Buying in Spain Before 31 December: The Real Timeline
November opened with 40 working days left in the year. 20 in November, once Monday 2 November comes out. 20 in December, once 7 December, 8 December and Christmas Day come out. That is the Andalusian count, and your own will differ slightly, because every municipality sets two local holidays of its own on top of the regional ones. Forty is not many. It is worth knowing what they have to hold.
Count backwards, not forwards
Most people plan a purchase forwards. Find the property, make an offer, sort the financing, sign.
That order is what causes the problem in November and December, because the notary date is the only fixed point in the whole process and everything else is measured back from it. If you want to sign before the end of the year, start at 31 December and work towards today.
The first thing that comes off is 10 days.
The 10 days are law and nobody can shorten them
When a Spanish bank makes you a formal mortgage offer, it issues a document called the FEIN. It sets out the rate, the term and every condition in writing.
Once you have it, the law gives you 10 days before you are allowed to sign. Not 10 days to decide, and not a cooling-off period you can waive. You cannot sign earlier, your bank cannot waive it and your notary cannot waive it.
So a notary appointment in mid-December needs a FEIN in hand by the start of the month. Not an approval in principle. The formal offer.
This is also the part people most often mistake for the bank being slow. It is not the bank. It is the statute.
The two things that eat the calendar before that
Working further back, two more things sit between a decision and a FEIN.
Your NIE. This is your foreigner's identification number, and nothing completes without it. Applied for from abroad, appointments can take weeks depending on where you apply. It is also the only part of this timeline that is genuinely in your hands, which is why it should be the first thing you start rather than the thing you deal with once you have found somewhere.
The valuation. The bank lends against the tasación, not against the price you agreed. It has to be instructed, carried out and returned, and in a busy quarter booking it is not instant. If the figure comes back below the price, you have a decision to make about the gap, and that decision takes time nobody has planned for.
What the process actually takes
From what our advisers see week to week:
Reservation to arras: about a month
Arras to notary: typically 4 to 8 weeks
That second window is set by how quickly the mortgage is agreed, not by your lawyer. 4 to 8 weeks is roughly 20 to 40 working days, and the 10-day wait sits inside the back end of it.
Put the two together and the arithmetic is not subtle. A buyer signing the arras in the first week of November has a realistic path to a December notary date. A buyer signing it in the first week of December does not.
The closed days, and why the count is not the same everywhere
In Andalusia the rest of the year loses 4 days:
Date | Day | |
|---|---|---|
2 November | Monday | All Saints, moved from the Sunday |
7 December | Monday | Constitution Day, moved from the Sunday |
8 December | Tuesday | Immaculate Conception |
25 December | Friday | Christmas Day |
Two of those are moved dates. All Saints falls on Sunday 1 November this year and Constitution Day on Sunday 6 December, and Andalusia moves both to the Monday. Not every region does, which is the main reason your working-day count is not ours.
The December pair matters most. The 5th and 6th are the weekend, the 7th and 8th are closed, so nothing moves at all between Saturday the 5th and Wednesday the 9th. Banks, notaries and the land registry are all shut for the two working days in the middle of that.
Add your two municipal holidays and the honest number for most buyers is somewhere between 36 and 38 working days.
If you have not started, January is the answer
This is the part worth saying plainly, because the alternative is three weeks of everyone pretending.
If you have not signed an arras contract by the end of November, a December notary date is not realistic. Pushing for one tends to produce one of two outcomes: a rushed valuation that comes back low, or an arras deadline that expires while the FEIN is still in its 10 days. Neither is a better position than signing in January.
January is not a failure. It is a date that will actually happen.
What to do this week
If you want to complete this year, 3 things, in this order.
Start the NIE if you have not. Get your borrowing figure agreed before you commit to a property rather than after. And ask for your working-day count from your own municipality, not the regional one, because yours is the number your notary date is built on.
We are mortgage brokers for international buyers in Spain. The sequencing is the part we do, and it is far easier to arrange in November than to rescue in December.