Half of your IRPF is decided by the community you live in
The scale in the national law is one half of the tax. The state half runs from 9.5% to 24.5%, and it is the same in Vigo as in Valencia. On top of it, your autonomous community applies a scale of its own, with its own brackets and its own rates. That second scale is what actually separates two people earning the same salary.
So the form asks where you live before it asks anything else. We model five communities: Madrid, Catalonia, Valencia, Andalusia and the Balearic Islands. If you still have a say in where you land, change the region and rerun the same salary. Nobody does this arithmetic for you at the offer stage.
Your payslip figure comes from a different calculation
The retención your employer holds back each month is not this number and was never trying to be. It runs on a national withholding scale of its own, as an advance, and the annual return settles whatever it got wrong in either direction. The monthly figure has a page of its own: the Spanish salary withholding calculator. Confusing the two is why people think Spain taxed them twice.
The mínimo personal y familiar is a credit, not a deduction
Spain does not subtract your personal and family minimum from your taxable base. It taxes the full base. Then it runs the same scale over the minimum (€5,550 for you, plus amounts for children, dependent parents and disability) and subtracts that tax from your tax.
The consequence decides real money. The relief lands at the bottom-bracket rates, so it is worth the same euros whatever you earn. A director does not get their minimum at a director’s marginal rate. A calculator that grants it there is under-taxing them.
Social security comes off before the scale ever runs
Your own contributions are deducted from employment income before the scale touches it: common contingencies at 4.7%, unemployment at 1.55%, vocational training at 0.1%, the MEI at 0.15%. So are €2,000 of standard expenses and, at the bottom of the range, a reduction of up to €7,302.
Those percentages stop at the contribution ceiling of €61,214. Above the ceiling your pay is not contribution-free: a solidarity contribution takes over, starting at 0.19% of the slice above it and rising from there.
Beckham replaces this whole machine, and most people who ask do not qualify
The impatriate regime of art. 93 LIRPF taxes you under the non-resident rules instead: 24% up to €600,000 and 47% above, for 6 years, with no progressive scale and no community half. While you are in it, all of your worldwide employment income counts as Spanish-source.
The conditions are not machine-checkable, so read them yourself. No Spanish tax residence in the five preceding tax periods. A move caused by an employment contract, a directorship, a certified entrepreneurial activity or highly qualified work for start-ups. An election on modelo 149, within six months of your social security registration. The number above assumes the ordinary scale, because this page does not model Beckham. Our freelancer tax calculator does, together with the trap that a plain autónomo cannot use the regime at all.
The model stops at employment income
Dividends, interest and capital gains sit on a separate savings scale this page never touches. If you own the company that pays you, the founder walkthrough is where both halves are put together.
Community tax credits are outside the model, and so is a community’s power to raise its own family minimums.
And if Spain is still one option among several, the Portuguese equivalent runs the same salary through a very different system.