Tenants and landlords in Spain: a radical-centre plan to end the war with public rent insurance

Spanish politics talks about renting as a war. Tenants are told landlords are speculators, landlords are told tenants won't pay and can't be removed, and each new law is sold as a win for one side. Miriam González picked this up in Democracia 21's launch (problem six in our overview of the party's proposals). According to Demócrata's account of her interview with El País, she rejects presenting owners and tenants as opposing groups, because many of both belong to the same families and social classes. That's a good starting point. Here is how to turn it into policy.

Who the two sides are

The landlord in Spain is mostly a person. A report by the Ministry of Social Rights and the CSIC, built on tax data from the 2023 household panel and reported by El Salto, finds that only 39% of rented homes belong to landlords with a single property. Among homes let by individuals, 52.8% belong to people with two or more homes on the market. So Spanish rental housing is owned largely by households, many of them with a few flats, and companies and public bodies hold a smaller part. The tenant is often their son, their niece, their employee.

The thing both sides fear most is the same event seen from opposite ends: a tenancy that breaks down over money. The CGPJ, which governs the judiciary, counts 18,317 evictions from rental cases in 2025, about seven in ten of all evictions carried out and 10.9% fewer than the year before. For the tenant that is losing a home. For the landlord it usually means months of unpaid rent, legal costs and a long wait. The fear of that wait shapes the whole market: it decides who gets offered a flat and on what terms.

What France already does

France takes the risk off the table. Visale is a rent guarantee run by Action Logement. It is free for the landlord. It covers unpaid rent and charges, and damage caused by the tenant, during the first three years of a lease, up to 36 months of unpaid rent in the private sector. It can't be combined with a personal guarantor, so the young tenant without a well-off parent competes on equal terms. Action Logement says Visale reached two million guarantees in its first ten years, with more than 264,000 individual landlords using it.

Spain has started down the same road. Royal Decree 1135/2025, of 10 December, creates a line of aid paid for by the State to cover unpaid rent on homes let to young people and vulnerable groups. It covers rent, damage and unpaid utility bills; the regions run it as a guarantee, insurance or subsidy, and a public guarantee must be free. The State Housing Plan 2026–2030 counts €304 million for it. Then, on 6 October 2026, the Government approved Royal Decree-law 29/2026. It allows some tenancies to be extended by up to two more years, caps rent updates at 2% until the end of 2027 when no figure was agreed, suspends evictions of vulnerable households with nowhere to go until 2030, and gives the administration two months to rehouse a vulnerable tenant facing non-payment proceedings or pay what is owed. With Parliament dissolved for the 29 November election, its validation is still pending.

The plan

The left is right that tenants deserve long, secure tenancies, with rises tied to a public index, and that no vulnerable family should be put on the street without somewhere to go. The market-liberal tradition is right that a landlord who isn't paid needs certainty, quickly, and that rules rewritten every year make people stop letting.

The idea that fits neither camp is to turn the war into an insurance pool. Make the 2025 guarantee universal: every lease whose rent is at or below the official reference price for its area gets a free public guarantee, whoever the tenant is. In exchange, the landlord accepts what tenants need: a minimum term longer than today's, and annual updates tied to the reference index Spain has used since January 2025. When a tenant stops paying, the guarantee pays the landlord within weeks. The State then holds the debt and the case splits in two. A fast civil procedure deals with a tenant who could pay and won't. Social services deal with a family that can't, with the rehousing duty the 2026 decree-law sketches, applied before anyone reaches the door with a court order.

Everyone gains something real. Tenants get long, predictable contracts and an end to the demand for a well-off guarantor. Landlords get paid. The State pays for the defaults, and in return gets more homes on the long-term market at controlled rents, with a far cheaper bill than building each of those homes itself. The pool can be funded from the housing plan and a small charge on the rental deposits the regions already hold, and priced by an independent actuary.

The last piece is time. Spain has changed its rental rules again and again, and every change has pushed some landlords out. A cross-party agreement that fixes the guarantee, the minimum term and the index for ten years, the horizon González asks for in her neighbourhood plan, would do more for supply than any single clause. Rent limits in the most stressed areas can sit on top, as we argue in our piece on rent control in Catalonia and Berlin, with a clear end date. Underneath, one stable deal: the State insures the rent, the landlord offers a long lease, and the tenant gets a home they can count on.