Inheritance

Buying out the other half of the flat (from your ex, from your sibling): what dissolving shared ownership really costs

November 3, 2026

Two siblings inherit a flat and one of them wants to keep it. Or an unmarried couple bought a home together, they break up, and one of them keeps the house. In both cases the same question comes up, with the same fear behind it: if I pay out the other person’s share, is that like buying a flat from a stranger, with everything that costs?

The short answer is no, and the difference isn’t a nuance: Spanish civil law doesn’t treat it as a sale, but as the mechanism for splitting something that can’t be split. That changes which tax you pay, on what amount, and in one of the three cases, whether you pay anything at all. This is what dissolving shared ownership (extinción de condominio) really costs, with numbers, and the two places where people overpay simply because they didn’t know better.

How much inheritance tax you pay in Spain (and the money you have to advance before you see a cent)

October 20, 2026

Inheriting sounds like money is about to land in your account. What almost nobody tells you is that, before that money is actually available, you usually need to pay something out of your own pocket first. The bank won’t let you touch the deceased’s account until you prove the inheritance tax has been paid, and that tax has a deadline that starts running on the day of death, not on the day you finally sort out the paperwork.