Modelo 115: How Withholding on Commercial Rent Works and Who Actually Files It

Two things sink most Modelo 115 filings, and neither of them is the 19% rate.

The first is the base. If your landlord passes on the community fees, the IBI or building maintenance as part of the agreed rent, those amounts are part of the consideration and go into the 19% base. The Dirección General de Tributos has confirmed this criterion (binding ruling V0898-18). Most tenants withhold on the "rent" line only and end up under-withholding every single quarter.

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The second is the €900 threshold everyone quotes. It is per landlord, per year, VAT excluded — not per property and not per quarter. Two small units rented from the same owner at €50/month each add up to €1,200 a year, so neither of them is exempt.

A worked example, because the arithmetic is where it goes wrong

Monthly rent: €1,200. Community fees passed on inside the rent: €200. So the taxable consideration is €1,400.

VAT at 21% on €1,400 = €294
Withholding at 19% on €1,400 = €266
What you actually transfer to the landlord: 1,400 + 294 − 266 = €1,428
What you declare on the quarterly Modelo 115: €266 × 3 months = €798

If you had withheld only on the €1,200 line, you would have paid the landlord €38 too much each month and declared €114 too little each quarter. Over a year that is a €456 shortfall the AEAT can claim from you — not from the landlord.

Who files it: the tenant, always

Modelo 115 is filed by whoever pays the rent, not by whoever receives it. If you are a company or a self-employed professional renting an urban property for your business activity — a shop, an office, a warehouse, a coworking desk under a lease — you are the withholder. You hold back the 19%, you pay it to the AEAT on the landlord's account, and you are the one liable if it never gets there.

The landlord's role is to invoice correctly and to receive a withholding certificate from you, which they then use to offset the amounts on their own tax return.

One consequence worth internalising: the obligation follows the payment, not the contract's good intentions. If the landlord tells you "don't withhold, I'll sort it out", and no exemption actually applies, the AEAT will assess the unpaid withholding against you, plus the penalty.

The cases where you do not withhold

Article 75.3.g of the IRPF Regulation lists the exceptions. In practice, four of them matter:

Under €900 a year to the same landlord, VAT excluded. That is €75/month — realistic only for parking spaces, storage rooms or tiny units.
Housing rented by a company for its own employees.
The landlord holds an AEAT exemption certificate confirming their activity is classified under IAE group 861 with a non-zero quota. In practice this requires the total cadastral value of the rented properties to exceed €601,012.10.
Financial leasing income and rent paid to entities fully exempt from corporate tax.

The certificate expires — put it in your calendar

The AEAT exemption certificate is valid for twelve months from the date the landlord requested it. This is the quiet failure mode: a landlord hands you a certificate in March 2025, you stop withholding, and nobody notices in March 2026 that it has lapsed. From that point you are back to withholding 19%, and the months in between are your problem.

Ask for the renewed certificate every year before the quarter in which it expires, and keep the PDF filed against the contract, not loose in an inbox.

Deadlines, and the monthly trap

Quarterly filers submit within the first 20 calendar days of April, July, October and January, covering the quarter that just closed.

But if your turnover exceeded €6,010,121.04 in the previous year, you are a *gran empresa* and Modelo 115 becomes monthly — filed in the first 20 days of the month after each accrual. Companies that cross that threshold in a growth year regularly miss the switch and spend the following year filing late.

The annual summary is Modelo 180, filed in January for the previous year (the deadline slides to the next working day when 31 January falls on a weekend — for financial year 2025 it ran to 2 February 2026). Modelo 180 is where you name each landlord and each property, so any mismatch between your four Modelo 115 filings and the 180 is visible to the AEAT at a glance. If you want a wider view of the quarterly cycle, our Q3 tax calendar for freelancers lays out how the forms fall together.

What filing late actually costs

File late but voluntarily, before the AEAT contacts you, and article 27 of the General Tax Law applies: 1% plus 1% for each complete month of delay during the first twelve months, with no late-payment interest. After twelve months it becomes 15% plus interest from the day after the voluntary period ended.

Wait for the AEAT to require you first and you leave the surcharge regime for the penalty regime of article 191 LGT: 50% to 150% of the amount not paid in, graduated by concealment and repeat offences. The difference between filing a forgotten quarter in month two (2%) and waiting for a letter (50% minimum) is the whole reason to reconcile before the 20th rather than after.

A ten-minute quarterly routine

The work is not the form — it is reconstructing which rent invoices arrived, at what amount, and whether the base was right. A routine that holds up:

Collect the rent invoices for the quarter the day the quarter closes, not on the 19th.
Check the base line by line: rent plus anything the landlord passed on within the rent, VAT excluded.
Check each landlord's cumulative annual total against the €900 threshold — cumulative, across all their properties.
Check exemption certificates for expiry dates falling inside the quarter.
Cross-check the total against your accounting before you file, then issue the withholding certificates.

Steps 1 and 2 are where the hours go, because the numbers live inside PDFs and photos. This is the same reconciliation problem as preparing supplier invoices for your accountant: if the base amounts, VAT and withholding are already extracted into a spreadsheet, the quarterly check is a filter, not an afternoon. WhappScan does that extraction from a photo or PDF sent over WhatsApp — rent invoices included — so the withholding base is a column you can sum rather than a number you retype.

And since the same invoices feed both forms, it is worth running the Modelo 303 checklist in the same session, along with the usual VAT classification mistakes — the rent invoice that was mis-based for withholding is very often mis-coded for VAT too.

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