Find your ideal place to retire in Spain
Tax is set by the region and every town in it pays the same. Daily life is set by the town. The Index keeps the two apart, and lets you decide how much each one matters.
- 1
Explore
See every region's tax bill and every town's liveability score on one map.
- 2
Compare
Set your own weights for healthcare, climate, housing, safety and more.
- 3
Plan
Answer seven questions and get three towns to look at closely.
What the engine found
Annual recurring regional tax (income tax, wealth tax and solidarity tax) for the reference household. Municipal property tax comes on top, town by town.
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Spain Retirement Index
15 fiscal regimes · 306 municipalities
Tax is legislated by the autonomous community, so every town in a region pays the same. Liveability belongs to the town. The two layers are kept apart on purpose.
Two layers, one map
Shading is the fiscal regime; dots are municipalities. Switch views to see how little the two agree.
Liveability weights
Move a slider to change how much each dimension counts. The map switches to the liveability view and the town ranking below updates. Tax figures don't change.
Layer A · the 15 fiscal regimes
Layer B · 306 municipalities
Click a town to see its Wikipedia summary and its score on each dimension on the right.
Americans in Spain: how does your town really compare?
Official statistics describe the general population. Your answers tell us what matters to someone who arrived from the US, and they are reviewed before every edition.
Thank you. You're an Index contributor.
We'll email you when the edition that uses your answers is published.
Method
Layer A · recurring tax
The Tertulia Engine computes IRPF, the wealth tax (Patrimonio) and the solidarity tax (ITSGF) for the 2026 tax year in each of the 15 common-regime communities, alongside the US federal return and the foreign tax credit. Every parameter is taken from a primary source (BOE consolidated texts, Hacienda's regional measures for 2026, AEAT doctrine, the US–Spain treaty) and carries its citation.
Engine passes validation fixtures and has been checked against AEAT's own Renta WEB, modelo 210 and modelo 718 simulators and third-party modelo 714 and Form 1116 models. Property tax (IBI) is now included town by town: each municipality's 2025 urban rate from the Ministry of Finance (7,399 municipalities, every rate re-checked against the source), applied to an assessed value (valor catastral) estimated at half the home's price. That is the legal ceiling, and older valuations are usually lower, so the figure errs high. Enter your actual assessed value in a personal report for the exact amount. Transfer tax on a purchase (ITP) and succession tax are not in this edition.
Layer B · liveability
The base is the 306 municipalities above 25,000 inhabitants in MIVAU's appraised-value series. Each variable is winsorised at the 5th and 95th percentiles across all 306, then scaled 0–100. Ten dimensions are weighted as shown here by default, and you can set your own weights on the Index page.
Current scores cover all ten dimensions. Safety counts home burglaries per 1,000 dwellings, violent robbery and assault per 1,000 people present (residents plus tourist overnight stays and airport passengers), and road accidents; offence types that measure police activity rather than risk are left out. Cost of living combines the OCU 2026 supermarket basket, measured in 186 of the 306 towns (elsewhere it is left out rather than estimated), with the monthly premium at age 65 for private health insurance with no co-payments, which a non-lucrative visa requires (DKV and Sanitas quotes by province).Cost of living: pending publication permission. Lifestyle counts restaurants, cafés and bars, and theatres, cinemas and museums, per resident, from OpenStreetMap, with under-mapped towns estimated from business registers. Aging & care combines long-stay hospital beds within 30 km per 1,000 residents aged 65+ with the share of recognised dependency claims that have a care plan in each region (IMSERSO, August 2026). Andalucía and Galicia do not register long-stay care hospitals in the national catalogue, so their towns are scored on dependency-care coverage alone rather than given a zero. A care-home measure from OpenStreetMap was tested and rejected: it finds only 42% of the homes in the official IMSERSO census. Connectivity is the time from home to boarding a US-bound aircraft: ground travel to the airport, airport time, and a connecting flight where there is no direct departure. The nine-hour transatlantic leg is left out because it is the same from anywhere in Spain. Ground times are straight-line estimates for now; connecting-flight times are scheduled block times, and Santiago's and Bilbao's US flights are counted as summer-only. Healthcare measures each town's 30 km catchment: straight-line distance to the nearest general hospital and the nearest large one, and hospital beds against the population they serve, so a town without its own hospital still scores on the ones nearby. Half of the dimension is private care, because a new resident on a non-lucrative visa must hold private insurance: distance to the nearest private general hospital, private beds nearby, and distance to the nearest hospital with an international patient service or Joint Commission International accreditation. Road travel times will replace straight-line distance before publication. Towns with a large seasonal population are flagged, because per-resident figures overstate what they offer year-round.
Why the layers stay apart
Tax is a euro amount set by the region; liveability is a score that belongs to the town. Blending them into one number would hide which one is driving a ranking. The survey combines them only for you, with the balance you choose.
Sources
Every figure traces to a published source. The full list, with a link to each one, is on the Sources page.
Not in this Index
Navarra and the Basque Country (Araba, Bizkaia, Gipuzkoa) collect their own taxes under the foral regime. The engine models the common regime only, so these territories are shown in grey rather than approximated. Ceuta and Melilla are also excluded.
Layer B weights
Challenge a number
Received. We'll reply once it has been checked against the source.
Changelog
Preview · Sept 2026
Engine v3.8: property tax (IBI) added for every town, using your home value and the town's 2025 rate; town tax figures and the survey ranking now include it. Round 6: Healthcare now gives half its weight to private care (private hospitals, international patient services); Cost of living adds the private insurance premium and no longer estimates the supermarket basket where OCU has no survey; Aging & care no longer scores zero in regions that do not register long-stay hospitals; Santiago's US flights corrected to summer-only; violent crime counts visitors in the population. Round 5: Safety rebuilt around home burglaries and violent crime, replacing total offences per resident; Cost of living now uses the OCU supermarket basket instead of local incomes; Lifestyle rebuilt from restaurants, bars and culture venues. Round 4: Aging & care added (long-stay beds and dependency-care coverage); Healthcare's bed count now uses general-hospital beds only; coverage 100%. Round 3: Connectivity added, measured as hours to a US-bound flight (Almería and Región de Murcia airports added to the route table); coverage 94%. Round 2: Healthcare restored using a 30 km hospital catchment (Catálogo Nacional de Hospitales 2024); Layer B now covers 83% of the default weight. Earlier: first combined map, Engine v3.7 (157/157 fixtures), Layer B round 1 after a ten-defect audit.
About Tertulia
In Spain, a tertulia is a conversation that has no particular reason to end. Friends meet regularly, often in the same café or around the same table, to talk about books, ideas, politics, art, or whatever has happened that day. Coffee becomes lunch, lunch becomes sobremesa, and nobody is checking the time.
That idea sits at the heart of Tertulia. Moving to Spain is not simply about taxes, property or choosing a place on a map. It is about having the time and the setting to build a life that feels like your own.
Why Tertulia exists
I’m Catalan and American, and I know the decision to move between the two countries from both sides. I trained as a physicist and have spent my career building technology for large international events, where accuracy, planning and execution matter. I later added an MBA and a master’s in data science. Tertulia brings those disciplines together: quantitative analysis, business judgment and data.
When I began considering a return to Catalonia, I found plenty of information about lifestyle and relatively little that addressed the practical questions. What would I pay in tax in different regions? How do the tax differences compare with the cost of living and other factors that matter when choosing a town? Which places offer good access to healthcare, international connections and the kind of everyday environment I would want to live in?
So I started building the analysis I wanted to have. I collected the relevant data, built the models and checked the results against official tax simulators and primary sources.
Tax is only one part of the decision. A move of this kind involves significant financial and practical trade-offs, and those are easier to evaluate when they are made explicit. The Index is designed to provide that foundation: a clear view of the numbers and the differences between regions and towns.
Tertulia makes that work available to other Americans considering a move to Spain. It is independent, quantitative and written in English, with a particular focus on Spanish taxation and the practical differences between places.
It is also intended to improve over time. If you already live in Spain and find that a number, assumption or town score does not reflect reality, tell us. The Index should become more useful as better data and more local knowledge are added.
Free research
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Personal reports
The full engine run on your own numbers. Readers of the Tertulia Letter hear about it first.
Help in Catalonia
Support on the ground after the move.
Research, not tax or legal advice. Check figures with a qualified adviser before acting on them.