12 months	EUR 900 for 12 months	EUR 1,250 winter for 6, EUR 1,500 summer for 2
Annual gross rent	EUR 9,840	EUR 10,800	EUR 10,500
Gross yield on EUR 277,000 all-in	3.55%	3.90%	3.79%
Cash running costs	EUR 2,774	EUR 2,950	EUR 5,250
Spanish tax, EU-resident landlord	EUR 1,343	EUR 1,302	EUR 713
Net income after costs and tax	EUR 5,723	EUR 6,548	EUR 4,537
Net yield on EUR 277,000 all-in	2.07%	2.36%	1.64%
Typical tenancy length	3 to 5 years	12 to 24 months	4 to 7 months, often the same tenant returning
Void risk	Moderate on the coast, low inland	Low	Four months of planned void
Furniture payback	Not applicable	145 months	Not applicable, the let does not exist unfurnished

Those net yields assume an EU-resident landlord taxed at 19%, with furniture amortisation claimed and building amortisation left out, so they are the conservative version of the EU case. A non-EU-resident owner taxed at 24% on gross rent lands roughly 0.4 to 0.7 of a percentage point lower on every line: 1.70% net unfurnished, 1.90% net furnished, 0.99% net seasonal.

The seasonal column does not win, and the cost line is where it loses. Agency management at 18%, landlord-paid utilities, changeover cleaning and four months of void pull the net yield below both long-let options, even though the headline monthly rent is far higher. Self-manage it and the net yield recovers to roughly 2.2%, still short of the furnished long let. People run snowbird flats because they get the property back in May and get a tenant who returns every year, not because the yield is better. Our long-term rental yield survey for the Costa Blanca sets these figures against the wider coast.

Tax: 19% with deductions, or 24% on the gross

This is the single largest number in the whole decision, and it has nothing to do with furniture quality.

A landlord resident in an EU member state, or in Norway or Iceland, pays Impuesto sobre la Renta de no Residentes at 19% and may deduct expenses. A landlord resident anywhere else pays 24% on gross rental income and may deduct nothing at all, not IBI, not the community fee, not the agency's cut, not a euro of repairs. British owners moved into that second category on 1 January 2021, and it caught a lot of people who had owned Spanish flats for twenty years.

Same furnished long let, EUR 10,800 gross rent	EU, Norway or Iceland resident landlord	Non-EU resident landlord
IRNR rate	19%	24%
Deduct IBI, community fees, insurance, agency, repairs	Yes	No
Deduct mortgage interest	Yes	No
Deduct furniture at 10% a year	Yes	No
Deduct the building at 3% a year	Yes	No
Taxable base before building amortisation	EUR 6,850	EUR 10,800
Tax due	EUR 1,302	EUR 2,592
Tax due with EUR 4,200 of building amortisation applied	EUR 504	EUR 2,592

Building amortisation is 3% a year of the construction element, taken as the greater of the cadastral construction value or the same proportion of what you paid. On this flat that is roughly EUR 4,200, and it is why a well-organised EU-resident landlord can end up paying about EUR 500 on rent that costs a non-EU owner EUR 2,592. One caveat worth respecting: amortisation reduces the acquisition value used for capital gains when you sell, so it defers tax rather than deleting it.

File it correctly. You submit Modelo 210 on rental income once a year, in January, covering the previous calendar year. The quarterly schedule that still circulates online ended with Orden HAC/56/2024 and is now simply wrong. Void periods are not exempt either: months when nobody rents the flat generate imputed income at 1.1% or 2% of cadastral value, also declared annually. Our Modelo 210 guide walks through the form itself.

Replacement cycles, deposits and the inventory

Furniture in a let flat is a consumable. On a long let, budget 8% to 10% of the fit-out cost every year as a replacement reserve, so EUR 800 to EUR 1,000 on a EUR 10,000 package. Set that beside the EUR 825 a year the furniture earned after costs and tax and the two numbers cancel. What the EUR 10,000 buys is access to a tenant who would never have viewed the flat bare. It does not buy yield, and on a straight long let that is the honest answer to the payback question.

On a heavy-turnover seasonal let with four or five tenant changes a year, use 12% to 15%, or EUR 1,800 to EUR 2,250 on a EUR 15,000 package. Mattresses last five to seven years and less under seasonal use. Sofas go at five to eight. Washing machines fail around six to eight, fridges and dishwashers closer to ten. Linens and towels need replacing every 18 to 24 months. Crockery, glassware and cutlery bleed away continuously, so allow EUR 120 to EUR 200 a year and stop counting individual items.

Your security against all of that is legally capped. A residential let requires one month of fianza, lodged with the regional housing body rather than kept in your own account, plus an additional guarantee of no more than two months' rent. On a EUR 900 flat that is EUR 2,700 standing behind EUR 10,000 of furniture. A seasonal contract under uso distinto carries a two-month fianza and no statutory cap on the extra guarantee, which is one genuine advantage of the snowbird route.

That makes the inventory the document that matters. Sign an inventario as a contract annex, with dated photographs of every room, model and serial numbers for the white goods, and written condition notes on the mattresses and sofa. Without it a Spanish court will not let you deduct from the fianza for damage you cannot evidence. Keep the purchase invoices in the same folder, because if you are an EU-resident landlord that file is also what supports your 10% furniture amortisation.

Next steps

Send us the reference number of the flat you are looking at and your country of tax residence. We will price the fit-out against local rents and model both tax positions before you buy a sofa. Start here.