It’s tax season in Spain once again! The Spanish tax system Hacienda has announced that the Declaración de la Renta (and by Renta they don’t mean your apartment rent – it’s your declaration of earnings & taxes) is open between the 2rd of April and the 1st of July to file your 2024 taxes. If you need help doing your taxes in-person, you can go online starting May 29th to get an in-person appointment starting on or after the 2nd of June.

¡Márcalo en tu agenda! Del 2 de abril al 30 de junio de 2025 es el plazo abierto para presentar la declaración de la Renta de 2024.

First things first, please remember I’m not an official gestora or tax advisor. I’m just here to show you how to fill out and submit the tax form. I can’t guarantee you’ll get any money back or have to pay anything – that all depends on how much money you earned last year. 

Right! Let’s get on with the tax preparation. 

At tax time, you’ll need to gather all your financial information from your economic activities. It’s a good idea (and will be mandatory in about a year or so) to keep a digital record of all of your income and expenses. Hacienda has a few different templates. I personally use a sort of complicated one with all the income, expenses and investments in one document. But you can choose to track everything in separate files, like these: Invoices Received (Expenses) and Invoices Sent (Income). 

 You can also get the information you need from your 4th Quarter IRPF statement, Modelo 130. If you’ve been making quarterly tax payments, you’ve been tracking your finances all year and your 4T (Q4) statement should have your financial data for the year already recorded. But it’s good to double check your books against your IRPF statements – I personally found a glitch in my books where I had entered an expense with a period instead of a comma. (Sigh, Spain is different!) Alternatively, you have your official Fiscal Data available to view, just log in as you normally do (Cl@ve PIN or digital certificate), and then you can Ctrl+P to generate a PDF to download.

However you get your data, just be sure to have all your important numbers in front of you: your income (ingresos), expenses (gastos) and withholding (retenciones).

How to fill out Modelo 100 step by step

To get started, go to the Agencia Tributaria website. Click the first option, Servicio tramitación de borrador / declaración (Renta DIRECTA y Renta WEB). And before going any further, be sure you’ve enabled pop-up windows in your browser because you will most certainly get pop-ups.

If you have a digital certificate or Cl@ve PIN, use it to sign in, and select Actuar en nombre propio (because you’re doing this for yourself, not for someone else). 

On the next page you’ll see a list of links, and a paragraph explaining how to access or modify your tax return later. But you just want to click the first link, Borrador/Declaración (Renta WEB). This will open a new tab. 

Here on the first page of the new tab, all your personal data should be filled in. Make any changes if you need to, and add children or dependent adults you’re responsible for on the next line. When all looks good, click Aceptar. Also click Aceptar on the popup that appears. 

The next section is called Actividades Económicas. It should have your clients listed with your total income from each one and how much they paid in taxes for you (Retenciones) with the option to directly incorporate the data into your tax declaration. Cool, right? Hold on! Actually, you should select No, to not automatically incorporate the data right now. We’re going to add all this information manually. So if you add it now, it might get duplicated later, and you also need to manually input your expenses – very important! So click No on all of those lines, then Aceptar.

You’ll get an angry-looking message that you didn’t incorporate your income and you should input it manually. Got it, thank you.

Just click Aceptar on the angry popup to appease it. Now you’re on the official Declaration page. You’ll see some weird numbers, don’t worry about them for now. Click “Pendiente” to go to the section where you’ll manually enter your financial data.

This section is full of yellow boxes for you to fill out, but you’ll notice you can’t enter data in all of them. At the top you’ll notice an option to import your accounting books. I personally never select this because I’m not sure mine is formatted exactly as it should be. (Maybe I’ll try it next year!)

The very first field, 0165, will auto-populate later. Just under 0165, click Buscador Actividades. This is the fun thing I talk about in setting up your Seguridad Social, that you need to choose an exact number out of a list of possible codes – “Código del Impuesto de Actividades Económicas (IAE).” So click Buscador and in the new pop-up window, leave the left drop-down menu blank and type the first numbers of your IAE. (You should know it since you’re registered in the system already.) I type 933 and then choose 933.9 out of the list, for freelance language teacher. When you find your code, click Seleccionar which will take you back to the declaration page and you’ll see some fields populated now. 

Important step: To be able to start manually entering data, click the little dropdown menu next to 0168 and choose whether you’re doing Estimación Directa Normal or Simplificada. This depends on what you chose when you did your Alta with Modelo 036 or 037 at the beginning of being autónomo. Personally I do Simplificada.

Now the fun part! You probably don’t need to check box 0169 unless you know what you’re doing there. Next to box 0171, there should now be a pencil – click the pencil to edit. A new section appears where you’ll enter all of your income. The most important field is

• Ingresos de Explotación = All your income from all your clients for the year.

There are several more types of income that you can include, but they’re less typical.  On the same page, at the bottom, you’ll see

• Retenciones a cuenta del impuesto relativas a la actividad = What companies have retained from your earnings to pay taxes.

I’ve been having retenciones withheld since I started as autónoma but apparently if your economic activity is in the Empresarial group (mine is), you don’t need to! But since I’ve had money withheld all year – and quite a bit, I might add – I want to be sure it’s reflected in my declaration, otherwise I would have to pay much more than I’m supposed to! You’ll see another note at the end:

• NOTA: Los pagos fraccionados deben reflejarse en la Página 22 = The quarterly tax payments you may have made last year, they will appear later in the declaration.

Now it’s time to input your expenses (gastos). It’s a good idea to track expenses individually by the categories that correspond to the Renta. My complex libro de gastos spreadsheet helps me do this, and it definitely saves me time on this section. You can use this website to help break down your Gastos by category and code. Fun fact: I started an MBA last year, and just about any master’s degree or study program related to your field of work is tax deductible. (Read more here if you’re curious about which expenses are deductible. In Spanish.)

Once you’re done entering all your expenses, you’ll see how the rest of the fields auto-populate like magic. Double check that all your expenses are entered and they add up to the same total you have in your books or your quarterly tax statement. After that, you can go back to the summary page by going to the top and clicking Resumen de Declaraciones.

Here you’ll see a list of a bunch of numbers with blue links. Click the links to double check those sections if you need to. At the top you may have some numbers filled in for “Rendimientos del capital mobiliario a integrar en la base imponible del ahorro.” Those numbers come from data that your bank supplied to Hacienda about earned interest in your bank accounts and shouldn’t need to be changed. 

If you’ve been making quarterly tax payments, check one number toward the bottom “Pagos fraccionados ingresados” to make sure it’s populated with the correct amount you paid last year.

So now everything has been calculated and you should see a big number at the top with the result. If you’re lucky the number is negative and you’ll get money back! 

We’re almost done – just click Presentar Declaración! A new window appears with a few more options to choose. There’s also a little note here to go back and check for errors. It would be nice to see this before the final step, but it isn’t clear. (You can check for errors beforehand by clicking Mostrar Opciones at the top, and Validar Declaración. But it’s hidden and I always forget to do it.) So in the final presentation window you just opened, click Cancel and then you can see a list in yellow of possible warnings and errors. Most of them are little warnings like “Hey!! You didn’t assign any of your tax refund to the Catholic Church!” (Um, no I did not.) But yes, do double check those warnings just to be sure everything is correct. At the end of the list, hopefully you’ll see a green check mark saying there aren’t any errors.

Once you’ve double and triple checked everything, click Presentar Declaración again. Choose individual or joint, then your preferred method of payment or refund (usually the first option, Transferencia, is the best one). Check your bank account IBAN number or manually add it if it’s blank. If your bank account is Spanish, add it on the first line, if it’s a foreign account on the second line. Then click Aceptar.

You will be reminded again of your greediness:

On the final page, just click Conforme and Enviar! You should see a message confirming – “Su presentación ha sido realizada con éxito.”  This page will generate a PDF document which is your copy of the tax return. Download it and save it for your records. You’re done filing your taxes for the year!! Hopefully you can get some money back, which will happen over the course of the next few weeks to couple of months. You should get a text message in the days before getting your refund.

Hey Americans! It’s just two weeks until the deadline to file your US taxes. If you’re filing at the last minute and want to make it easy, try TaxAct. This link will get you 20% off. Even better, if you’re under a certain income threshold, filing your federal taxes is free! TaxAct has different pricing tiers depending on your needs and it’s really easy to use.

Last but not least, have you downloaded my free Autónomo Setup Pack? It’s a great way to track your students/clients, hours worked, invoices, budget and more!