The autonomous communities will continue to step on the accelerator of tax cuts in the coming years. Between now and 2031, they have projected tax reductions of around 2.3 billion as a whole, according to data collected by the Tax Authority (Airef). The greatest negative impact in terms of resources for public coffers will occur in personal income tax, and will be registered in 2028; The rest will be concentrated in liens related to real estate taxation and inheritances and donations. On the other side of the scale are the measures to increase income, whose footprint will be much smaller: around 250 million accumulated at the end of the period.
The Airef has made its accounts based on the regional budget projects for next year, the measures already approved that have effects in future years and the announcements made by the different regional governments on fiscal matters. Communities have a wide margin of autonomy to modify the taxation of their citizens, although it is often blurred in the data who is responsible for what increase or decrease in taxes. This is the case of Personal Income Tax, which will concentrate close to 80% of the negative tax collection impact: a tax shared between the territories and the State, to which regional governments can apply reductions, deductions and increases or decreases in the rate that corresponds to them.
The inheritance and donation tax is another of the great workhorses of tax reductions for the communities, which have regulatory and management powers over the tax. The same occurs with the tax on wealth, but the room for maneuver has been reduced by the introduction of the solidarity tax on large fortunes, of a state nature. Instead, the communities are squeezing the regulatory capacity on the tax on documented legal acts and property transfers (IPT/AJD), linked to the purchase and sale of housing. The tax has once again gained prominence in these years of crisis in access to the real estate market, as also reflected in the latest report from the Ministry of Finance on the General Budgets of the autonomous communities, which includes generalized downward changes in the tax, with the focus on habitual residences and young people.
All these tax reduction policies occur in the heat of an economy that is moving at a sustained pace and rising incomes. This year, the communities have already applied reductions in personal income tax for around 300 million, according to the calculations that Airef includes in its Report on the Projects and Fundamental Lines of the Budgets of the Public Administrations, published this week. If the downward adjustments in other figures and the measures to increase collection are added, the net result is negative 474 million. Next year it will be 600 million and more than 770 the next.
Andalusia is one of the territories that has announced new tax cuts in its 2027 budgets for a value of more than 280 million, in line with the downward fiscal trajectory printed by Juanma Moreno since he came to the Board seven years ago. The project foresees a drop of a quarter of a point in the regional personal income tax quota for incomes of up to 60,000 euros and progressive decreases in the ITP/AJD rates over the next four years, in addition to other changes and new deductions in inheritances and donations and in income tax.
The Valencian Community moves in a similar terrain. Between the end of 2025 and the beginning of 2026, it approved reductions in different taxes, including ITP/AJD, inheritances and donations, assets; In the middle of this year, it opted for reductions in the regional personal income tax rate that will begin to be applied between 2026 and 2027. The impact on collection will exceed, in total, 640 million euros. Madrid, defender and bastion of tax cuts, is advancing along the same path, with reductions already approved in inheritances and donations, and announced in ITP/AJD. Among the large communities, Catalonia is the only one that will register a positive net effect due to the tax changes applied in 2025 and 2026 and that will display their effects until 2031, including changes in personal income tax, ITP/AJD, taxation of tourist establishments and water charges.
Diego Martínez López, professor of Economics at the Pablo de Olavide University, considers that the moment is not the most appropriate to lower taxes, since at this time of expansion phase of the economic cycle a restrictive or neutral fiscal policy would correspond. It also focuses on fiscal rules. "The prospects for compliance with the only current fiscal rule, the spending rule [the others are not in force because the stability path was not approved], are very negative; and, as is known, tax cuts reduce the spending capacity according to said rule, penalizing its compliance," he says.
