Changes to the list of Catalan municipalities where rent prices will be regulated: 22 leave, 53 join

BarcelonaUpdates to the list of Catalan municipalities that meet the conditions to apply the rent price cap. The Generalitat has reviewed the declaration of municipalities considered a tense residential market area – the first declaration expired in March 2027 and was pending renewal – and has incorporated and excluded several towns: after conducting a study on the housing situation, the Government proposes that 302 municipalities have official recognition that their housing market is tense.

Although the number of towns has increased – there were 271 until now – the number of people living in areas considered tense has dropped from 7 million to 6.1 million. “This shows that the rent price cap mechanism works to contain price increases,” defended the Minister of Territory, Sílvia Paneque, in a press release this Tuesday.

The Government has opted to keep 118 municipalities within the area, which concentrate almost six million people, 72.9% of the Catalan population. On the other hand, it has considered that 22 municipalities have managed to meet the conditions that allow them to leave the tense market area. This is the case of Lleida, Granollers, or Mollet del Vallès, among others, which together total more than 634,000 inhabitants.

On the other hand, there are 53 municipalities that until now were not part of the tense market areas, but which now meet the conditions to be considered as such. More than 255,000 people live there.

What does it mean to live in a municipality considered a tense area?

Tense areas are the government's instrument for limiting areas where it can contain housing prices, through the application of rent caps. Firstly, the rent for new contracts cannot exceed the amount of the last valid contract, once updated (mostly, based on inflation). Secondly, when it comes to a large landlord – the natural or legal person owning five or more urban properties – the rent cannot be higher than the reference index for rent prices.

In parallel to the two basic containment measures, the Generalitat approved last December – when rent caps had already been in place for over a year – a law to regulate seasonal rentals and room rentals. These are the two loopholes that some owners had found to impose prices higher than those permitted by law.

Beyond rents, tense areas will also determine where the Government and the commoners want the construction of social housing (HPO) to be streamlined as much as possible, overriding urban planning laws, provided that the resulting flats meet the habitability conditions to obtain the certificate.

When does a municipality become a tense area?

The law establishes that a municipality's housing market is tense if, on the one hand, citizens have to dedicate more than 30% of their income to pay for housing expenses – rent or mortgage and basic supplies – or, on the other hand, if the rent or purchase price has increased in the last five years by three points above the consumer price index (CPI, the indicator used to calculate the increase in the cost of living).

The declaration of a tense zone is one of the instruments included in the first state housing law – approved in May 2023– to tackle the housing crisis, although it is the autonomous communities that must apply the measure. Catalonia was the first territory to officially declare a large number of municipalities as tense zones, and it did so in two phases: in August 2023 it applied the classification to 140 locations and, in April of the following year, to 140 more. In total, last year there were 271 Catalan municipalities considered tense zones.

Despite the regulations, the Generalitat has only fined three large holders –meaning owners of more than five homes each– for non-compliance with the regulations, without specifying what the offense was, for example, whether it was a violation of the rent cap.