Spain charges you tax if you rent the property out. If you don't rent the property out, it imputes a rent and you are charged tax on the imputed rent.
The cadastral value is (finger in the air) 40% of the value of the property; you pay (non-eu resident) 24% of between 1.1% and 2% of the cadastral value.
0.2% is significantly lower than the property tax rate I pay on my house, and taxing vacant property seems like a good idea to try to disincentivize inefficient use of limited urban real estate.
In England there is a policy for "no empty house".
But tell me what happens in England if someone occupies a house. What I know is that they are kicked out and quickly.
In Spain? Just stop the electricity or water for them or look at all the laws that make them "vulnerable" and you are going to pay for them until they kick them out. Things got so bad that now people when they rent they make an insurance against this kind of intrusion. Before this was not a problem.
> seems low for the provision of roads, schools, firefighters
well, not so low if you think that for roads they get 24 billion + 16 billion from highways + car taxes (car registration and others) and the maintenance of roads is 7 billion per year and they are undermaintained.
You forgot also all the money that goes to subsidizing votes and unnecessary positions. In Spain, depending on who you ask, the "comunidades autónomas" expenses are valued between 30 billion and 90 billion per year and I can tell you a lot of it is totally unnecessary. Or the central government. One or the other. There is duplication, which equals to legal corruption. Most countries have some of this but I think the case of Spain is relatively worrying.
You can ask about the firefighters, army, police, etc. to people from Ceuta or people from Valencia (where I am from). The 5th day after the disaster a french firefighter arrived to help and he was shocked to see that no spanish firefighters had arrived yet.
There is a reason why I do not like taxes, but there is even a more reasonable reason about me not wanting to pay them in Spain when I see how they are spent. Bc I still have to pay taxes somewhere anyway...
Property tax is not only taxation model. In some systems taxes are not really earmarked ton specific purposes instead they go to general budget and are then redistributed. So you can have lower property tax but otherwise higher other taxes and still pay for the stuff.
The cadastral value is (finger in the air) 40% of the value of the property; you pay (non-eu resident) 24% of between 1.1% and 2% of the cadastral value.
So 0.1%-0.2% of property value annually.