Sources and method

The method, in five rules

A figure comes from the body that sets it, or it does not appear. A tax rate comes from the authority that levies it. A statutory fee comes from the instrument that sets it, on the BOE. A provider's price comes from that provider's own price page. Never from a review site, a directory, a summary or an answer engine.
Every figure carries the date it was read. Not the date the page was published, and not the date of the last deploy. The date somebody looked.
Prices are re-read every 90 days. A row that cannot be re-read is deleted rather than carried forward, and the date only moves when something real has changed with it.
Where a page does not state something, we write that it does not state it. We draw no inference from an absence: "they do not publish a fee" is permitted, "they are hiding their fee" is not.
Where we do not know, the page says so. There are sentences on this site that say we have not read a source, and they stay there until somebody does.

Where the numbers come from

Statutes and official instruments

Boletín Oficial del Estado (boe.es): the consolidated texts of the Código Civil, the Reglamento Hipotecario, Ley 5/2019 on mortgage credit contracts, Real Decreto 1155/2024 on immigration, Real Decreto 316/2026, Real Decreto 1426/1989 (the notaries' tariff), Real Decreto 1427/1989 (the registrars' tariff), Real Decreto Legislativo 1/1993 on transfer tax and stamp duty, and Ley 31/2022, which sets the IPREM figure still in force. All read 26 August 2026.
Boletín Oficial de la Junta de Andalucía and the Junta's own publications — Ley 7/2021 (LISTA) and Decreto 550/2022, for the recognition of irregular buildings. Read 26 August 2026.

Registers and tax authorities

Colegio de Registradores (registradores.org): the published price of a nota simple, the continuous-information version, the translated version, and the statement that the amounts published do not include applicable taxes. Read 26 August 2026.
Sede Electrónica del Catastro (sedecatastro.gob.es): the public consultation of cadastral records.
Agencia Estatal de Administración Tributaria: the IVA rates on a new-build dwelling. Read 26 August 2026.
Junta de Andalucía, Comunidad de Madrid, Generalitat Valenciana, Agència Tributària de les Illes Balears: regional transfer-tax and stamp-duty rates, each from that community's own publication. Read 26 August 2026.
Policía Nacional, sede electrónica: the fee for assigning a NIE at the applicant's own request, and the procedure page. Read 26 August 2026.
Ministerio de Inclusión, Seguridad Social y Migraciones: the EX-15 form.
Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores, through the Spanish consulates in London, Manchester and San Francisco — the non-lucrative visa requirements.
Servicio Público de Empleo Estatal and the Ministerio de Hacienda: the IPREM figure in force and the budget extension that keeps it there.
Banco de España, Portal del Cliente Bancario: valuation rules and the general loan-to-value position.
European Central Bank: the euro reference rate used for every sterling figure on this site, dated 25 August 2026.

The United Kingdom government

gov.uk, Spain: buying and renting property: read in full on 26 August 2026. Published 22 March 2013, last updated 13 May 2021, and carrying a standing banner reading "This guidance is currently being reviewed and updated."
gov.uk, Living in Spain: last updated 3 July 2026.
gov.uk, Spain entry requirements: the 90-in-180 visa-free rule. Note that the Living in Spain page no longer contains that rule; it was rewritten into a link hub in December 2025, and citing it for the rule would be citing a page that does not carry it.

Named providers

Every price attributed to a named company on this site was read from that company's own published price page on 26 August 2026, and a copy of that page is held on file. Where a company publishes no price, the table says Not published and we say nothing more about it. Company names are used to identify their owners. Nobody named on this site has paid to be here, and no arrangement of any kind exists with any of them.

What we could not verify

This section is the point of the page. It is longer than most sites would allow, and every line in it is a limit on what we have told you.

The ministerial order that sets the NIE fee. The Policía Nacional publishes the amount without citing the instrument behind it, and we have not traced it. The figure is sourced to the authority that charges it, not to a statute.
A tax-inclusive price for a land registry extract. No page of the Colegio de Registradores that we could reach publishes one. Every figure it publishes excludes tax, and the checkout that would show the inclusive figure sits behind a Spanish electronic identification we do not hold.
A flat price for a certificación registral. The Colegio de Registradores declines to publish one. Only the underlying tariff items are available.
A non-resident loan-to-value from the Banco de España. It does not publish one. The figure on this site is one named bank's published figure for one named product, and it is not a market average, because nobody publishes a market average.
The euro figures for the non-lucrative visa from a current consular page. The consulates we could read publish the multiples of IPREM rather than the euros. The euro figures on this site are arithmetic from the IPREM in force.
The Supreme Court judgments on arras, first-hand. Our statement of the three-way classification comes from an official resolution published in the BOE, which sets it out in its own reasoning. We have not read the judgments themselves and we do not cite them as if we had.
A consolidated text of Decreto 550/2022. Andalucía does not publish one. Our statement that the relevant articles are unamended was assembled from the original text plus every modifying instrument the competent department itself lists, which is not the same thing as reading a consolidated version.
Municipal practice on irregular buildings. Each town hall may set its own procedure and conditions by ordinance, so no single Andalusia-wide answer exists, and we give none.
The current status of the investor visa route. We have not read the instrument, so we say nothing about it in either direction.
Spanish tax residency. We have not read the statute at source and we assert no threshold, rule or consequence.
A real search-result page from Google. Google no longer serves organic results to a client that does not run JavaScript, and we could not obtain one. What we could obtain was two credible search-engine result sets and a set of directional ones, and that is what the page-planning decisions rest on.

The correction policy

If anything on this site is wrong, tell us at info@spanishpropertycheck.com.

We will check it against the source, correct it, and date the correction on the page itself. We do not quietly edit a figure and move the last-updated date. If the correction is material, it is stated as a correction.

We would rather be told than be right, and a message pointing at a specific sentence is more useful to us than almost anything else you could send.

Freshness

Prices on the two comparison pages: re-read every 90 days, hard.
Tax rates and statutory fees: re-checked every 90 days, and immediately if a regional budget or a tariff instrument changes.
Statutory citations: re-checked against the consolidated text every 90 days. Two of the regulations on this site were rewritten inside the last two years and a third was amended in April 2026, which is precisely why this is a rule and not an aspiration.

Images and data

There is no stock photography on this site, no illustration, no chart, no icon set, and no image of any document that is not our own invention. The example nota simple on this site is a synthetic facsimile: no register issued it, it describes no real property, and its identifiers are built so that their check characters do not work out.

Wave one ships no geodata layer. If one is added, its attribution string will appear inside the image's own frame rather than as a footnote, in the form the licence requires.

Who writes it

Helen Marsh writes and checks every page here.

That is a pen name, and this page says so rather than letting you find out. It carries no credential, and it is not going to acquire one: no solicitor, no abogado, no colegiado number, no photograph, no claim to a regulated profession. What it means is that one identifiable role is answerable for every figure on this site, and that when a figure is wrong there is a person and an address to write to.

We would rather tell you that than borrow authority we do not have. This site's case is not that its author is an expert. It is that the sources are named, the dates are printed, the arithmetic is shown, and the limits are written down — which is a claim you can check rather than one you have to accept.

More about why the site exists is on about this site; who runs it is on the legal notice; what happens to an email address is on the privacy notice.