Cadastral Value and Reference Value: the Two Spanish Property Numbers Everyone Confuses

Your cadastral value is the number the Spanish State uses while you own a property: it drives your IBI and your annual Modelo 210. The reference value is the number transfer tax and inheritance and gift tax are calculated on. It does not change your IBI or your Modelo 210. Same office, different figures, different ways of complaining.

Key facts

So, a letter arrives from Spain. Or your lawyer sends an email before completion. And there they are again, two phrases that look almost identical to an English speaker.

Valor catastral.

Valor de referencia.

Same register. Same office in Madrid. Completely different taxes.

And then a third one turns up, referencia catastral, which sounds like both of them and is not a value at all.

Honestly, this is one of the most common tangles that reaches my desk, and it is not because owners are careless. It is because the names are almost the same and nobody puts them side by side for you.

Two numbers, one code, and why everyone mixes them up

Here is the whole thing in one line.

The cadastral value is the number for keeping a property. The reference value is the number for moving one.

Keep it, and the cadastral value follows you every year, twice. Once through your town hall, as IBI. Once through the Spanish tax agency, as the imputed income on your Modelo 210.

Move it, and the reference value is the figure transfer tax and inheritance and gift tax are calculated on, whatever the parties actually paid.

That is it. That is the distinction people pay for.

Now the third name, because it causes as much trouble as the other two. The cadastral reference is not a value. It is the identifier: an alphanumeric code that pins your property to its exact spot on the Catastro's official map. One property, one code. It has no euros in it.

Think of it this way. The cadastral reference is the property's name. The cadastral value and the reference value are two different opinions about what it is worth.

Both of those opinions come from the same place.

The cadastral value: the number you own with

The cadastral value is determined objectively for each individual property, from the data the Catastro holds. It is made of two parts added together: the value of the land, and the value of what is built on it.

To reach the figure, the rules tell the valuer to look at where the property sits, what the planning rules allow on that land and what it is capable of producing, and what the market around it is doing.

There is one hard ceiling on all of it. The cadastral value cannot exceed market value, and the law even defines market value for this purpose: the most probable price at which the property could be sold, between independent parties, free of charges.

Read that again if you own on the Costa Blanca, because it is the sentence that surprises people most. The cadastral value is legally forbidden from being higher than what your property would fetch.

The figures do not appear out of thin air. They come from a valuation report, the ponencia de valores, which sets out the criteria, the planning inputs and everything else needed to work out the values for an area. It can cover a whole class of property in the municipality, or just some zones, or a special group.

And here is the part almost every foreign owner has wrong.

Your town hall does not set your cadastral value.

Maintaining the Catastro, and valuing what is in it, is the exclusive competence of the State, exercised by the Directorate General of the Catastro, an administrative register that sits under the Ministry of Finance.

The town hall sends you the bill. Madrid sets the number the bill is built on. That single fact decides where you go when you think the number is wrong, and we will come back to it.

The reference value: the number you buy and inherit with

The reference value is younger, and it works in a completely different way.

Every year, the Catastro looks at the prices actually being paid. Public notaries report the prices agreed in property sales, the Catastro analyses them, and out of that analysis comes the reference value. Market value is the ceiling on it, same as before.

The analysis does not disappear into a drawer. It goes into an annual report on the property market and into a map of values, which splits the country into areas that behave alike and gives each one an average value for the types of property that best represent it.

So while the cadastral value is a periodic exercise built on a valuation report for your town, the reference value is an annual exercise built on what buyers and sellers in your area are really signing at the notary.

And, like the cadastral value, it has a ceiling. To stop the reference value from going above market value, the Ministry of Finance sets a reduction by order for each class of property.

Which brings us to the question everyone eventually asks.

Why the two numbers are never the same size

If both figures are capped by the same market value ceiling, and both are set by the same office, why do they come out so far apart?

Because the ministry keeps each one under that ceiling by a different distance.

For urban cadastral values, it applies a coefficient of 0.5 to the individual value that comes out of the valuation report. Half.

For urban reference values, the reduction is 0.9. Nine tenths.

Two rules, two different distances from the market. On purpose. That is the structural answer to why your cadastral value looks so small next to the price you paid, and why a reference value can land uncomfortably close to it.

Now, the honest caveat, and please take it seriously. Those coefficients are not a calculator for your own property. They are how the ministry builds each figure across a whole class of property, in different exercises, in different years, from different inputs. Treat them as the explanation of why the two numbers never match. Not as a valuation of your house.

Which tax each number governs

This is the section to screenshot.

Take them one at a time.

IBI runs on the cadastral value. The taxable base of that local tax is the cadastral value of the property, determined and notified under the Catastro rules. Nothing to do with the reference value.

Your Modelo 210 runs on the cadastral value too. When a non-resident owner declares imputed income for a property kept for their own use, the calculation applies a percentage to the cadastral value, and the tax agency's own guidance points you straight at where to find it: the IBI receipt.

On the percentage itself, the rule is 2 percent, dropping to 1.1 percent where the cadastral values in your municipality were revised through a general collective valuation procedure that came into force in the tax period or in the ten previous ones. Which side of that line your town falls on deserves its own treatment, and the full Modelo 210 guide works it through with the arithmetic.

Transfer tax runs on the reference value. Where that tax applies, the taxable base of the property is its reference value at the date the tax accrues. And there is a twist that catches people: if the value the parties declare, or the price actually agreed, or both, are higher than the reference value, then the highest of those figures becomes the base.

Which cuts one way only. Agree a price below the reference value, and the tax is worked out on the reference value rather than on what you paid. Pay above it, and the base is the price you paid. The rule takes the biggest number on the table every time.

Inheritance and gift tax runs on the reference value as well. Same structure: the base is the reference value, unless the value the interested parties declare is higher, in which case that one is taken.

Both have worked this way since 1 January 2022. Before then the reference value was not the base your file was assessed on, which is exactly why advice from a neighbour who bought a few years earlier can be sincerely offered and completely wrong.

One of these numbers is public. The other is not

Now for the fact that explains most of the frustration.

The cadastral value is protected data. So are the names, identification codes and addresses of the people registered as owners, and the separate land and construction values.

Protected means what it says. It is not published, and it is not there for anyone who fancies a look.

Free access to the Catastro covers your own properties and the data that is not protected. Getting at protected data requires the express written consent of the person affected, a law that removes the need for it, or an accredited legitimate and direct interest.

The reference value is the opposite. It does not have the character of personal data, so it is announced for general knowledge and can be consulted permanently through the Catastro's electronic office. The Catastro says so itself, in plain words, in its own frequently asked questions.

Well, that asymmetry has a very practical consequence. You can look up the reference value of the house across the street in about a minute. You cannot look up its cadastral value at all. And a surprising number of owners cannot immediately lay hands on their own.

How you actually get your cadastral value

There is a real answer here, and it is not a website.

It is your IBI receipt. The last receipt proving payment of the IBI is one of the documents the law accepts to establish the cadastral reference of a property, and the cadastral value is printed on it too. For an owner abroad with no Spanish electronic ID, that receipt is the shortest path to both numbers there is. If you want to know exactly which line to look at, we wrote a short page on where the number sits on the receipt.

Two other routes are real. You can turn up in person: free electronic means are provided at the Catastro's regional and sub-regional offices, at the Puntos de Informacion Catastral hosted inside various public bodies, and at the town hall of the municipality where the property is. That last one matters if you visit Spain once a year and want to sort several things in one trip.

And you can appoint someone. A representative in Spain, whether an asesoria, a gestoria or a lawyer, can deal with the Catastro on your behalf.

Then there is the electronic route, and here I want to be careful with you.

The tax agency's own guidance assumes you already have a NIF or NIE for electronic identification and for filing the Modelo 210. We could not find an official source stating what happens if you do not have a NIE yet, so we make no claim either way. What does not depend on it: your cadastral value is printed on your IBI receipt, and you can always appoint a representative in Spain or go in person to a Catastro office or a Punto de Informacion Catastral.

How you look up a reference value

This one is genuinely easy, which is why so many people reach for it when they should not. You go into the Catastro's public consultation service with the cadastral reference of the property and you get the figure. No certificate. No Cl@ve. No appointment.

It is a useful tool at exactly two moments: before you sign a purchase, and when an inheritance is being valued, so nobody is surprised by the base the tax will be calculated on. Outside those two, it is a number that has nothing to do with you.

The garage and the storeroom are different properties

Quick one, because it changes the arithmetic for a lot of owners.

If your garage space or your storeroom has its own cadastral reference, it is a separate property in the eyes of the system. Each one carries its own cadastral value, and each one generates its own Modelo 210.

Not a line on your flat's return. A separate return.

That is a whole subject of its own, especially once you add a second owner to the deeds, and we have set it out with the numbers in the piece on why each cadastral reference means another declaration.

When your cadastral value moves and nobody writes to you

Owners often tell me their number changed and they never heard a thing. It moves in two different ways, and Spanish law does not treat them as the same thing: a general collective valuation of the whole municipality, or an update by coefficients in the annual State budget law.

That distinction is not academic. It is the first of the two that decides whether your annual return runs at 1.1 percent or at 2 percent, and the rule is decided at town level, never at property level. That single sentence is where most published versions go wrong, so we take it apart on its own page: is your imputed income 1.1% or 2%.

Two numbers, two different doors

Here is where the practical damage happens, because owners send perfectly good complaints to the wrong place and lose their moment.

The cadastral value is challenged at the Catastro. It is a State matter, so the town hall is never the venue, no matter how convinced the person at the counter sounds. The acts of the Catastro can be reviewed under the review rules of the General Tax Act. There is also a procedure the administration opens on its own initiative when the description held in the Catastro does not match the reality of the property.

One warning that catches people every time. Bringing the formal tax complaint does not suspend the enforceability of the act you are complaining about. In plain English, the cadastral act you are challenging stays enforceable while the complaint runs.

The reference value is challenged inside the tax file, not at the Catastro. There is no counter at the Catastro where you argue about it in the abstract. The law gives you two moments and no others: when you appeal an assessment the tax administration makes, or when you request a rectification of the self-assessment you filed.

Get that wrong and you can burn months writing to an office that has no power to give you what you want.

If your case is that the reference value is genuinely out of line with the state of the property, that is a file for the law firm, not a form to fill in on a Sunday evening. I am the tax adviser here; my father Juan is the lawyer, and those files land on his desk.

The expensive mistake: the reference value has nothing to do with your annual return

Right. The one I want you to leave with.

Every year, someone declares their Modelo 210 imputed income on the reference value.

It is easy to see how. The reference value is the number they can actually find, because it is public and free. It is the number their lawyer quoted during the purchase, so it feels like the official one. And the phrase reference is sitting right there on the IBI receipt, attached to that alphanumeric code.

But the rule is not ambiguous. Imputed income is calculated by applying the percentage to the cadastral value, and the tax agency's own guidance says that value is the one appearing on the IBI receipt. The reference value is not the base for your annual return, and it is not the base for your IBI either.

Use it anyway and you are declaring on a figure the rule does not give you. Too much or too little depends on how the two numbers sit in your case, and neither is somewhere you want to be. If a past return needs putting right, the guide on surcharges and putting a late return in order covers what comes next.

So, the simplest possible instruction.

For your annual Spanish tax as a non-resident owner, ignore the reference value completely. Find the IBI receipt. Use the cadastral value. That is the whole rule.

Your IBI receipt carries the number your annual return actually needs. Run that cadastral value through the Easy210 calculator to see where you stand, and if you would rather hand the filing over, that is what the imputed income service is for. For a cadastral value you want to challenge, or an inheritance where the reference value is doing real damage, that is the law firm's desk, not software.

Where these figures come from

These are the sources used for the factual claims in this guide.

This article is general information, not legal or tax advice, and does not create a lawyer–client relationship. Confirm your specific situation with a qualified adviser before acting.