The Spanish housing market, in two contradictory numbers
Two facts about Spanish housing are both true at the same time, and they don’t obviously fit together: prices have now risen for more than 40 consecutive quarters, and Spain also has, depending on which official source you read, somewhere between 3.8 million and 7.7 million empty homes. Below is what’s actually behind both numbers, with current prices, a look at where it’s worst, and why the vacancy figure isn’t one number at all.
Prices are still climbing, and climbing everywhere
The INE’s house price index (IPV) — the official measure, based on actual notarized transactions rather than asking prices — showed +12.9% year-on-year in Q1 2026, the fastest pace since the 2007 peak. Resale homes led at +13.5%, new build came in cooler at +9.1%, and 2025 closed with a +12.7% average for the year. That’s not a blip: it’s the continuation of a run of 40-plus straight quarterly increases.
Idealista’s asking-price index — a different methodology, faster-moving and watched closely by the market even though it isn’t the official figure — has been tracking even hotter: used-home prices started 2026 up 18.4% year-on-year, a new record, and were still up 16.9% by May. The two sources disagree on the exact number for a simple reason — one tracks what sellers ask, the other what buyers actually sign for at the notary — but they agree completely on direction and speed. This is, by both measures, one of the most strained housing markets in about 20 years.
Where it’s worst
Averages hide the range. By June 2026, San Sebastián was the most expensive city in Spain at €6,426/m² — roughly 2.3 times the national average — ahead of Madrid and Barcelona. Here’s how that compares to Vigo, where I’m based:
Vigo itself hit its own all-time high of €2,480/m² in June — up 10.5% year-on-year — with Teis (+31%) and Lavadores (+18%) leading the neighborhood-level increases. Regionally, Baleares (€5,337/m²) and Madrid (€4,786/m²) sit at the top and Extremadura (€1,083/m²) at the bottom — Baleares is nearly five times Extremadura. But the fastest growth right now isn’t in those expensive regions at all: Murcia (+21.1%) and Cantabria (+18.4%) are climbing hardest while Madrid, already near the ceiling, has cooled to +6.6%. The market is effectively moving at two speeds — the already-expensive spots plateauing, and the previously-affordable ones catching up fast.
Vacant homes: two very different numbers
Here’s where it gets genuinely confusing, and where most headlines quietly pick whichever number fits their argument. There are two official-ish figures for “empty homes in Spain,” measuring different things:
- INE’s “permanently vacant” homes: about 3.8 million dwellings (~13.7% of the total housing stock) — the traditional vacancy figure, homes that are unoccupied and not used as anyone’s residence at all.
- The Housing Ministry’s “non-principal dwellings”: about 7.7 million (~28.6% of the stock) — a broader category that folds in second homes and tourist-use properties, not just vacant ones.
The gap between the two is mostly second homes: of that 7.7 million, roughly 2.9 million are secondary residences, 3.8 million match INE’s permanently vacant figure, and around 380,000 are tourist-use properties, with the rest unspecified. In other words, most of the “empty homes” narrative built on the 28.6% figure is actually describing beach apartments used three weeks a year, not abandoned housing stock that could be released onto the market tomorrow.
| Metric | Homes | Share of stock |
|---|---|---|
| INE — permanently vacant | 3.8M | 13.7% |
| Ministry — non-principal (all types) | 7.7M | 28.6% |
| of which: secondary residences | 2.9M | — |
| of which: tourist-use | ~0.38M | — |
Where the vacant homes actually are
The more interesting question isn’t the national total, it’s the map. Vacancy in Spain isn’t spread evenly at all — it’s heavily concentrated in the depopulated interior and northwest, the parts of the country known as “España vaciada.” By region, Galicia has the highest vacancy rate in the country at 28.8%, more than four times Madrid’s 6.4% — the lowest — with Castilla-La Mancha (22.6%), Castilla y León (19.7%) and Canarias (19.4%) close behind. Dynamic job markets keep vacancy low almost everywhere else: the Basque Country (6.5%), Navarra (10.0%) and Catalonia (10.7%) all sit near the bottom.
Zoom in to province level and it gets more extreme still. Two Galician provinces top the national ranking outright — Ourense at 43.7% and Lugo at 37.3% of their entire housing stock standing empty — followed by Ciudad Real (29.1%), Zamora (26.9%) and Cuenca (25.1%). Roughly half of Spain’s 3.8 million permanently vacant homes sit in just 14 provinces, almost all of them rural and losing population.
That’s the flip side of the “it’s mostly second homes” story above: the Ministry’s 7.7 million figure is dominated by second homes because it counts the whole country, including coastal and touristy provinces where almost every “non-principal” home is somebody’s holiday flat. But INE’s narrower 3.8 million figure — homes that are actually empty, not just unoccupied part of the year — skews just as hard the other way, toward places nobody’s buying a holiday flat in either. The provinces with the most vacant homes in absolute terms are a different list again: populous or tourist-heavy areas like the coasts of Alicante, A Coruña and Santa Cruz de Tenerife, plus the interior of Alicante and Barcelona, simply because they have so much housing stock that even a modest rate adds up to a large count. Rate and count tell different stories, and headlines usually only pick one.
Take
Put the sections together and the contradiction mostly resolves: prices keep climbing because genuinely available supply is tight where people actually want to live, and the “millions of empty homes” figure that shows up in every housing-policy debate is mostly second homes on the coast plus a separate pool of genuinely empty homes concentrated in depopulated inland provinces — not idle stock sitting in Madrid or Barcelona waiting to be released onto the market. That distinction is the whole ballgame in the current empty-homes-tax debate: a national policy aimed at “vacant housing” is really trying to solve two unrelated local problems — coastal second homes and rural depopulation — with one number.