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You sign a lease at 900 euros a month and the agency hands you four figures: the first month, 900; the legal deposit, another 900; an additional guarantee of two months, 1,800; and "management fees", one month plus 21 % VAT, 1,089. Total, 4,689 euros just to get through the door.
One of those four figures is not yours to pay, and this is not a generous reading: it is written down.
Law 12/2023 of 24 May, on the right to housing, added a paragraph to article 20.1 of Spain's Urban Leases Act. It says that estate-agency management costs and the costs of drawing up the contract fall on the landlord. It came into force on 26 May 2023. From that day on, in a residential lease, the agency's commission is an invoice between the agency and the owner, and you do not appear on it.
The 1,089 euros in the example are 36 days of rent. Over a five-year contract they come to 2 % of everything you will pay in rent. Of the four figures in the move-in bill, it is the only one the law takes off your hands.
The rule covers residential leases, the ordinary kind, the ones regulated under Title II of the Act. It makes no difference what the item is called on the receipt: fees, commission, management, formalisation costs, solvency assessment, contract processing. The law names both things, estate-agency management and formalisation, precisely so that changing the label does not work.
It does not cover commercial premises, seasonal lets, a garage space rented on its own and, in general, anything that is not a home. Nor contracts signed before 26 May 2023, which are governed by whatever was agreed then.
With the law in hand they can ask you for the first month, the one-month deposit under article 36.1 of the Act, and, if you agree to it, an additional guarantee that in a residential lease cannot exceed two months' rent. Nothing else. The deposit belongs neither to the agency nor to the landlord: it is lodged with whichever body your region has for the purpose and returned at the end.
One clarification that prevents arguments: a holding payment is not a commission. If you put down 300 euros so the flat is not shown to anyone else and that money is later deducted from the first month's rent or from the deposit, that is a holding payment and it is lawful. If it is deducted from nothing, it is the commission under another name.
There is one more trick, and it is the one going around lately: a clause in the contract itself stating that the tenant takes on the intermediation costs. It does not work. Article 6 of the Act says that stipulations worsening, for the tenant, what that Title of the law grants them are void and are treated as unwritten. Signing it commits you to nothing, and you do not even need to challenge it: it simply does not exist. The rest of the contract stands.
If you have already paid, it has not expired. A claim for money charged without cause has a five-year limit, under article 1964.2 of the Civil Code. That is: if you signed in 2024, you have until 2029. And you have two doors, not one. The agency is a business selling a service, so the complaints book and your region's consumer office both apply; and below 2,000 euros a small claim can be brought with no solicitor and no court agent, with the contract, the transfer receipt and the receipt where the agency wrote down what it was charging for. That receipt, if you have it, is half the case.
And if they are asking you for it today, one sentence settles the conversation without an argument: ask for the invoice. An invoice with your name, the item and the VAT broken out. The agency then finds itself having to put in writing that it is charging you a cost the law puts on the owner, and that is precisely what it does not want to sign. Ask for it before you transfer anything, in writing, and keep the reply: that email is worth more than any argument at the counter.