Since 1 June, VAT on electricity in Spain is back to 21% and the electricity tax to 5.11%. How to read your next bill without panicking, in plain English.

Your electricity bill in Spain is about to jump 14%, and it's not your provider (this time)

A heads-up before your next bill lands: it's going to be higher. Around 14% higher, even if you used exactly the same electricity as last month. And before you fire off an angry email to your provider in your best Google-translated Spanish, save yourself the trouble: they didn't do it.

On 1 June, the Spanish government ended two temporary tax cuts that had been softening electricity and gas bills for the past few years. This isn't fine print from any company. It's national tax policy, published in the BOE (Spain's official state gazette). But since nobody explains it on the bill itself, here it is in plain English.

The two numbers that changed

VAT is back to 21%. It had been temporarily reduced to 10%. It's applied at the very end of your bill, on top of everything else, which is why it's the one you'll feel most.

The electricity tax is back to 5.11%. Its full name is the Impuesto Especial sobre la Electricidad (IEE), and it had been cut to 0.5%. It's calculated on the sum of your standing charge (potencia) and your consumption (energía), before VAT. Which means yes: you pay a tax, and then you pay VAT on that tax. That's genuinely how it works. Welcome to Spain.

Natural gas follows the same path: its VAT also returns to 21%. So do firewood, pellets and briquettes, in case your countryside casa runs on those.

What it means in euros

No calculator needed: your total bill goes up roughly 13-14% compared to an identical bill from May.

If you were paying around €50 a month, expect about €57. If you were paying €90, expect around €102. The proportion is similar for almost every household, because both taxes apply to the whole bill, not to specific parts of it.

It stings most in high-consumption homes: electric heating, an EV charging in the garage, a big villa with the air-con doing battle against August. There, 14% adds up to real money over a year.

How it will look on your bill (and why that matters)

Here's the part almost nobody tells you. When your July bill arrives (covering June's consumption), you'll see a higher total, and your brain will do what every brain in Spain does: "they've raised my prices again".

That reflex is understandable, and it's risky in two opposite ways:

Risk 1: you blame the wrong party. If your tariff was fine, the only thing that changed is taxes. Switching providers over this fixes nothing: VAT and the electricity tax are identical with every single retailer, on the free market and on the regulated PVPC tariff alike. Anyone who promises to help you dodge them is selling you smoke.

Risk 2: you miss a price rise that IS your provider's doing. June is a perfect month for a tariff revision to slip through unnoticed. Spanish law requires retailers to give you at least one calendar month's notice before raising prices (article 44.1.e of Ley 24/2013), and that notice usually arrives as an email with a deliberately boring subject line. If your provider raised your kWh price around the same time, the tax increase gives it perfect cover. Everything blurs into one bigger total and nobody checks the breakdown.

There's exactly one way to tell them apart: compare the unit prices (€/kWh and €/kW) on your new bill against your May bill. If those unit prices haven't moved, the difference is purely fiscal. If they have moved, you've got two increases stacked on top of each other, and the second one can actually be fixed.

The trick that makes the increase (almost) not matter

Both taxes are percentages applied to your bill. That has a mathematical consequence that works in your favour: every euro you trim from the base is now worth more than it was before.

An example. If you have more contracted power than you actually use (a classic in rented flats, where nobody has adjusted it since the landlord set it up), every extra kW costs you the regulated tariff, your retailer's margin, and now a 5.11% tax plus 21% VAT on all of it. Lowering your peak contracted power by 1 kW saves roughly €40-55 a year under the new tax regime. Lower it by 2 kW, double that. In many homes, that alone cancels out the June increase.

Same logic for the add-on services that sneak onto Spanish bills (maintenance plans, "home assistance", electrical protection, typically €4-12 a month each): every one of them now costs you 14% more than it did in May. If you don't use them, June is the perfect month to cancel.

And the same again for an outdated tariff. Current new-customer prices, taxes included, sit around €0.18-0.25/kWh at peak, €0.11-0.15 mid, and €0.07-0.12 off-peak. If your prices are clearly above those ranges, you were overpaying before the tax change, and now you're overpaying with 21% on top.

In short: you can't touch the taxes, but you can absolutely touch the base they're applied to. And the base is where almost everyone has slack.

Three things that did NOT change (so nobody cons you)

Worth knowing, because confusing times are high season for confusing sales calls:

The bono social is untouched. Spain's electricity social discount keeps its reinforced rates: 42.5% off for vulnerable consumers, 57.5% for severely vulnerable, and 100% coverage for those at risk of social exclusion (with the remainder covered by social services), under Royal Decree-laws 7/2026 and 16/2025. If you're a resident who meets the requirements (PVPC tariff, contracted power up to 10 kW, and the vulnerability criteria), it's still worth applying.
The IVPEE stays suspended until 30 July. It's a tax on electricity production that you never see on your bill, but it pushes up wholesale prices when active. Its suspension keeps a small lid on the wholesale kWh for a few more weeks.
Your agreed unit prices don't change because of taxes. If you signed a fixed price, that €/kWh stays exactly as signed. A "special offer because of the VAT increase" makes no technical sense whatsoever; if someone calls you with that pitch, you now know exactly what kind of call it is.

The obvious question: will they lower them again?

Maybe. Energy tax cuts have come and gone since 2021, tracking electricity prices and inflation. The tool exists and Spain has used it before. But any new cut needs its own Royal Decree and its own BOE publication, so don't budget your year around it.

Our position is the usual one: you can't control what the Council of Ministers decides, but you can control whether your bill carries accumulated fat that you're now paying 21% VAT on. That takes one review, about ten minutes, and it's done.

If you'd rather we did it, upload your May bill and then your July one when it arrives. We'll tell you, in English, which part of the difference is taxes, which part is your tariff, and whether anything is worth adjusting. And if everything's fine, we'll tell you that too and leave you alone.