Squatters' rights in Spain 2026: the law, real eviction timelines, and how to protect your property

Okupas, squatters, and inquiokupas: three different problems

Conversations and forum threads pile three quite different stories into one word. Which one is yours determines the article of the Criminal Code, the procedure, and the timeline.

A squatter in an occupied home. Someone has forced the door of a house or apartment where people genuinely live. The worst position for the intruder and the best for the owner: this is where police react fastest.

A squatter in an empty property. The target is a home standing unoccupied: a second residence, an inheritance, a renovation project, an unsold unit belonging to a bank or a fund. Softer penalties, harder procedure.

An inquiokupa (from inquilino, Spanish for tenant). This person moved in legally, under a contract, then stopped paying and will not leave. Strictly speaking, not a squatter at all: they hold a title. They are removed through the ordinary tenancy termination procedure, and the fast-track criminal machinery does not apply.

One word will keep coming back: title. Spanish law uses it for any lawful basis for being in a property: ownership, a tenancy agreement, the owner's permission. With a title you are an occupant with rights; without one you are an okupa. Everything turns on that distinction, down to whether the electricity can be switched off.

The day-fine (día-multa) needs a word of explanation, or the figures look odd. A Spanish court does not set a lump sum. It sets a number of days and a daily rate pegged to the offender's income. Three months at a couple of euros a day adds up to a figure that scares nobody. Hence article 245's reputation for toothlessness.

How common are squatters in Spain? The numbers behind the headlines

Spain's Interior Ministry runs a dedicated statistical series on breaking into dwellings and unlawful occupation of property. That is the primary source, unlike the estimates from security-industry firms that usually make the news.

Source: Portal Estadístico de Criminalidad, Ministerio del Interior, "Allanamiento / Usurpación inmuebles" series, annual figures, 2025 data.

Over fifteen years the figure has risen to five and a half times what it was, but the peak stayed in 2021, and the trend since has turned down again, with 2025 the sharpest fall in the series. Which is where it gets interesting for anyone looking at Valencia and the Costa Blanca.

Costa Blanca squatters: the coast running against the trend

Catalonia and the Valencian Community have moved in opposite directions: the first shed 15.6% of its complaints in a year; the second added 2.2%.

Inside the region the provinces diverge too. Valencia logged 856 complaints, 2.3% down from the previous year. Castellón had 177, down 13.2%. Alicante recorded 772, a rise of 12.4%.

Here is the conclusion I would draw as a buyer. Compare each region's share of complaints with its share of population. Catalonia, home to roughly a sixth of Spain's people, produces two-fifths of all complaints, nearly two and a half times its weight. The Valencian Community produces almost exactly its share: 11% of the population, 12% of the complaints (INE figures, January 1, 2025). The Catalan anomaly is not our story. But the national decline has passed this coast by, and Alicante province, meaning the Costa Blanca with its enormous stock of second homes, is posting double-digit growth. These are precisely the properties British buyers hold: a place by the sea the owner uses three months a year.

These are complaints filed, not homes occupied, and the distinction matters more than it looks. A single occupation dragging on for years produces one complaint, and some cases never reach the police at all.

What the 2025 law changed

When the first court rulings under the new rules came through, we broke out the champagne at the office. Everything rests on one document: Organic Law 1/2025 of January 2, 2025, on the efficiency of the justice system. The same law, as British readers may remember, that abolished the Golden Visa.

Its article 20.15 added two new entries, letters i) and j), to the list of offenses handled by the fast-track procedure in article 795.1.2ª of the Criminal Procedure Act. Letter i) covers breaking into a dwelling under article 202 of the Criminal Code; letter j) covers unlawful occupation under article 245. The official BOE footnote to the consolidated text fixes the date the change took effect: April 3, 2025.

Until then, occupation cases went through the ordinary procedure and stretched over a year or more. Now they sit in the same category as thefts and minor violent offenses: the duty court's fast-track list.

For the mechanism to engage, article 795 requires some basics:

• the case starts with a police report (atestado);
• the suspect is identified and either detained or summoned to the duty court;
• the offense is on the list, and since April 2025 squatting is.

Before, the third point demanded either a flagrant crime or an obviously simple investigation, and occupation cases regularly fell outside both. Now they qualify by being on the list. One bottleneck survives, though, and it rarely gets written about: everything starts with whether the patrol that turns up is willing to write the report.

"Eviction in 15 days": what the phrase actually means

The 15 days do exist in the law, but all they cap is how long you wait for the hearing. The phrase spread through the press and social media, and I repeated it myself until the first real rulings appeared in February 2026. Let me unpack it honestly, because your expectations depend on it.

Look at the text. Article 800.3 of the Criminal Procedure Act obliges the duty court's clerk to schedule the hearing "at the earliest possible date and in any event within the following fifteen days." Article 802.3 gives the judge three days after the hearing to deliver a verdict.

The second caveat matters more than the first, and it lands squarely on your case. The Criminal Code sorts offenses by the penalty attached: serious, mid-range, and minor. A fine of up to three months is a minor penalty; above three months it is mid-range. Occupying an empty home without violence carries a fine of three to six months, so at its lower end it falls among the minor offenses and at its upper end among the mid-range ones. And the fast track, where those fifteen days live, is built for the mid-range. Article 13.4 of the Criminal Code breaks the tie in one direction: the offense counts as minor in every case. And minor offenses have their own track, articles 962 and following of the Criminal Procedure Act, where the fifteen-day deadline does not exist.

That is how the public prosecutor's office reads it. Circular 1/2025 of June 26, published in the BOE, splits the two paragraphs of the same article in its third conclusion: occupation with violence under 245.1 goes through the fast track, while occupation of an empty home under 245.2 "will be handled through the procedure for minor offenses." The prosecutors held the same position before the reform, in Instruction 1/2020.

And here I have to say what nobody else says. The question is not settled. The circular binds prosecutors, not judges: a judge answers to the law alone. The law contains no express bar on running a minor offense through the fast track: the conclusion is assembled from several provisions rather than read off one line. Nor is there a Supreme Court ruling on it, or any prospect of one: article 977 of the Criminal Procedure Act ends the appeal route for minor offenses at the provincial court, so divergences between provinces can last for years.

More than that, the opposite view is held by a sitting Supreme Court magistrate, Vicente Magro Servet. In the "Treatise on Housing Law," published by the BOE itself, he writes that since April 3, 2025, any complaint under these articles must go through the fast track, because the new law tacitly repealed the earlier rule. To follow his argument you need to know that Spain has two ranks of statute: organic laws, which require an absolute majority in Congress and cannot be repealed by an ordinary one, and ordinary laws, passed by a simple majority. Magro holds that the amendment arrived in an organic law and therefore overrides the earlier regime; yet that same law states in its final provisions that its article 20 ranks as ordinary law, so hierarchy settles nothing. A view of that weight exists, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

What this means in practice, and whether it is good news. If squatters take an apartment where someone lives, that is article 202 and the fast track applies in full. If they take an empty one without violence, do not count on the fifteen days. But you lose no time by it, rather the opposite: article 965 of the Criminal Procedure Act requires the hearing to be scheduled "within no more than seven days," and sometimes the matter is heard during the duty shift itself. Any loss will come not from the statutory deadline but from the fact that a minor offense carries no investigation phase and none of the attention a fast-track case gets: it is easier to postpone and easier to drop.

Three things about that track are worth knowing in advance.

Your complaint is essential. This is the same police complaint discussed earlier, the denuncia; there is no third document. But without it the court may drop a minor offense as too slight, and that is not a formality: the injured party's complaint is what keeps the case alive.

You need both a lawyer and a procurador. In the smallest cases the law lets you do without them, but the threshold sits below the maximum penalty for this offense. Here that maximum is exactly six months, so the case falls outside the simplified regime.

Eviction can come before the judgment. An interim order is a provisional decision by which the court removes the occupants while the case is still running, so you can get the keys back before it ends. The prosecutor or your lawyer applies for it, and the criteria the prosecutor follows are in that same Instruction 1/2020. It is neither automatic nor always granted, so plan around the judgment. But your lawyer should raise it on day one, not at the end.

So the law guarantees a fast trial, not a fast eviction. The property comes back when the judgment is enforced, and the code sets no deadline for that stage. Add the appeal, which the defense files almost every time, and the picture becomes more realistic. The answer to the first question that raises: yes, an appeal always postpones enforcement. A criminal judgment is enforced only once it is final (art. 803.3 of the Criminal Procedure Act), and the criminal process has no provisional enforcement. But there is no need to sit and wait: your lawyer can ask for the interim eviction order at any point in the case, and it lasts exactly until the judgment becomes final, which is to say it covers the appeal. On the civil side it is the other way round: a first-instance judgment is enforced without waiting for the appeal and without posting security (arts. 524 and 526 of the Civil Procedure Act).

The difference is still fundamental. Before the reform, a first hearing took a year to eighteen months. Now the court stage takes weeks. That is a huge shift, but between the verdict and the moment you open your own door with your own key lies one more stage.

How long it really takes to get a property back

In practice the realistic range is two to three weeks from occupation to hearing, then months more if the defense goes to appeal. No official statistics on average timelines under the new procedure have been published yet; I have checked every open series from the Interior Ministry and the General Council of the Judiciary. So I lean on colleagues' casework.

In a podcast we recorded in January 2026, the lawyer Maks Snisar described fresh cases like this: occupations that happened on December 5, 9, and 11 were in court by December 23. From the police arriving to the papers reaching the court took a matter of hours.

He also had a case that shows the other side. A client bought an apartment, strangers moved in a week later, the verdict arrived within a month and a half, and then the case sat in appeals for months. Formally, the ruling was not yet final (firme). In practice, other people carried on living in the client's apartment.

Non-paying tenants go down the civil route. There Snisar quoted three to eight months from the date the claim is accepted for filing. For one of his clients, the owner of fourteen apartments in Alicante, an eviction took about six and a half months.

The upshot: the eighteen-month wait is gone, and that is the main change. But I will not promise you your keys back in two weeks.

Allanamiento and usurpación: two offenses, two speeds

Spanish criminal law splits occupation into two separate offenses, a distinction British owners rarely expect. Everything hangs on the legal concept of morada, a dwelling. Not who owns the property, but whether anyone actually lives in it.

Article 202 of the Criminal Code defines allanamiento de morada: entering another person's dwelling without living there, or staying in it against the resident's will. The penalty is six months to two years in prison. With violence or intimidation, the range moves to one to four years plus a fine.

Article 245.2 defines usurpación: occupying, without proper authorization, another person's property, dwelling, or building that is not anyone's home. Here the only penalty is a fine of three to six months of day-fines. Prison comes into play only under article 245.1, which carries one to two years, imposed on top of the penalty for the violence itself, and applies solely where the occupation involves violence or intimidation against people. A forced lock on an empty apartment does not qualify: the law speaks of violence against people, not against property.

A second home counts as a dwelling if it is genuinely used for living. The apartment you spend every summer in, with your belongings in the closets, is a different thing in law from an empty shell after a renovation. The boundary is one a court draws case by case, and everything that proves regular use works in your favor: utility bills, photographs, neighbors' statements, alarm system records.

When the police can evict squatters without a court order

The right to enter a property without a court order exists only for a flagrant crime, delito flagrante. That follows from article 18.2 of the Spanish Constitution, and article 795.1.1ª of the Criminal Procedure Act defines flagrancy: an offense being committed or just committed, with the offender caught at the scene.

How patrols should act is set out in Instruction 6/2020 of the Secretariat of State for Security, dated September 17, 2020. The instruction was never published in the BOE; it is an internal document carrying an authenticity verification code, but its content is public and courts cite it. Two of its provisions matter here.

First: breaking into a dwelling is treated as a continuing offense, so flagrancy "must not be tied to the expiration of any time period." The mythical 48-hour deadline everyone has heard about simply does not exist.

Second: the instruction lists situations that justify immediate intervention. Among them is a signal from your alarm received at a security company's monitoring center. A monitoring contract stops being a domestic convenience and becomes a legal argument.

One caveat about alarms. The instruction names a monitored signal as grounds to intervene, but the case law is not yet settled. Snisar put it this way: most judges today lean toward treating it as a flagrant crime, but nobody can promise it. A monitored alarm sharply improves your odds of the fast scenario; it does not guarantee it.

With an empty property under article 245, things are harder. Flagrancy there goes cold quickly, and once the occupants have settled in, the police will not enter without a judge.

How squatters have responded to the new law

A workaround has emerged that is worth knowing about in advance. The arriving patrol is shown a tenancy contract. A forged one, but a police officer is not a forensic examiner and has no duty to establish whether the paper is genuine, so the dispute heads to court and the fast scenario dies on the doorstep. "Not every occupation will get an atestado out of the police," as Snisar puts it.

Hence the point of the box further down about registering tenancy agreements. Against an entry in the Land Registry, someone else's printout does not work: the patrol gains a way to check who is there lawfully, right on the spot.

Can you cut off squatters' electricity and water?

As a general rule, yes, provided the occupants have no right whatsoever to be in the property. That is where the plenary of the Supreme Court's Criminal Chamber landed on June 24, 2026, and it is the most practical news of the year for owners.

Ruling 426/2026 was made public on July 13. The case itself was about something else: the court upheld a nine-month prison sentence for a man who cut the electricity to the family home where his wife had stayed after their separation.

Along the way, though, the plenary drew the line the market had waited years for. In its words, it is not the same thing when the act targets a person holding lawful title to possess the property as when it targets someone who "seeks to make use of another's property." In the second case, disconnecting utilities, in the court's formulation, "may not be punishable, since the cessation of supply does not fulfill the normative element 'without authorization.'" In plain English: coercion presupposes depriving someone of something they are entitled to. A squatter has no entitlement to your electricity and water, so there is nothing to deprive them of.

The practical conclusion. An owner who stops paying for water and electricity in an apartment occupied by people with no title of any kind is, as a general rule, not committing coercion under article 172 of the Criminal Code. The same actions against a tenant with a valid contract remain a crime carrying six months to three years.

Five caveats, without which this advice becomes dangerous:

• it covers stopping payment and canceling supply contracts, not physically interfering with meters or wiring;
• it concerns utilities only: forcing people out remains against the law;
• this was not said in a squatting case. The plenary was deciding a marital separation: a husband cut the electricity to the home where his wife had stayed, and his conviction was upheld. On squatters the court spoke in passing, and immediately noted that this was not the case before it. The wording is cautious too: the circumstances "advise against punishing," rather than placing the act outside the offense, and the court offered three alternative grounds without settling on any;
• the protection reaches only those occupying with no title at all. The ruling expressly leaves on the punishable side anyone holding a title that is apparent or in dispute. So if they show you a tenancy agreement, even a forged one, the safe harbor stops working until that agreement is knocked down. A tenant who has stopped paying is not covered at all;
• there is an article the ruling did not close. The majority never said that cutting the power is not violence. It took the owner out of the coercion offense on three other grounds, and none of them carries over to article 455 of the Criminal Code, which punishes anyone who enforces their own right outside the legal channels by using force against property, with a fine of six to twelve months. The four dissenting justices wrote precisely that the majority's caveat leaves that question hanging. The Supreme Court has not answered it.

The dissent deserves a word of its own, because it does not read the way you would expect. Those four held that the majority stretches the notion of violence too far, that it criminalizes too much. On that axis they are gentler toward the owner, not harsher: a judge of that view would be even less likely to see an offense in cutting power to someone with no right to the property at all. The split on the court does not, by itself, work against you.

What to do. Stopping payment is allowed, and the coercion risk today is genuinely low. But keep to three things. Do it through the lawyer handling your case, and in writing, so there is a record. Stop paying rather than ordering a disconnection: the ruling specifically faults the husband for canceling the contract without warning. And touch nothing if they have produced any document supporting their presence in the property, until it has been set aside.

What is left of the protection for vulnerable occupants

There is no longer a national moratorium on evicting vulnerable families: the rule expired on December 31, 2025, and Congress has twice declined to extend it. Most of the internet, including recent posts by law firms, has not caught up, so check the publication date of anything you read on this subject.

What the Constitutional Court struck down. Ruling STC 26/2025 of January 29, 2025, declared unconstitutional and annulled paragraphs 6.c and 7 of article 439 of the Civil Procedure Act. These were requirements from the 2023 housing law: attaching to the claim a document on the defendant's vulnerability and, for large property owners, going through mandatory conciliation before filing. For new claims those barriers are gone.

What simply ran out. The moratorium It applied to the eviction of vulnerable occupants without title and rested on article 1 bis of Royal Decree-Law 11/2020, a pandemic-era measure. The current wording states the deadline plainly: until December 31, 2025.

Part of the claim requirements outlived the Constitutional Court's ruling: under article 439.6, a possession claim must still state whether the property is the defendant's main home (vivienda habitual) and whether you are a large property owner (gran tenedor). What it changes today: little beyond the statement itself, because the Constitutional Court struck down the compulsory pre-claim conciliation for large owners. The statement stayed, though, and without it the claim is not admitted. If you are buying an apartment for yourself, you are not one: the law reserves that status for owners of more than ten urban residential properties or more than 1,500 square meters of built residential floor area (article 3.k of housing law 12/2023). Only residential-use properties count: garages and storerooms do not; and a region may lower the property-count threshold to five in strained-market zones, an official designation applied to areas where rents rise faster than incomes, so it is worth checking whether your town carries it. If you already own several rental apartments, check that threshold with a lawyer in advance. And note the law's inverted logic: it is the person who declares that they are not a large property owner who has to attach a Land Registry certificate listing everything they own, as proof of the denial.

Twice the government tried to extend the moratorium into 2026. Decree 16/2025 of December 23, 2025, was rejected by Congress on January 27, 2026. Decree 2/2026 of February 3 repeated the attempt and was rejected on February 26. The official BOE footnotes to article 1 bis record both failures.

What still operates. Articles 441.5 and 441.6 of the Civil Procedure Act describe a different mechanism, and they are permanent. If the occupied apartment is someone's main home, the court itself notifies social services. Proceedings can be suspended for a maximum of two months when the claimant is a private individual and four when it is a company. After that the case resumes automatically, whether social services have acted or not.

How to evict squatters in Spain through the civil courts

The criminal case is not the only road, and sometimes not the best one. The civil route is more reliable in the situation foreign owners most often find themselves in: the apartment stood empty, nobody caught the intruders in the act, the facts stretch no further than article 245.2, and the patrol declined to write a report. A criminal case on those facts may never begin at all, while a civil claim depends on neither the police nor the prosecutor's office. The Civil Procedure Act offers several routes.

You pick the route that fits your situation.

Express eviction arrived with Law 5/2018 and lives in article 250.1.4º. Only certain claimants may demand immediate return of a dwelling: private individuals (owners or lawful possessors on another basis), non-profits, and public owners of social housing. Banks, funds, and ordinary companies cannot use it, which is good news for a private buyer.

The mechanics are in article 441.1 bis. Notice is served on everyone inside, including people whose names nobody knows: the law itself calls them ignorados ocupantes, unidentified occupants. They get five days to produce a document proving a right to be in the dwelling. If no such document exists, the court orders eviction and immediate transfer of possession. That order cannot be appealed; the code says so expressly.

The possession claim under the same article 250.1.4º is brought by whoever was stripped of possession. A 2025 detail matters here: Organic Law 1/2025 made a pre-litigation settlement attempt mandatory for almost all civil claims, but this one is expressly excluded, so you can go straight to court. The claim against someone living in the apartment with no contract and no rent (precario, article 250.1.2º) did not make the exclusion list.

The registry claim under article 250.1.7º serves those who cannot use express eviction, companies above all: it rests on the Land Registry entry and works against anyone without a competing entry.

A word on speed, to avoid misleading you. The civil route wins not because the court hurries: the law guarantees no deadlines here, no official statistics exist, and express eviction runs into court caseloads, which vary widely by province. The route wins because no patrol's refusal to write a report can block it. The case simply proceeds.

The first 48 hours after squatters move in

Six steps, in order.

Call the police at once: 091, or 062 outside town limits, or 112. Not tomorrow, not after taking advice. While flagrancy can still be argued, the fast no-court scenario is alive.

Insist on a report being written. The fast-track procedure starts with the atestado. If the patrol refuses, demand that the refusal be recorded and file a complaint at the station.

Gather your ownership documents. The purchase deed and a nota simple, the Land Registry extract showing who owns the property and what debts and encumbrances (cargas) are registered against it. It can be ordered online for around 11 euros, and it should be sitting in your folder in advance, not hunted down mid-panic.

Record evidence of residence and of the property's condition. Photographs, utility bills, neighbors' statements, alarm logs. This is what turns article 245 with its fine into article 202 with its prison term.

Do not go inside and do not change the locks while people are in there. Taking the law into your own hands is punishable under article 455 of the Criminal Code with a fine of six to twelve months of day-fines, and any use of force adds coercion under article 172.

Hire a lawyer. You cannot file the claim yourself: in Spain an eviction claim is filed by a lawyer, not by the owner in person. In court you will be represented by a pair: the abogado argues the case; the procurador handles procedure and paperwork with the court. Both send bills.

If the property is in the Valencian Community

Regional authorities cannot alter criminal or civil procedure; that is national law. But the Generalitat has organized help for affected owners, announced on May 7, 2026. It set up a dedicated service for owners hit by occupations, and consultations run through the existing network: 37 crime-victim support offices and 66 JustiProp points that handle housing matters, reached via the 012 phone line, which carries a flat call charge (or use 963 866 000, free if your plan covers landlines); the advice itself costs nothing. They will not build the legal case for you, but they will walk you through the first steps and the paperwork, and for a shaken owner on day one that counts for something.

If you are abroad when it happens

The scenario second-home owners actually face: the alarm goes off and you are in another country. You can still act, but the groundwork has to be laid in advance.

The police complaint is filed by your representative under a power of attorney, or by your lawyer. Do not count on the National Police's online form. Occupation cannot be reported through it at all: the portal accepts only reports of thefts and losses where the offender is unknown. And any complaint filed online must be signed in person at a police station within 72 hours, or it has no effect.

For a lawyer to run the case without you present, you need a litigation power of attorney, a poder general para pleitos. Four ways to get one:

• at a Spanish notary by video call, without traveling to Spain: article 17 ter of the Notarial Act allows poderes de representación procesal to be authorized by video call, and a litigation power of attorney is one of them. General powers of disposition and precautionary ones are excluded by that same provision, which is worth knowing. No apostille or sworn translation is needed, because the document is Spanish from the start. You do not need an electronic signature of your own either: the same article requires the notary to issue you one free of charge for that single document. The real barrier is identification when you log in to the notarial portal, so ask the notary in advance whether they can identify you from your country;
• at a Spanish notary in person, if you are in Spain;
• at a Spanish consulate in the country where you live: you walk out with a Spanish document ready to use, no apostille or sworn translation needed;
• at a notary in your own country: then an apostille and a sworn translation are required, which adds weeks.

My advice to owners living outside Spain: sign this power of attorney at the same time as your purchase, while you are at the notary's anyway. It costs little, stays valid for years, and saves exactly the weeks during which a fresh occupation turns into an entrenched one. One detail settles half the questions: the power of attorney names a specific lawyer and procurador, so the lawyer is chosen before you go and sign. On completion day you will not yet have an eviction lawyer, and that is fine: ask the lawyer handling your purchase to line up the names in advance, or sign the power later, once you have one. If you have already bought, what decides the route is not the electronic signature but the identification: if the notary can identify you from your country, go by video call; if not, use the Spanish consulate where you live, booking well ahead.

How to protect your property before anything happens

Prevention here costs a fraction of what getting it wrong costs.

A monitored alarm. The only measure built directly into the legal machinery: a signal received at a security company's monitoring center is on the list of grounds for immediate police intervention. Cameras and sensors without monitoring have no such effect.

Presence instead of emptiness. A property manager who picks up the mail and waters the plants, neighbors who know you and will call if they hear anything. An overflowing mailbox and shutters closed for months work like a billboard for people scouting targets.

A serious door. Obvious, but forcing a reinforced door is itself evidence of forced entry.

A paper trail of use. If the property stands empty for long stretches, put every stay on paper, whoever it is who uses the place: a short-term tenancy for relatives or friends, written permission to use the property with dates. Paper proving the home is in use helps get it treated as a dwelling rather than an empty property, and both the article applied and the speed of recovery turn on that.

From SFERO's practice. We register our clients' tenancy agreements at the Land Registry. To an arriving patrol, an unregistered contract is a printout anyone could have produced. A registered one removes the argument about who is there lawfully, and it counts as evidence in court. The tool is cheap, and almost nobody uses it.

How not to buy an apartment with a squatter already inside

The risk of buying an occupied apartment is concentrated in bank and investment-fund stock: former mortgage collateral, in buildings where some of the apartments are already occupied. Hardly anyone writes about this trap, yet any buyer of resale property on the coast can walk into it.

Snisar told a story on our podcast that is worth remembering. A fund's representative showed a buyer the only vacant apartment in that stairwell, because every other one had been moved into. On paper, the man bought the apartment behind the next door down the hall, the one he was never shown, squatter included. The fund took the money; the untangling fell to the buyer.

The cause of such mix-ups is mundane. The town hall, the utility companies, and the Cadastre can each write the same building's address differently. What you check is the finca registral number at the Land Registry and the cadastral reference (referencia catastral). The first appears on the nota simple; the second is in the property paperwork and in the free search on the Cadastre website. Checking both before you sign costs around €11 and half an hour.

The second trap concerns the moment ownership passes to you. In Spain, title passes not when the sale is registered but when the contract is joined by actual delivery of possession, and handing over the keys plays the delivery role. If strangers move in between your viewing and the signing at the notary's, the burden of proof lands on you, and the seller will shrug.

Out of this grew a trick that sounds absurd right up until the first real case. Locks not changed yet? Leave someone in the apartment for the two hours the signing takes. Viewing in the morning, notary at midday, new locks by evening. That closes the gap.

What about buying an occupied apartment at a discount?

Such apartments exist and sell 20–40% below market, so the question is a fair one. The math has to be honest, and the listing price is not the math.

On the plus side, the discount. On the minus side: the eviction (starting at a thousand euros, lawyer and procurador included), months without access, utility bills and taxes all the while, community fees, and repairs after recovery to a property whose condition you cannot inspect in advance. One more detail: express eviction under Law 5/2018 is available to private individuals but not companies, so buying such an apartment through a company strips you of the fastest tool.

The numbers work if the discount covers all of the above with a margin, you can afford to wait, and you have seen the documents beforehand: the police report on the occupation or a notarial deed recording it. They do not work if you need the home to live in, the money is borrowed, or the seller will not show the papers. This is professional investors' territory, and a poor way to save on your own future home.

New construction is a separate case. A home bought from the developer has no history of collateral and no neighbors who moved in after the previous owners were evicted. Nearly all the risk described in this section lives in bank and fund resales.

Pre-purchase checks. When we run a transaction, the property goes through a checklist: nota simple with encumbrances, finca registral and cadastral reference cross-check, community debts and approved works levies, a town-hall certificate of no zoning or building-code violations, physical inspection. On your own you can cover the same ground in two to three weeks if you know what to request. If you would rather hand it over, message us on WhatsApp +34 664 02 87 80 or see legal and tax support.

Squatter insurance in Spain: what it actually covers

A standard home policy does not cover occupation. You need a separate add-on, which insurers sell as protección antiokupas or ocupación ilegal coverage.

What is usually included:

• legal defense from the pre-court stage;
• lawyer's and procurador's fees;
• court and notary costs;
• sometimes compensation for lost rent;
• lock replacement, cleaning, and repairs after the property comes back.

What is almost never included: full compensation for the loss of use and the cost of alternative accommodations. The Spanish consumer organization OCU reviewed the market in 2020, before specialized products appeared, and noted that ordinary home insurance policies do not cover the losses from an occupation.

Read the conditions, all of them. Five questions to put to the insurer:

• from what date the policy counts as in force;
• whether you must file a police complaint within a set period;
• whether a property that stands empty for long stretches is covered, and after how many consecutive days the restriction kicks in;
• whether lost rent is compensated and, if so, for how many months;
• whether there is a waiting period, meaning a stretch after the policy starts during which an occupation is still not covered, and where exactly it is written.

The third question is the usual trap, and it catches two kinds of owner at once. The first is obvious: someone who visits the apartment once a year. But the same clause reaches the landlord who has a long gap between tenants and never knew the policy excluded it. The fourth question matters only to landlords, and it has to be asked separately: lost rent is not always compensated, and for anyone living on that rent it is the main loss. The fifth is about the waiting period: with some policies coverage does not start on the day you sign but after an agreed interval, and an occupation that falls into that gap is covered by nobody. That interval is in the conditions, not in the brochure, which is why you should ask where exactly it is written.

What keeps costing you while the apartment is occupied

While you are getting the apartment back, the bills arrive as if nothing had happened. Three things need sorting out. The community fees stay yours. The imputed income tax can be stopped, but not retroactively. The mortgage runs on unchanged, and that is the good news.

Community fees are yours to pay. The obligation attaches to ownership, not to use of the apartment, and the law does not list occupation as an exception. Article 9.2 of the Horizontal Property Act, the Spanish law governing buildings held in common ownership, also closes off the "I am not using the building" argument: not using a service does not release you from the charge that goes with it. The debtor here is you, not the people who moved in. If you stop paying, the owners' association (the comunidad de propietarios) reclaims the debt through a summary debt-recovery order, a fast-track procedure in which you are served notice and given a deadline to pay. The owners' meeting may charge a defaulting owner interest above the statutory rate, and that owner loses the right to vote at meetings. And if you decide to sell, the debt for the current year and the three preceding ones passes to the buyer, which in practice means the buyer deducts it from the price. You will not get this money from an insurer: community fees are not on the list of what a squatter-insurance policy covers.

Imputed income tax stops accruing, but not from the day of the occupation. First, what it is: if you do not live in Spain and the property is not rented out, the Spanish state treats it as generating a notional income and taxes that amount once a year. The tax agency takes the view that a property occupied against the owner's will generates no such income. But the exempt period starts from the moment you file the civil claim to recover possession, and you do not have to wait for a judgment. A police report on its own will not do: the whole line of rulings is built around the civil claim to recover possession. Which leads to something worth asking your lawyer outright: if they are running the criminal case only, the imputed income tax keeps accruing, and filing the civil claim alongside it can pay for itself on that alone. That is stated in the AEAT income tax manual, and the same line holds in six binding rulings from the tax directorate between 2018 and 2021: V1385-18, V0967-19, V1054-20, V1197-20, V1368-20, and V1308-21. For a non-resident the rule applies through the cross-reference in article 24.5 of the non-resident income tax act, but the tax agency has never published a ruling specifically about non-residents, so the burden of proof falls on you. Ask your lawyer for two documents, a copy of the claim and the court's order accepting it for filing, and hand them to whoever prepares your annual return. Count the gap as well: the months between the occupation and the filing are taxed, and for an owner who lives outside Spain and has to arrange a power of attorney first, that gap is at its longest. If the apartment was rented out, you have no imputed income anyway: you declare the actual rent, and from the month the payments stopped there is nothing to declare under that heading.

A bank will not demand early repayment because of an occupation. Article 24 of the mortgage credit act allows early repayment to be demanded only for missed payments, and then only if three conditions hold at once. One: there are missed payments. Two: the arrears reach 3 percent of the capital or twelve monthly payments if you are in the first half of the term, counted from signing, or 7 percent or fifteen payments in the second half. Three: the bank has demanded payment in writing, giving you at least a month. The rule is mandatory: you cannot agree otherwise. One important limit: this protection exists only where the borrower, surety, or guarantor is a natural person. If the loan sits with a company, article 24 does not apply at all and the contract governs. An occupation does not fall under it, the terms of the loan do not change, and you keep paying as usual. The law does not require you to notify the bank either, but check your mortgage deed: it may require you to keep home insurance in force, and an ordinary policy often stops covering the property if it stands empty for more than a month or two. Whether an occupied apartment counts as standing empty is something each insurer settles its own way, so ask outright. What to do: as soon as squatters move in, notify your insurer in writing and get confirmation that the policy remains in force. Breaching that clause is not a missed payment, and on its own it does not let the bank call in the loan, but you do not want the argument. No court decision has linked squatters to early repayment. That is not proof, but it is the best signal available.

What it costs in real money

The question readers ask first and articles quietly skip. I have gathered the price ranges from public sources as of August 2026. Treat them as a rough guide: the exact figure depends on the province, the insurer, and the complexity of the case.

Insurance and alarm prices come mostly from comparison-site reviews: operators rarely publish their own rates.

In dollars and pounds, at roughly $1.08 and 85p to the euro: the lawyer's €800–2,000 is roughly £680–1,700, the €550–670 a year of prevention about £470–570, a basic policy at €265 about £225, and a monitored alarm at €45–55 a month about £38–47. In dollars that is about $865–2,160 for the lawyer, $595–725 a year for prevention, $286 for a basic policy, and $49–59 a month for the alarm. Exchange rates move, so recheck before you budget.

Lawyers are a story of their own. The bar associations publish no recommended fees, and that is not modesty: in March 2018 the competition regulator CNMC fined nine bar associations a combined €1,455,000 for collectively recommending prices (the penalty was appealed all the way to the Supreme Court and largely upheld). Your reference points are the published price lists of individual firms.

Free legal aid (justicia gratuita) does exist in Spain, but the income thresholds are pegged to the IPREM index, and property beyond your main home counts among the applicant's assets. The owner of an occupied second home is unlikely to qualify.

And a word about the firms promising to "free" your property within a week. Employees of one such firm have already been convicted: the Provincial Court of Madrid, in a ruling of May 5, 2022, upheld the conviction of two of them for minor coercion (art. 172.3 of the Criminal Code), describing their conduct as intimidation. The penalty was symbolic, a €90 fine each, but the conviction stood. The point lies elsewhere: the court called what these firms do intimidation, and the person who ends up paying is the client, twice. First the firm, then a lawyer for their own defense.

Simple arithmetic to finish. A monitored alarm plus squatter coverage added to an existing policy comes to about €550–670 a year. No policy yet? Add around €265 for basic home insurance.

Now the other side. An eviction lawyer charges from €800, and on top of that comes the procurador, whose fee for this type of claim is capped at €351. So even the simplest case runs to about a thousand euros, and if the defense takes it to appeal, the bill passes three thousand. And that is only the lawyers: the months without the apartment and without rental income are not part of that figure.

Six myths about squatters' rights that stop owners from acting

"After 48 hours the squatters cannot be removed." No law contains any such period, and the police instruction says the direct opposite. Details in the section on when the police can evict without a court order.

"They will register at the address and gain rights to the apartment." Register they can: the padrón is Spain's municipal register of residents, and the town hall must record everyone actually living at an address, lawfully there or not. But it confers no rights over the property. The official padrón instructions of April 29, 2020, put it plainly: registration is "fully independent of private-law disputes over ownership of the dwelling."

"With children or pensioners inside, there will be no eviction." Vulnerability buys a pause of up to two months via social services (four when the claimant is a company), not immunity: the moratorium ended in December 2025. Snisar described an eviction of a mother with two infants.

"Just change the locks while they are out." While people are living in a dwelling, it enjoys constitutional inviolability, and your actions add up to taking the law into your own hands under article 455. The scenario with temporarily absent squatters is contested in case law, and I advise against relying on it.

"Squatters are brought in deliberately so their votes can be harvested at elections." The data exists, and it takes the theory apart. The open Interior Ministry series carries no breakdown by nationality, but the government disclosed one in 2024 in answer to a parliamentary question: of 9,721 people detained or investigated in 2022, 4,866 were foreign nationals and 4,855 were Spanish citizens. Almost exactly even, no anomaly. The law is identical for both. And padrón registration confers no vote: Spanish citizens vote, EU citizens too in municipal elections, and the padrón is merely a technical condition.

"Easier to hire a firm that puts them out." The "eviction companies" (desokupas) promise results in days, with methods to match: pressure, a round-the-clock presence at the door, blocking access. Legally this skirts the edge of articles 172 and 455, and the client who hired them shares the risk. Their main sales pitch used to be "the courts take years," and the 2025 reform has made it obsolete. Prices and the case law are gathered in the money section.

What is coming in parliament

On May 19, 2026, Congress admitted for consideration the People's Party bill No. 122/000254, which the press calls the ley antiokupas. It would oblige occupants to leave within 24 hours or produce a document proving a right to stay; ban registering squatters on the padrón; and amend article 172 of the Criminal Code so that cutting water and electricity in an occupied dwelling could "in no case" count as coercion. On May 26 the bill moved to the Interior Committee.

To be clear: this is the start of the parliamentary procedure, not law in force. The text can change beyond recognition, and the bill may never reach a final vote. Building purchase plans on it would be premature.

Where this leaves you

In short: no grounds for panic, no room for complacency.

The economics of squatting have changed, and that is the main thing. A squatter used to get a year and a half of free living in someone else's apartment; now the wait for a court hearing is measured in weeks. Eighteen months of reform have delivered more for owners than the previous decade managed.

But the law only works for owners whose paperwork is in order. A nota simple on hand, a monitored alarm, a registered tenancy agreement, a power of attorney for a lawyer, neighbors who know you. Boring things nobody does in advance and everybody regrets not doing.

I live in Valencia, in the Ayora district, and I see this subject from the street, not from the news. The real risk to an ordinary lived-in apartment is low. It sits in specific stock: second homes standing empty, fund-owned apartments, houses the owner visits once a year. If that describes yours, give one evening to the prevention list above.

And if you are still choosing a home on the coast and want this risk closed at the purchase stage, write to us or WhatsApp +34 664 02 87 80: we will run the property through the checklist before you put down a reservation deposit.

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