Navarra's Ley Foral 11/2026, passed by the regional parliament on 2 July, was gazetted nationally in the BOE (Boletín Oficial del Estado, Spain's state gazette) on Tuesday 28 July 1. Spain's national housing decree-law was due at the Council of Ministers that same day and instead went nowhere.
The Navarra text sorts room lets into three categories. A room taken as a habitual residence carries full tenancy protection: minimum duration, rent limits, deposit and succession rules. A seasonal room is defined by the purpose of the stay, written into the law as vacational, touristic, recreational or leisure, and carries almost nothing. A third category covers hospitality-style lets with services. Any temporary contract that runs past twelve months converts automatically to permanent status, and every contract must be entered in a regional rental registry. A landlord who calls a year-long let seasonal to escape the five-year extension regime has, in Navarra, been handed a definition to fail.
Two separate competences are in play here, and the newer one did not produce this law. In May the Tribunal Supremo, Spain's Supreme Court, annulled the state's single national registration procedure in judgment STS 620/2026 on the grounds that it duplicated administrative registries the communities already run . That devolved administrative registration to all seventeen communities. Navarra's law rests on something older and different in kind. Article 149.1.8 of the Constitution reserves civil and contract law to the state except in the six communities that kept their own civil law in 1978: Aragón, the Balearic Islands, Catalonia, Galicia, Navarra and the Basque Country. Navarra's Fuero Nuevo, its compilation of foral civil law, predates the 1978 settlement and had already lifted room rentals out of the state's Ley de Arrendamientos Urbanos in 2019. The May ruling and the July law arrived in the same summer by coincidence. Madrid, Andalusia and Valencia would need the Cortes Generales to legislate for them, whatever the Supreme Court decided about registries.
The national decree went the other way. On Monday 27 July the government confirmed it was postponed to September 2. It would have extended expiring rental contracts automatically to 30 June 2028, capped seasonal contracts at a year, and raised VAT on tourist flats to 21 per cent, which is the package promised for July at the end of June . A Spanish decree-law takes effect at once but lapses within 30 days unless Congress convalidates it, and the government cannot find the five votes it needs from Podemos, a left party outside the coalition. Podemos objects to a land-law reform in the same text that it says would fuel speculative urban windfalls. Junts separately rejects other elements, having already extracted the landlord tax deductions that Sumar, the government's own coalition partner, conceded on 14 July . Idealista, which had reported the 28 July approval five days earlier, published its own correction as the postponement was confirmed 3.
A tenant in Pamplona now holds protections a tenant in Seville does not, and Seville cannot legislate its way to them. A landlord with property in three communities already faces three registration regimes and may soon face three definitions of a season. The Comunidad de Madrid put its own Ley 2/2026, a supply-side measure passed on 11 June, into the very same BOE issue 4. Whether the map that results counts as federalism working or failing depends on which of those two people you ask.
