Not Registering Your Guests: What the Penalty Regime Actually Says (Spain, Italy, Portugal)

Not Registering Your Guests: What the Penalty Regime Actually Says

Almost every article on this topic stops at "fines from €100 to €30,000". That range is useless for planning, because the number that decides your exposure is not the ceiling — it is the cliff at €601.

Under Spanish law, sending a traveller report late is a minor infringement, capped at €600. Not sending it at all, or not holding the documentary register, is a serious infringement — and serious ones start at €601 and are graded upward to €30,000 (Ley Orgánica 4/2015, art. 39). Same guest, same missing data: the difference between "we filed it three days late" and "we never filed it" is the difference between a €600 ceiling and a €601 floor with fifty times that above it. If you are behind on reports right now, the arithmetically correct move is to file them late, not to skip them.

And if you operate across borders, the shape of the penalty changes completely. In Spain it is essentially counted per establishment and per infringement. In Portugal the coima is assessed in relation to the number of missing forms. In Italy it is not an administrative fine at all — it is a criminal contravention. Below, the three regimes with their actual sources, and a worked example on a small portfolio.

Spain: the two-tier structure nobody explains properly

The obligation comes from Real Decreto 933/2021, fully applicable to lodging businesses since 2 December 2024. Two duties matter for penalties:

• Communicate the guest data immediately and in any case within 24 hours of check-in or contract formalisation (art. 6.3).
• Keep the electronic register for three years from the end of the service (art. 5.3).

Article 8 of the Royal Decree does not invent its own fines. It routes breaches into Ley Orgánica 4/2015 on public safety:

• Serious (art. 36.20): absence of the documentary registers, or omission of mandatory communications.
• Minor (art. 37.9): irregularities or deficiencies in completing the registers, and communications sent outside the deadline.

So the classification hinges on a single factual question an inspector can answer in one minute: does the record exist and was it sent, yes or no? Late and sloppy is minor. Absent is serious.

What the serious band actually looks like

Article 39 sets €601–€30,000 for serious infringements, but it is not a free-for-all. The band is split into three degrees:

• Minimum degree: €601–€10,400
• Medium degree: €10,401–€20,200
• Maximum degree: €20,201–€30,000

Article 33 requires proportionality, and the medium and maximum degrees have to be justified — typically by recidivism, by the economic benefit obtained, or by the seriousness of the harm to public safety. A first-time apartment operator who stopped reporting for a month is not in the €30,000 conversation; that number belongs to repeat, large-scale, or deliberately falsified cases. Plan against the minimum degree, and note that even its floor of €601 is already above the entire minor band.

How long they can come after you

This is the part the top-ranking guides omit, and it is the one you need when you discover a gap in last year's records. Under article 38 of the same law, infringements prescribe by:

• Minor: 6 months
• Serious: 1 year
• Very serious: 2 years

Counted from the day the infringement was committed. Sanctions already imposed prescribe in one to three years depending on severity. Practical reading: a missing report from eighteen months ago is generally out of reach; a missing report from last month is not, and the three-year retention duty means the evidence of the gap sits in your own system either way.

Italy: this one is criminal, not administrative

Managers of accommodation must communicate guests' identity data to the Questura within 24 hours of arrival, through the Alloggiati Web portal, under article 109 of the TULPS. The sanction for breaching it comes from article 17 of the same TULPS: arrest of up to three months or a fine of up to €206.

Two consequences that a euro figure alone hides:

1. It is a contravention, so it goes through the criminal track, not a municipal fine notice. Article 162 of the Criminal Code allows *oblazione* — extinguishing the offence by paying half the maximum fine, i.e. €103, plus costs, before the hearing opens. Cheap in money, not free in paperwork or record.
2. The unit of account is the schedina, the individual guest form. Twenty unregistered guests is not one €206 problem.

Late transmission is treated as a breach too, which is why the portal's official downtime procedure exists and why you should document any outage you rely on.

Portugal: counted against the number of missing forms

Anyone providing paid accommodation to foreign citizens must submit a *boletim de alojamento*, within three working days, through the SIBA portal — for entry and for exit. The obligation covers every foreign national, regardless of age.

The official SIBA FAQ points to article 203 of Lei 23/2007 and a coima of €100 to €2,000, with the amount depending on the number of infringements and liable to aggravation under the general administrative-offences framework. The mental model is therefore the opposite of Spain's: your exposure scales with volume, so a busy August with the portal untouched is structurally worse than a quiet one.

Run the numbers on your own operation

Take a small operator: 6 units, roughly 40 check-ins a month, one month of reporting missed. Using only the ranges above, arithmetic — not legal advice:

• Spain: the omission is one serious infringement, minimum degree, €601–€10,400. Filing those 40 reports late instead would have capped the same month at €600.
• Portugal: 40 boletins in the gap, assessed within €100–€2,000 in relation to the number of infringements — the count itself is the aggravating factor.
• Italy: 40 schedine, each a contravention. Settling each by oblazione at half the €206 maximum works out at €4,120, before costs.

The pattern is consistent: the cost is not driven by the severity of any single omission but by how many nights went by before anyone noticed. Which makes this an operations problem, not a legal one.

The fix is upstream of the portal

Nobody misses these deadlines on purpose. They miss them because the data lives in a photo of a passport on a phone, and someone has to type it into a form. The reports that go unsent are the ones from the 23:00 self check-in on a Saturday.

Three things close the gap:

1. Capture the identity data at the door, in structured form — not as an image to be transcribed later. Our breakdown of exactly which ID fields the law requires you to collect is the field list to build against.
2. Submit inside the shortest applicable window — 24 hours in Spain and Italy, three working days in Portugal. The 2026 guide to traveller registration in SES.Hospedajes covers the Spanish submission flow end to end.
3. Don't create a second problem with the ID copies. Keeping images of documents longer than needed, or in the wrong place, is a separate data-protection exposure. See how to store client ID copies without breaking GDPR.

A cheap version of step one: the guest or the cleaner photographs the ID and sends it to a WhatsApp number; the fields come back as structured data ready to upload, in seconds, with no app to install. That is the approach described in registering guests in SES.Hospedajes by scanning their ID over WhatsApp.

FAQ

Is the fine per guest or per property? It depends on the country. Spain frames the breach as an infringement of the establishment's duty; Portugal's coima is assessed in relation to the number of missing forms; Italy's contravention attaches to each unsent guest form.

Is filing late better than not filing? In Spain, materially. Late filing falls under the minor tier capped at €600; omission falls under the serious tier starting at €601. In Italy, late transmission is still treated as a breach of article 109 TULPS, so the incentive to file is about limiting exposure, not eliminating it.

Can I be fined for records I no longer have? Yes — the absence of the register is itself the serious infringement in Spain, and the retention duty runs three years from the end of the service.

How far back can an inspection reach in Spain? Minor infringements prescribe in six months and serious ones in one year from commission, under article 38 of Ley Orgánica 4/2015.

If the bottleneck is typing passport and DNI data into a portal, test the extraction first: try it free — no signup.