Spain's New Rental Rules, October 2026: What Tenants and Landlords in Mallorca Need to Know

What happened

The sequence matters, because it explains why two new decrees are doing the work of the two that fell.

• 29 September: the Council of Ministers deliberated Royal Decree-laws 26/2026 and 27/2026. They were published in the BOE on 30 September and 1 October.
• 2 October: Congress rejected both in roll-call votes, 172 in favour and 178 against for RDL 26/2026, and 166 in favour and 184 against for RDL 27/2026. Both were repealed in the BOE the same day.
• 6 October: the Council of Ministers approved RDL 28/2026 (rental-contract stability) and RDL 29/2026 (the social function of housing and affordable supply). By then the Cortes had been dissolved for the 29 November general election, so validation falls to the Diputación Permanente, the standing committee that acts for Parliament between sessions.
• 7 October: both were published in the BOE.
• 8 October: RDL 29/2026 came into force. RDL 28/2026 is set for 15 November.

RDL 29/2026 reproduces most of RDL 26/2026, with changes. The two-year extension and the rent-update cap, for example, are word for word the same.

If you rent

Rent updates are capped. For any annual update that falls due between 8 October 2026 and 31 December 2027, the landlord cannot raise the rent by more than 2% unless you both agree a different figure. If your rent is already above the official reference-price ceiling, it cannot be raised at all. Separately, a contract with no express update clause gets no update, and any update is limited to the national rent-update index (IRAV).

You can ask for up to two extra years. If your contract was in force on 8 October and its compulsory term (or a tacit extension) ends before the end of 2028, you can ask for an extraordinary extension in annual steps, up to two more years, on the same terms. You must be up to date with the rent and have paid it on time each month for the previous eight months. The landlord has to accept, unless you have agreed other terms or signed a new contract, or the landlord has given notice that they genuinely need the home for themselves or family and can show that need. The extension does not apply if you renew or sign a new contract at a rent at least 5% lower. Requests already made under the earlier, repealed decree count as validly made.

• Seasonal lets: a temporary contract now has to state a real, documentable reason, such as being temporarily displaced from your usual home, and the landlord carries the burden of proof. Without it, the contract is treated as a normal long-term lease from the start. Duration must be over 31 days and generally no more than twelve months, and more than two successive contracts on the same flat between the same parties turns the first into a habitual-residence lease. You can leave a temporary let after one month with ten days' notice. Contracts signed before 8 October run to their agreed end under the old rules, with no extension.
• Room rentals: renting a single room now counts as a habitual-residence lease, and the rents on simultaneous room contracts cannot add up to more than the rent for the whole flat.
• Guarantees and insurance: a landlord cannot require you to take out rent-default insurance. An additional guarantee beyond the legal deposit is capped at two months' rent on a standard contract, or one month on a temporary let. The legal deposit itself is unchanged.
• Agency and contract fees are the landlord's: the agency's fees and the costs of drawing up the contract cannot be passed on to you, directly or indirectly, under any name. That covers preparing, signing, managing, changing or renewing the lease (Urban Leases Act, article 20.2, as rewritten by RDL 29/2026). Landlords have had to pay these costs since Ley 12/2023 of May 2023; the decree adds that no indirect charge or other label gets round it. An optional extra service can only be charged if you asked for it in writing after being told it is optional and what it costs. Property taxes such as IBI cannot be passed on to you either.
• Repairs: if you ask in writing and the landlord does not respond with a quote within 15 calendar days, you can have the work done and deduct the cost from the rent. On a temporary let the landlord has five working days.
• First refusal: your right of first refusal if the landlord sells cannot be signed away in the contract.
• Tax: if your taxable base is below €33,007.20, you can deduct 10% of the rent paid on your main home, unless your household owns another dwelling within 50 km. We could not confirm whether it covers rent paid before 8 October, so check with a gestor.

If you own and let

Everything above has a landlord's side. The update cap, the two-year extension (which you must accept unless an exception applies), the tighter seasonal-let rules, the room-rent ceiling, the guarantee limits, the ban on charging IBI or agency fees, the repair deduction and the non-waivable right of first refusal all apply to you now. The decrees also require the parties to sign a record of the property's condition at handover, and without one the dwelling is presumed returned in good condition.

Ending or not renewing a lease, today. Once a lease has run its five years (seven if the landlord is a company), it extends year by year for up to three more years unless the landlord gives at least four months' notice. The tenant needs to give only two.

From 15 November, if RDL 28/2026 survives. Instead of that, if neither side gives notice the lease renews automatically for successive five-year terms (seven if the landlord is a company). The landlord's notice period becomes six months. A landlord who validly declines to renew then owes the tenant an indemnity: the larger of twelve months' rent, calculated at the upper value of the reference range for that dwelling, or one month's rent for each year the tenant has lived there, payable on handover of the keys. There are exceptions, which must be stated in writing in the notice: you are an individual who needs the home for yourself or a relative up to the second degree, the tenant has been absent for more than six of the last twelve months without justification, the tenant has another suitable home in the same municipality, a new contract is signed, or the tenant turns down a formal offer of a new five- or seven-year contract at a compliant rent.

Notices you sent before 7 October keep their effect and generate no indemnity. If fewer than six months remain on the contract on 15 November, you can still give four months' notice.

• Income tax: landlords who are not large holders get a reduction on net rental income that depends on what happens to the rent. Outside a tensioned zone the main tiers are 100% if you cut the rent by more than 5% and keep the same tenant (or relet below the reference index), 85% for a tenant aged 18 to 35, 50% if the rent is not increased, and 40% down to 15% as increases get larger. The 95% and 90% tiers require a tensioned zone. In practice the new tiers apply to contracts signed after 1 December 2026. From 1 January 2027, owners of empty or second homes also face a progressive scale for imputed income, rising from 1.1% of cadastral value to 3% above €1 million.
• Corporate buyers: until the end of 2030, companies that are large holders, and entities buying distressed property well below market value, cannot buy a home for less than 70% of its appraised market value. Private individuals are not covered.
• Evictions: until the end of 2030, courts must pause cases against vulnerable tenants with no housing alternative where the claimant is a distressed-asset buyer, and in other cases ask the housing authority for a solution, with compensation paid by the administration. A vulnerable tenant's situation does not prevail where the landlord is an individual who owns two or fewer homes. In non-payment cases the administration has two months to offer housing or pay the debt.

Tourist and short lets

From 1 December 2026, furnished lets of 30 nights or fewer to the same guest lose their VAT exemption and move to the reduced rate, reported as 10%. The same applies where the landlord provides hotel-type services. A let in the landlord's own main home is excepted from the 30-night test. Like the rest of RDL 29/2026, this depends on the decree being validated.

Platforms that fail to share rental data with the national digital registry now face sanctions of up to €1 million or 2% of turnover. Those fines fall on platforms, not individual owners. The new IBI surcharge on tourist lets, which can reach 50% to 150% depending on how many properties you own, is only available in declared tensioned zones, so it does not apply in Mallorca. Balearic tourist-licence rules continue to apply as before.

What this means in Mallorca

The Balearic Islands have no declared tensioned residential market zone. The ministry's latest list of new declarations has no Balearic municipality, and on 6 October the PP and Vox in the Balearic Parliament rejected declaring Balears a tensioned zone. None of the decrees contains a Balearic-specific provision.

Applies in Mallorca now: the 2% and 0% update limits, the two-year extension, the standard annual extensions of up to three years after the first five, seasonal and room-rental rules, eviction measures, guarantee and fee limits, repairs, first refusal and the 70% rule. Does not apply without a zone: the extra three-year extension, the new-contract rent caps, the tourist-let IBI surcharge and the 95% and 90% landlord tax-reduction tiers.

The Balearic government has said it will study a challenge before the Constitutional Court on competence grounds. That is reported political positioning, not a filed case. The decrees also say they apply without prejudice to regional rules on temporary and room lets.

What happens next

The Diputación Permanente has to vote on both decrees, and the date is not confirmed. The constitution gives Congress 30 days from promulgation, but how that period is counted is unclear. If it is business days, RDL 28/2026 could start on 15 November before any vote. If either decree is not validated it would be repealed, as the first two were.

Law firms read a repeal as forward-only, meaning things done while a decree was in force, such as extension requests or capped updates, are not automatically undone. Each case would need individual assessment. If RDL 29/2026 fell, the earlier wording of the law would return and the cap and extension would stop applying to future updates and requests. If RDL 28/2026 fell before 15 November, it would never take effect.