What living here actually costs

Two things are true at once, and most articles on this subject pick one and ignore the other. Day-to-day living on Mallorca is generally cheaper than in the UK. Running a house here is often not.

Why we do not publish a monthly figure

You will find pages quoting a precise monthly budget for a couple on Mallorca. We do not, because the number depends almost entirely on three things nobody averaging can know: whether you have a car, whether you have a pool, and whether you live here in winter.

A couple in a flat in Palma with no car and a couple in a finca outside Artà with a pool and two cars are not living in the same economy. Averaging them produces a figure that describes neither.

What follows is the structure of the difference instead.

Where it is genuinely cheaper

Eating and drinking out. The gap is real and it is the one most new arrivals notice first — not at the tourist-facing restaurants on the front line, but at the ones inland where locals eat.

Fresh food from the markets. Fruit, vegetables, fish. Seasonal and local, so the advantage narrows sharply for anything imported.

Healthcare, once you are in the system. Residents contributing to Spanish social security use the public system at no cost at the point of use. Private cover, which many foreign residents take alongside it for speed and language, costs a fraction of what comparable cover costs in the UK or US.

Property taxes. The annual municipal tax on a Mallorcan house is generally well below UK council tax on an equivalent property. This is the difference that surprises people most.

Where it is not

Electricity. Spanish domestic electricity is expensive by European standards. A house with air conditioning through the summer and a pool pump running daily produces bills that a British owner will not have budgeted for.

Anything imported. Cars, electronics, familiar branded groceries. It is an island: everything arrives by sea or air, and the price reflects it.

Water, in dry years, and in the rural areas where a property depends on a tank rather than mains supply.

Rentals in season. If you are renting before you buy, the summer months are not a fair sample of what long-term accommodation costs.

The running costs of a property, specifically

This is the part that gets left out of cost-of-living comparisons, because it is not living costs — it is ownership costs. For most buyers it is the larger surprise.

• IBI, the annual municipal property tax
• Rubbish collection, usually billed separately from IBI
• Community fees, where the property is in a development
• Home insurance
• Pool maintenance — chemicals, servicing, and either your time or someone else’s
• Garden maintenance, which on a Mallorcan plot in summer is not a light job
• Non-resident income tax, if you are not tax resident in Spain and the property is at your disposal
• A keyholder or management arrangement, if the property stands empty for months

None of these is dramatic alone. Together they are the difference between the budget people plan and the one they end up with.

The winter question

The cost most people never think to ask about is heating.

Mallorcan houses are built for summer. Many older properties have thick stone walls, tiled floors, single glazing and no central heating, because they were designed to stay cool in August rather than warm in February. A stone finca in January can be genuinely cold, and heating it is expensive precisely because the building was never meant to hold heat.

If you plan to be here year-round, insulation and heating are worth more attention during the search than almost anything else on the specification — and they are far cheaper to consider before buying than to fix afterwards.

What we do

When we show a property we can usually say what it costs to run, because we have asked the owner for the actual bills rather than estimating from floor area. Ask us. If a figure sounds implausibly low for a house of that size with a pool, it usually is.