BARCELONA, Spain — Laia Ferrer, a 29-year-old nurse, signed a lease in the Gràcia district of Barcelona in August for 1,050 euros a month, about 180 euros less than the previous tenant paid. Under Catalonia’s rent cap, her landlord could not charge more. “I know the number only because the contract has to show it,” she said. “That is the first time in my life I have felt the law was on my side of the table.”
Her landlord, a retired teacher who asked not to be named, has a different view. Two of his other apartments in the same building are now rented by the month to visiting academics and remote workers, a category exempt from the cap. “I did not want to do this,” he said. “The cap made it the only sensible thing.”
A year and a half after Catalonia became the first region to apply the price limits allowed under Spain’s 2023 housing law, the two of them capture the state of the evidence. Data released on Friday by the regional housing agency show that median rents for new long-term leases in Barcelona fell 4.8 percent between the third quarter of 2024 and the third quarter of 2026, the first sustained decline in the city in more than a decade. Over the same period, the number of new long-term leases registered fell 17 percent, while registrations of seasonal rentals, which run for one to 11 months, rose 38 percent.
“The cap works. The data say so,” said Montserrat Pujol, the regional housing secretary. She said the government would seek to close the seasonal loophole by requiring landlords to prove a tenant’s temporary status, a measure that Madrid has promised to include in a revision of the national law. “The other side said rents would not fall. They fell.”
Jordi Casals, who heads an association of small landlords, said the decline was a statistical artifact. “Rents fell on the apartments that are still offered as long-term rentals,” he said. “Those are fewer. The apartments that left the market did not get cheaper; they disappeared. Ask the person who did not find one.”
Economists who have studied the cap say both are partly right. Ignacio Bermúdez, a housing economist at Pompeu Fabra University, said the pattern mirrored Berlin’s experience with its own cap in 2020 and 2021: sitting tenants benefited, newcomers faced a thinner market, and the effect on overall affordability was small. “The honest summary is that the cap redistributes from landlords to tenants who already have a lease,” he said. “It does not build apartments. Nothing about it was ever going to build apartments.”
Catalonia built 14,700 new homes last year, the most since 2009 but far below the 25,000 a year the regional government says it needs. For Ms. Ferrer, the broader debate is abstract. “I am a nurse and I live in the city where I work,” she said. “Two years ago I was not sure that would be possible.”
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 12, 2026, Section A, Page 5 of the European edition with the headline: A Year Into Catalonia’s Rent Cap, Rents Dip, Listings Vanish and Everyone Claims Victory.
