Spanish IRPF by Región: All 15 Autonomic Scales Compared (2026)

Spanish freelancers get told two contradictory things about where they register. One is that it makes no difference because IRPF is a national tax. The other is that Madrid is a tax haven and Cataluña punishes you.

Both are wrong, and the reason is more interesting than either: the ranking of Spanish regions changes with your income, and it changes more than once. The region that is cheapest in the whole country at €20,000 of invoicing is the most expensive in the country at €50,000.

IRPF is two taxes wearing one name

The general scale you pay is the sum of two halves.

The state half is fixed nationwide by article 63 of the IRPF law: 9.5%, 12%, 15%, 18.5%, 22.5% and 24.5%. Nobody can change it and it is identical in Almería and in Bilbao.

The autonomic half is approved by each comunidad autónoma under Ley 22/2009, which lets regions set their own rates and their own bracket boundaries. That second freedom is what produces the reordering below: two regions with similar top rates can tax €45,000 very differently because the income at which each rate begins is different.

Everything in this guide is the autonomic half only. It is the only part that varies, so it is the whole of the difference.

All fifteen scales

Ordered by what each costs at €100,000 of invoicing, cheapest first. “Top rate from” is the income at which the region’s highest autonomic rate starts, and “combined top” adds the 24.5% state top.

Region	Opening rate	Top rate	Top rate from	Combined top	@ €30,000	@ €50,000	@ €100,000
Comunidad de Madrid	8.5%	20.5%	€57,320	45.0%	€1,897	€4,504	€14,025
Illes Balears	9.0%	24.75%	€175,000	49.3%	€2,145	€5,101	€14,852
Región de Murcia	9.5%	22.5%	€60,000	47.0%	€2,019	€4,781	€14,923
Cantabria	8.5%	24.5%	€90,000	49.0%	€1,937	€4,787	€14,961
Castilla y León	9.0%	21.5%	€53,407	46.0%	€2,072	€4,899	€15,040
Galicia	9.0%	22.5%	€60,000	47.0%	€2,036	€4,958	€15,190
Andalucía	9.5%	22.5%	€60,000	47.0%	€2,103	€5,043	€15,293
Castilla-La Mancha	9.5%	22.5%	€60,000	47.0%	€2,144	€5,084	€15,334
Canarias	9.0%	26.0%	€123,745	50.5%	€2,021	€4,815	€15,494
La Rioja	8.0%	27.0%	€120,000	51.5%	€1,880	€4,624	€15,522
Cataluña	9.5%	25.5%	€175,000	50.0%	€2,155	€5,308	€15,530
Asturias	9.0%	26.0%	€175,000	50.5%	€2,122	€5,110	€15,556
Aragón	9.5%	25.5%	€130,000	50.0%	€2,098	€4,976	€15,644
Extremadura	8.0%	25.0%	€120,200	49.5%	€1,923	€5,309	€16,370
Comunitat Valenciana	9.0%	29.5%	€200,000	54.0%	€2,069	€5,021	€16,739

Euro columns are the autonomic IRPF due on the taxable base our Spain calculator derives for that gross invoicing — €23,923 at €30,000, €41,947 at €50,000 and €90,712 at €100,000 — with the mínimo personal applied as a credit on each region’s own scale, as the law requires.

The ranking is not stable

Gross invoicing	Cheapest region	Dearest region	Spread
€20,000	Extremadura	Cataluña	€179
€30,000	La Rioja	Cataluña	€276
€40,000	Comunidad de Madrid	Cataluña	€543
€50,000	Comunidad de Madrid	Extremadura	€805
€60,000	Comunidad de Madrid	Extremadura	€1,147
€75,000	Comunidad de Madrid	Extremadura	€1,565
€100,000	Comunidad de Madrid	Comunitat Valenciana	€2,715

The cheapest region changes twice on the way up and the dearest twice. Any article that ranks Spanish regions once, without saying at what income, has described one point on a curve and presented it as the curve.

Extremadura, both ends of the table

Extremadura opens at 8%, the joint-lowest rate in Spain, which makes it the cheapest region in the country at €20,000. It then climbs to 16% by €20,200 — a 6-point jump in a single step, the steepest early escalation of any scale here — and by €50,000 it is the most expensive region in Spain.

The reversal is worth €1,565 a year at €75,000 against Madrid, from a region that headline-rate tables list as mid-range because its top rate of 25% is unremarkable. Nothing about its top rate predicts either of its positions.

La Rioja does something similar and stops short: also 8% at the bottom, cheapest at €30,000, and then a 27% top rate — the second highest in Spain — that only begins at €120,000. At €100,000 it has slid to tenth.

Why headline rates mislead

Comunitat Valenciana has the highest combined top marginal rate in Spain, 54%. It applies to income above €200,000.

At €50,000 of invoicing Valencia costs €5,021 against Madrid’s €4,504 — a €517 difference, mid-table, and less than Extremadura, Cataluña, Asturias or Illes Balears cost at the same income. The 54% figure is accurate and tells you almost nothing about what a freelancer pays.

Madrid makes the point from the other direction. Its top autonomic rate starts at €57,320 — a lower threshold than any other region in this table — and it is still the cheapest region from €40,000 upwards, because the four brackets underneath it are the gentlest in Spain. Reaching your top rate early is not the same as paying a lot.

How this compares to leaving Spain

We measured what a freelancer keeps in Portugal versus Spain after adjusting for what each country costs. At €100,000 of invoicing the real-terms gap between the two countries came to €1,247 in Spain’s favour.

The spread between Spanish regions at that income is €2,715 — more than twice as large. At €100,000, which comunidad autónoma you register in matters more than the choice between Spain and Portugal.

At €30,000 the comparison inverts: the country choice is worth €2,318 in real terms and the region €276. The two levers trade places as income rises, and the crossover sits somewhere around €50,000. The full working is in real-terms take-home.

What our calculator does with this

Our Spain autónomo tax calculator uses a combined reference scale — 19, 24, 30, 37, 45 and 47 percent — rather than any single region. That is deliberate: a national tool that quietly picked one of fifteen scales would be wrong for fourteen groups of users without telling any of them.

Read its output as a mid-range national estimate. Against the table above, expect your own figure to sit a few hundred euros either side of it below €50,000, and up to roughly €1,400 either side at €100,000.

Two things this does not cover

País Vasco and Navarra are absent, and not by omission. They operate foral regimes with their own income tax rather than the state-plus-autonomic split, so they publish no tramo autonómico in this manual at all. Spain has seventeen comunidades autónomas; fifteen of them appear here because fifteen is how many use this system. Ceuta and Melilla are autonomous cities and apply the state scale.

Regional deductions are separate and can outweigh the scale. Each region also grants its own deductions — rent, dependants, moves to depopulated municipalities, young-buyer housing relief — applied after the scale. At the spreads above, a single deduction you qualify for can reverse the ordering for you personally. The scale is the part that applies to everybody; the deductions are the part that applies to you.

The part that does not vary at all

Social security is national. The fifteen RETA income bands and their quotas — €205.88 to €607.35 a month including the MEI, fixed by ministerial order — are identical everywhere, and below about €50,000 of invoicing the quota is the larger of a freelancer’s two bills anyway.

So the honest ordering of levers is: the band you declare and whether you still qualify for the reduced quota come first, the region comes second, and it only becomes the bigger of the two well above €60,000. The full Spain autónomo guide covers what is national, and what the reduced quota is worth covers the lever most new autónomos should pull before this one.

All fifteen scales read from the AEAT’s own published tables on 30 July 2026 and re-derived row by row — each bracket’s cumulative quota must equal the previous one plus its width times its rate, which is how we caught one region whose table had come back with its columns shifted. Regional scales are approved annually and can change every January.