Spain spent eighteen months building the machinery the European Union asked for. The day after those EU rules became fully applicable, its own Supreme Court took the central piece apart.
Regulation (EU) 2024/1028 has been in force since 20 May 2024, but member states were given two years to prepare: it applies from 20 May 2026[4]Online short-term accommodation rental services — data collection and sharing (Regulation (EU) 2024/1028). The regulation does not tell any country whether to license short-term lets — that remains a national and regional choice. What it requires is that where a registration scheme exists, the numbers it issues must be verifiable, and that every member state operate a single digital entry point through which platforms hand activity data to the authorities.
Spain's answer was Real Decreto 1312/2024, of 23 December 2024, which created both a Registro Único de Arrendamientos and a Ventanilla Única Digital de Arrendamientos. It entered into force on 2 January 2025, and its substantive provisions began to apply on 1 July 2025[1]Real Decreto 1312/2024, de 23 de diciembre, por el que se regula el procedimiento de Registro Único de Arrendamientos y se crea la Ventanilla Única Digital de Arrendamientos (texto consolidado). From that date a landlord offering short-term accommodation through an online platform needed a registration number — on top of whatever regional tourism licence already applied.
What the court actually annulled
The Generalitat Valenciana challenged the decree, and it won in part. In judgment 620/2026, the Supreme Court held that the State had no valid competence[2]El Tribunal Supremo anula el Registro Único de arrendamientos de corta duración por considerar que el Estado carece de competencia para su creación“excede de lo que constituyen unas "bases" o "medidas de coordinación" concretas” to create the single rental registry. The court rejected both grounds the government had relied on: article 149.1.8 of the Constitution, covering the ordering of public registries, and article 149.1.13, covering the bases of economic planning.
excede de lo que constituyen unas "bases" o "medidas de coordinación" concretas
That is the whole of the reasoning in one clause: a national registry layered on top of the regional ones went further than setting common bases or coordinating between them. Housing, and the registries that govern it, sit with the autonomous communities.
This was not a single judgment. The consolidated text of the decree now carries annotations recording that articles 5, 8, 9 and 10 — the provisions that actually imposed the registration obligation — were annulled by Supreme Court rulings of 19 May, 21 May and 1 June 2026[1]Real Decreto 1312/2024, de 23 de diciembre, por el que se regula el procedimiento de Registro Único de Arrendamientos y se crea la Ventanilla Única Digital de Arrendamientos (texto consolidado). The registration mechanism was dismantled piece by piece across three decisions in under three weeks.
What survived, and why it matters
The parts of the decree that answer directly to the EU regulation were upheld. The court found the State did hold competence, under articles 149.1.13 and 149.1.31, for the Ventanilla Única Digital, for the obligation on online platforms to transmit data, and for the transmission of data for statistical purposes.
So article 7 of the decree still stands, and with it the national digital gateway that receives platform submissions, verifies registration numbers and passes activity data to the authorities. So does the ministerial order that operationalises it. Orden VAU/653/2025, of 19 June 2025, requires platforms to transmit data within the first fifteen calendar days of the following month[3]Orden VAU/653/2025, de 19 de junio, por la que se determinan los plazos y el modelo para la transmisión por parte de las plataformas en línea de alquiler de corta duración de datos a la Ventanilla Única Digital de Arrendamientos“los quince primeros días naturales del mes siguiente”, with smaller platforms reporting quarterly on the same fifteen-day tail. The annexe to that order specifies exactly what moves: registration numbers, the full address of each unit broken into street, postal code, municipality and country, guest counts and countries of residence, the rental dates, and the listing URL.
Read those two outcomes together and the awkwardness is obvious. The pipe that carries registration numbers to the State survives. The mechanism by which the State issued those numbers does not.
The practical position for hosts and platforms
Nothing here abolishes registration in Spain. The regional schemes the national registry was built on top of are untouched, and they were always the layer that actually granted permission to operate. A host in Catalonia or Valencia or Andalusia still needs whatever their autonomous community requires. What has gone is the additional national number introduced in July 2025.
For platforms, the reporting duty continues on its existing cadence, because the court left article 6 and article 7 substantially intact. The open question is what a platform is meant to verify when the national issuing authority has been stripped of the power to issue.
It is also worth being precise about what this ruling was not. It was not a decision about whether short-term lets should be restricted, and it says nothing about the merits of registration as policy. It was a decision about which level of Spanish government may build a registry. A differently constructed scheme — one routed through the autonomous communities rather than layered above them — would not obviously face the same objection.
What to watch
The EU obligation does not soften because a national implementing measure failed. Spain still has to satisfy Regulation 2024/1028's requirements on verifiable registration and a functioning single entry point, and it now has to do so without the instrument it designed for the purpose. That leaves three plausible routes: rebuild the registry on a different competence footing, formally federate the seventeen regional registries into the existing digital window, or negotiate a co-operative arrangement with the autonomous communities.
Which of those Madrid attempts, and how quickly, is the thing to watch — and it is a question every other member state with a strong regional tier should be reading closely, because the competence problem Spain hit is not unique to Spain.