Spain will vote in a general election on Nov. 29, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said on Monday in a televised address from the Moncloa Palace, three days after Congress struck down the two emergency housing decrees his cabinet had approved the Tuesday before.
The decrees would have suspended evictions of vulnerable tenants until the end of 2030, held rent increases on existing leases to 2 percent through 2027 and made most leases renew on their own. Mr. Sánchez said he needed voters to give him “a much broader progressive majority” to pass that kind of law. The conservative People’s Party, which leads every major poll, says the answer is construction, not regulation.
The fight sits on top of a decade in which rents and home prices pulled away from pay. The record points first to arithmetic. Spain formed about 240,000 households last year and finished 92,000 homes, and the Bank of Spain now counts a shortfall of 750,000. Tourist flats and foreign buyers press hard on a few coasts and city centers but are small against the national market. Catalonia’s rent caps, in force since March 2024, have done part of what each side predicted: rents rose more slowly for people inside the system, and fewer new leases were signed. Whether that drop means landlords leaving or tenants staying put is what economists still dispute.
Ten days in Madrid
Maricarmen Abascal is 87 and uses a wheelchair. On Sept. 23, after hundreds of neighbors and activists tried to block the doorway of her building in Madrid’s Retiro district, a large police operation cleared the way and she was taken from the flat where she had lived for 70 years. It was the fourth attempt to evict her in recent months, elDiario.es reported.
The owner, Urbagestión, which denies being a vulture fund, wanted to raise her old-style lease of €500 a month to €2,650, according to elDiario.es, more than five times as much. The Guardian put the increase at 230 percent. The two figures do not reconcile. “The owner has refused to negotiate or accept any proposal,” her lawyer, Beatriz Duro, said that morning. After the outcry, Ms. Duro said a deal would let her client return under a new lease.
Protests spread to more than 50 cities, and tents filled the Puerta del Sol. On Sept. 29 the cabinet approved two royal decree-laws. The first, Royal Decree-law 26/2026, bundled the eviction freeze, a two-year extension for leases expiring before the end of 2028, the 2 percent cap, a 10 percent value-added tax on tourist rentals, rules for seasonal and room-by-room lets and a bar on investment funds buying homes for less than 70 percent of appraised value, according to idealista. The second made leases roll over in five-year terms, seven when the landlord is a company, and required a landlord who refused without cause to pay the tenant 12 months’ rent.
Both fell on Oct. 2. The first lost 178 to 172, with the People’s Party, the far-right Vox, the Catalan separatist Junts and the single deputy of UPN voting no. The second lost 184 to 166 after the Basque Nationalist Party and Coalición Canaria joined them. Junts had negotiated parts of the text. In a statement the night before, reported by The Objective, the party said many of the measures would reduce the supply of rental homes and raise prices. “It is incomprehensible and irresponsible to ask us to vote in favor of some bad decrees,” Mònica Sales, a Junts lawmaker, said.
Before the vote, Mr. Sánchez told the three parties that “history will judge you sooner than you think, and more forcefully than you imagine.” When the result was read, people in the public gallery shouted “the vulture funds rule the Congress” and were removed.
On Monday he took the defeat to the voters. He said his government had “made mistakes,” called Spain the fastest-growing economy in the European Union and cast the election as a choice about the far right. On housing, he put it this way.
There are still many social injustices to correct and many goals yet to be achieved in public services and housing. The truth is that, to do more, we need the support of the people; we need Parliament to give us a much broader progressive majority.
Rent against pay
The best long series on what Spaniards pay comes from the Ministry of Housing’s rent index, built from income tax returns on more than two million private leases. An elDiario.es analysis of it found that the median rent rose about 43 percent from 2015 to 2024, while the average wage in the national statistics agency’s wage survey rose 27 percent, from €23,106 to €29,540. In Retiro the median went from €815 to €1,205. Ms. Abascal’s pension is €1,450 a month.
Those tax records include old contracts and run two years behind, so they understate the bill for anyone signing a lease today. The property portal Fotocasa and the job site InfoJobs compared asking rents with advertised salaries and found that renting an 80-square-meter flat took 50 percent of gross pay in 2025, up from 38 percent in 2019, and 76 percent in the province of Barcelona. María Matos, Fotocasa’s head of research, called it a “genuine housing emergency.”
Buying is no easier. The national statistics agency’s house price index rose 12.2 percent in the year to the second quarter. The Bank of Spain calculated in June that a renting household would need 6.8 years of gross income to buy a home, and more than 10 years in Madrid and Barcelona. Homeownership among young people fell from 41 percent in 2007 to 22 percent in 2025, the bank found.
Mr. Sánchez said on Monday that purchasing power had risen three times more than in France or Germany. That is an economywide average. For tenants, the tax records point the other way.
The missing homes
In 2025, Spain added about 240,000 households and completed 92,000 homes, 9 percent fewer than the year before. It was the fifth straight year that household formation more than doubled completions, according to the Bank of Spain’s annual report, published in June. The bank put the gap accumulated since 2021 at 750,000 homes, or 3.7 percent of households, against 1.5 percent in Germany. In April 2024 it had estimated about 600,000. Six provinces, Madrid, Barcelona, Alicante, Valencia, Murcia and Málaga, hold 52.5 percent of the shortfall.
The central bank was not first to the finding. In 2023, Judit Montoriol Garriga of CaixaBank Research matched building permits against new households, town by town, and found the fastest-growing places had the worst shortages.
The supply of housing in Spain is currently not enough to cover structural demand
Demand is not about to stop. The national statistics agency projects 2,184,048 more households between 2026 and 2041, about 145,600 a year. That forecast is lower than the agency’s previous one and still far above last year’s completions. The agency expects population growth over the period to come entirely from international migration.
Spain once had the opposite problem. From 1997 to 2007 it built about 1.6 homes for every new household, CaixaBank Research found. Completions peaked at 658,510 in 2006, according to the government’s housing observatory. After the crash, unsold new homes reached 650,000 in 2009 and completions sank to 44,630 in 2016. Construction’s share of jobs has fallen from 11 percent in the late 1990s to 7 percent, the Bank of Spain said.
In a Reddit thread on the election, one reader rejected the shortage argument outright.
Thank you, this is a pervasive talking point and it’s false, for a decade we built housing enough for three countries and the prices still went up. The problem is the deregulation that brought tons of capital demanding benefits and pushing for more.
The first claim describes the boom years well and the present badly. The overbuilding ended in 2008. The government still counts about 450,000 unsold homes from that era, many of which, the Bank of Spain says, buyers do not want because of where they are or the state they are in. Since 2021, completions have run below half of household formation every year. Another reader in the same thread cited the bank’s estimate as 800,000 homes since 2020. The published figure is 750,000, for 2021 through 2025.
Empty homes are the other argument against building. The 2021 census, using electricity records, counted 3,837,328 empty dwellings, 14.4 percent of the stock. About 45 percent were in municipalities of fewer than 10,000 people, and 10.5 percent in cities over 250,000, which hold 24 percent of the population, according to the census figures. Kiko Llaneras, a data journalist at El País, wrote that the count may overstate the empties and that most are not where homes are needed.
🏠 ¿Cuántas viviendas vacías hay realmente en España?
Spoiler: quizás no tantas como creemos. Y la mayoría no están donde se necesitan.
Pero eso NO significa que los impuestos a la vivienda infrautilizada sean mala idea.
🔹 EL DATO OFICIAL (Y MATICES)
El INE estimó en el…
A reader in the same Reddit discussion made the geographic point more bluntly.
3/4 of Spain is losing population because young people leave towards big cities due to lack of job opportunities and infrastructure. So yeah, you can build 100,000 houses in the middle of Zamora if you want, but no one is going to move there unless their job prospect is just raising sheeps for a few peanuts.
The provincial breakdown supports the reader on where the shortage is, not on whether building helps. The gap sits in the provinces with the jobs. The Bank of Spain estimates that existing buildings in Madrid and Barcelona could yield 300,000 to 350,000 more homes, though it says they are hard to bring to market.
Tourists and foreign buyers
The national statistics agency counts tourist flats by scraping Airbnb, Booking and Vrbo twice a year. In May it found 341,001 advertised, 1.28 percent of the country’s dwellings and 10.7 percent fewer than a year earlier. The Bank of Spain estimates that tourist flats make up about 10 percent of the rental market and that their number peaked near 400,000 between 2021 and 2024.
They cluster. In the city of Madrid, 12,637 tourist flats were advertised in November 2025, while the national registry listed 1,283 as active, the Housing Ministry said. The most cited study of the effect, by Miquel-Àngel Garcia-López and three co-authors in the Journal of Urban Economics in 2020, found that Airbnb raised rents 1.9 percent in the average Barcelona neighborhood and about 7 percent in the busiest tenth. The authors wrote that the effect could not explain the bulk of the city’s rent increases from 2012 to 2016.
The government has gone after the listings. In May 2025 the Consumer Affairs Ministry ordered Airbnb to block more than 65,000 of them, and in December it fined the company €64 million. Airbnb said it would appeal. In May, the Supreme Court struck down the national rental registry, ruling that tourist housing is mainly a matter for the regions.
Foreigners bought about 97,300 homes in 2025, a record, or 13.8 percent of the more than 705,000 sales recorded by the land registrars, idealista reported. Notaries, who count differently, put the share at 18.4 percent in the second half of the year, down from 19.5 percent a year earlier. Foreigners made 45.7 percent of purchases in Alicante, 32.8 percent in the Balearic Islands and 32.3 percent in Málaga. By the notaries’ count for the first half of 2025, about 60.9 percent of foreign buyers lived in Spain.
Spain closed its golden visa program, which gave residence to big property investors, on April 3, 2025. The 100 percent tax on non-E.U. buyers that Mr. Sánchez announced in January 2025 had stalled in Congress by March, Reuters reported. “The government has chosen to limit, ban and penalize instead of addressing the real issue: a lack of housing supply,” Marta Madrenas, a Junts lawmaker, told the agency.
The coastal figures are large where they apply, and the provinces with the most foreign buying are among those with the steepest rent increases. Nationally, the numbers do not match the shortfall. Tourist listings are falling while rents keep rising, and most foreign buyers are residents who also need somewhere to live.
Seventy years of rent rules
In 1950, Spain had as many renters as owners. In the 1960s the state required leases to be extended for a tenant’s lifetime, let them pass to a spouse and children and tied rent increases to inflation, which cut landlords’ returns, the economists Ghizlen Ouasbaa and Elisabet Viladecans-Marsal wrote for Brookings in 2021. Decades of subsidies for buyers followed. Ownership peaked at 82 percent in 2001, and public rental housing covers 1.6 percent of households, against an E.U. average of 9.3 percent.
A reader on Reddit pointed to a decision behind that small public stock.
The huge mistake Spain did is that these houses were given to the people instead of being owned by the government forever, so now, they are regular houses and people that bought them originally at subsidized low prices are now able to sell them for a massive profit.
The Brookings figures fit the reader’s account of a country that subsidized owning over renting. The rules for private tenants have swung with each government. The 1985 Boyer decree ended compulsory lease extensions, and rental supply barely grew. The 1994 lease law set a five-year minimum, a 2013 reform cut it to three, and a 2019 decree restored five years, or seven for companies, according to the law firm MSG Legal. The 2023 Housing Law let regions declare stressed zones and cap rents in them.
Evictions have their own history. In November 2012, after a wave of suicides and protests, the conservative government of the day halted some evictions of low-income homeowners for two years, Al Jazeera reported. A pandemic-era moratorium ran from 2020 until February, when the People’s Party, Vox and Junts voted down the decree extending it, even after the government exempted small landlords.
What the caps did in Catalonia
Catalonia was the first region to use the 2023 law. Caps took effect in 140 municipalities on March 16, 2024, and 131 more were added that autumn. It had tried once before, with a 2020 regional law that the Constitutional Court struck down in 2022.
Studies of the 2020 law split on supply. Jordi Jofre-Monseny, Rodrigo Martínez-Mazza and Mariona Segú, using lease-level registry data in Regional Science and Urban Economics, found rents fell 4 to 6 percent and no evidence that the rental stock shrank. Joan Monràs and José García-Montalvo, in a study for Esade, found about 10 percent fewer contracts, concentrated among pricier flats.
The first evaluation of the 2024 caps, by Luis Pérez García, was posted to arXiv in February. Comparing the 140 first-wave towns with uncontrolled ones, he found rent growth about 3 points lower in his main estimate but not in other methods, and about 13 percent fewer new tenancy agreements. He wrote that limited data called for caution.
The results point to a reduction in tenancy agreements and a less robust decrease in rental price growth.
A paper by Fernando Pinto of Rey Juan Carlos University for the research group Fedea in June found average asking rents rose 5.7 percent in the province of Barcelona from early 2024 to late 2025, against 8.5 percent in Madrid and 10.8 percent nationally. Rental listings fell 22.2 percent in Barcelona and rose 3.9 percent in Madrid, and each Barcelona listing drew 462 inquiries. Mr. Pinto wrote that listings measure a flow of new offers, not the stock of rented homes, and that his results are signs rather than causal estimates.
The Catalan government’s deposit data, which do count leases, show the stock of standard leases grew by 8,895 in 2025, Infobae reported. Seasonal leases, which escaped the caps, filled about 47 percent of listings in Barcelona city in early 2025, against about 17 percent in Madrid, Mr. Pinto found. After Catalonia extended the caps to them in December, active seasonal contracts fell by 1,233 in the last quarter of 2025.
Read together, the evidence supports a narrower claim than either side makes. Caps lower rents by a few percent for tenants who have a lease, and new leases get scarcer for people who don’t. Fewer listings are consistent with tenants staying put as well as landlords leaving, and the stock data do not show a collapse. The Bank of Spain wrote in June that caps are “especially effective in the short term” for sitting tenants but, held over time, risk pushing homes into tourist or seasonal use, idealista reported. It added that tenant protections can cut rental supply if public bodies do not cover owners’ risks, the gap Junts named when it said payment by the state was not guaranteed.
The campaign argument
Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the People’s Party leader, set out his housing plan on Monday morning at a congress of family businesses in Madrid, Infobae reported: 250,000 homes a year, homes on public land sold about 30 percent cheaper, building licenses granted automatically if a town hall does not answer within 90 days, an anti-squatting law, value-added tax on homes cut to 4 percent and public guarantees of up to 100 percent of the price for young buyers. “Housing has been the great failure of this government and must be the success of the next one,” he said. He also said the decrees had made rental listings collapse within days, a claim that could not be independently verified.
His target is 2.7 times last year’s completions and well above the 145,600 households a year the statistics agency projects, so if it were met it would cut into the backlog. The Bank of Spain’s June report also covered his financing idea. It said public guarantees do not ease the income limits of buyers and raise their debt burdens.
Voters like intervention. In a 40dB poll for El País and Cadena SER, taken Sept. 25 to 28, 67.5 percent preferred limiting rents even at a cost to landlords’ returns, including 56.5 percent of People’s Party voters and 55.2 percent of Vox voters, Demócrata reported. They do not vote that way. An average of 11 polls through Oct. 3 put the People’s Party at 32.1 percent, the Socialists at 26.5 percent and Vox at 18.4 percent, with the right together at 50.5 percent.
Oriol Bartomeus, a political scientist at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, told The Associated Press why the timing suits the prime minister.
Sánchez can frame the election ... in very classic left-versus-right terms.
On Reddit, a reader argued the defeat was the plan.
The legislation was designed to fail - and this was a move by him to ride a wave of discontent into the voting booths
Nothing in the record shows intent. The government negotiated parts of the text with Junts, and Junts said it would vote for a rewritten decree. The government did have warning. Congress had already repealed, on April 28, a March decree with the same two-year extension and 2 percent cap.
Mr. Sánchez opened his campaign on X on Monday, setting affordable housing against what he called his rivals’ penthouses and cuts.
Frente a sus áticos, sus recortes y su servilismo a las élites, nuestro compromiso con la gente: vivienda asequible, servicios públicos y derechos sociales.
España tiene que seguir avanzando y, para eso, necesitamos que la ciudadanía amplíe nuestra fuerza en el Parlamento.
Toca…
A reader in the r/europe thread recalled the last time the polls wrote him off.
PP and Vox were polling well before this, but they were also polling well when they stormed the municipal elections in 2023. He took a massive gambit calling an election in response and still survived it.
That is accurate. In July 2023 the People’s Party won 137 seats to the Socialists’ 121 and Vox’s 33, and Mr. Sánchez kept power with the votes of smaller parties, Junts among them. Vox now polls about six points above its 2023 result.
Jeremy Cliffe, a journalist who covers European politics, wrote that the odds were strongly against Mr. Sánchez but that the timing caught a turn in the national conversation from migration to housing.
Sánchez calls elections for November 29. Odds strongly against him but history suggests it would be unwise to write off the great survivor of Spanish politics entirely. The timing is typically canny: seizing moment where national conversation has turned from migration to housing.
What comes next
The dissolution decree is due in the official gazette on Tuesday. Parties must register coalitions by Oct. 16, the campaign runs from Nov. 13 to Nov. 27 and polls may not be published in the five days before the vote, according to Newtral.
The protesters are not waiting for the result. Alicia del Río, a spokeswoman for the Tenants’ Union in Madrid, said on Monday that the group was preparing a general strike for housing in November and would keep the Sol camp, elDiario.es reported. “This fight is not going to wait for any electoral calendar,” she said. The labor federations CCOO and UGT met on Monday to decide whether to join.
The strike date is to be announced in the coming days. Polls open on Sunday, Nov. 29.