Spain's College of Registrars publishes the numbers that actually record what changed hands, taken from the property register rather than from asking prices. Its second-quarter figures for 2026 contain something worth pausing on.
The number
Foreign buyers completed more than 26,800 purchases in Q2 2026, which is 15.98% of all registered transactions. That is the highest share in the history of the series.
The share matters more than the count, because it rose while the overall market got smaller. Domestic transactions fell. Foreign ones did not. When one group holds steady in a shrinking market, its weight goes up, and the composition of who you are bidding against changes with it.
Who is buying
The first half of 2026 nearly produced a change at the top of the table.
- British buyers: about 3,567 purchases, down roughly 10% year on year.
- Dutch buyers: about 3,489 purchases, up about 12%.
British buyers stayed the largest foreign group, but only just. A gap of under a hundred transactions over six months is close enough that a single quarter could reverse it.
For a Dutch buyer this is the more interesting half of the statistic. You are not an outlier in the Spanish market any more. You are part of the second-largest foreign cohort in it, and it is growing while the largest one contracts.
What a record share does to a purchase
Competition is concentrated, not general. Foreign demand does not spread evenly across Spain. It clusters in the coastal and island markets and in a handful of cities. A 16% national share can mean something far higher in the specific municipality you are looking at, and close to nothing thirty kilometres inland.
A shrinking market is not automatically a soft one. Fewer transactions usually reads as weakness. Here the fall came from domestic buyers, while prices kept rising. Fewer sales with firm prices means less stock reaching the market, not less appetite for it.
Transfer tax is regional, and it moved this year. Spanish ITP is set by each autonomous community and currently ranges from about 6% to 13%. The Valencian Community moved to 9% for properties up to €1,000,000 and 11% above that from 1 June 2026. Andalusia sits at a flat 7%, Murcia at 7.75%. Where you buy changes your entry cost by several percentage points before you look at the property.
Reading it without over-reading it
One quarter is one quarter. A record share tells you about the second quarter of 2026 and about nothing else with certainty. It does not tell you where prices go next, and anyone who says it does is selling something.
What it does tell you is factual and useful: the buyer pool you are competing in has a larger foreign component than at any point since the registry started counting, and the Dutch part of that pool is growing.
You can see what is actually listed and at what price on our Spanish listings, each one published with its own figures by the seller who owns it.
Figures are from the Colegio de Registradores Q2 2026 statistics and coverage of them, current at publication in September 2026. Onora publishes market data for context. It is not advice, and past market behaviour does not indicate future results. See our disclaimer.
