Barcelona's Rent Cap, Two Years On: Prices Are Rising Again
The short version
- In the two years before the cap, rent per m² on new contracts rose 20%. In the two years after, it rose 0.9%.
- That's not a flat line. For about a year prices stalled or fell, then they turned. Since mid-2025 they've been going up 4 to 7% a year, and the last quarter of 2025 was a record: €17.04/m².
- The average monthly rent is still lower than before the cap (€1,137 against €1,193), mostly because the flats being rented got smaller, from 75 m² to 71 m².
- Fewer contracts get signed: 30,789 in 2025, against 38,683 in 2023. But that fall started two years before the cap.
- Per m², every district costs more than in the year before the cap. Ciutat Vella went up the most, 8%.
On 16 March 2024 Barcelona was declared a stressed rental market under Spain's housing law, and rents on new contracts were capped. For most landlords that means a new tenant can't be charged more than the last one. Big landlords, and flats that haven't been rented in the last five years, are held to the government's reference index. (If you want to check that index for your own flat, here's how.)
People have argued about whether it worked ever since, usually with whichever number suits them. A year in, in March 2025, the Spanish housing minister and the Catalan housing minister announced that rents on new contracts in Barcelona had dropped 6.4%. The official series agrees that prices fell. They just didn't keep falling.
These are the official figures from INCASÒL, the Catalan agency where landlords have to lodge the tenant's deposit, for every quarter from early 2023 to March 2026. March 2026 is the latest quarter they've published.
Quarter by quarter
| Quarter | €/m² | vs a year earlier | Monthly rent | Contracts |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Q1 2023 | 15.66 | +12.5% | €1,087 | 10,890 |
| Q2 2023 | 15.92 | +12.6% | €1,124 | 10,328 |
| Q3 2023 | 16.22 | +8.7% | €1,171 | 8,934 |
| Q4 2023 | 16.74 | +10.4% | €1,178 | 8,531 |
| Q1 2024 | 16.73 | +6.9% | €1,193 | 9,825 |
| Q2 2024 | 15.98 | +0.4% | €1,132 | 7,938 |
| Q3 2024 | 15.74 | −3.0% | €1,133 | 7,484 |
| Q4 2024 | 15.88 | −5.2% | €1,117 | 7,656 |
| Q1 2025 | 16.19 | −3.3% | €1,087 | 7,615 |
| Q2 2025 | 16.56 | +3.6% | €1,136 | 7,411 |
| Q3 2025 | 16.84 | +7.0% | €1,153 | 7,855 |
| Q4 2025 | 17.04 | +7.4% | €1,161 | 7,908 |
| Q1 2026 | 16.89 | +4.3% | €1,137 | 8,156 |
The cap started two weeks before the end of Q1 2024, so Q2 2024 is the first full quarter under it. Rent per m² fell 4.5% from one quarter to the next. That doesn't normally happen in spring: in 2022 and 2023 the second quarter came in about 1.6% higher than the first.
Read down the "vs a year earlier" column and the whole story is there. Double-digit rises through 2023, then almost nothing, then three quarters in a row of falling prices. That's the stretch the government was talking about. Then it turns, and by late 2025 rents were rising 7% a year again and had passed anything seen before the cap.
You can see the full series, back to 2000, on the rent history page.
Cheaper per month, because the flats got smaller
Something easy to miss: the monthly rent in early 2026 (€1,137) is still below early 2024 (€1,193), while the price per m² is higher. Both are true because the average rented flat shrank. It was 74.4 m² across the four quarters before the cap and 71.4 m² across the last four.
I can't tell you why from this data. Maybe bigger flats went to sale or to seasonal lets, maybe it's just which flats happened to come up. But if you're comparing your rent with what a friend paid in 2023, compare per m², not per month. Per month flatters the cap.
Fewer contracts, but the fall started earlier
This is the number the cap's critics point to, so it's worth looking at properly.
| Year | Contracts |
|---|---|
| 2019 | 51,294 |
| 2020 | 40,416 |
| 2021 | 57,158 |
| 2022 | 47,927 |
| 2023 | 38,683 |
| 2024 | 32,903 |
| 2025 | 30,789 |
Yes, about 20% fewer contracts were signed in 2025 than in 2023. But 2023 had already lost 19% on 2022, and the cap didn't exist yet. The slide was well under way, and this data can't tell you how much the cap added to it.
The most recent quarters go the other way. The last three were each up on the year before, by 5%, 3% and 7%.
District by district
Here I compare the year before the cap (April 2023 to March 2024) with the latest year of data (April 2025 to March 2026). Each figure averages four quarters, weighted by the number of contracts. The first period includes the cap's first two weeks, which is close enough.
| District | €/m² before | €/m² now | Change | Contracts |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ciutat Vella | 16.92 | 18.32 | +8.3% | +2.8% |
| Les Corts | 17.31 | 17.88 | +3.3% | −4.5% |
| Gràcia | 17.42 | 17.96 | +3.1% | −11.2% |
| Sarrià-Sant Gervasi | 18.55 | 19.09 | +2.9% | −7.9% |
| Sant Martí | 16.29 | 16.71 | +2.6% | −21.4% |
| Horta-Guinardó | 14.78 | 15.10 | +2.2% | −15.0% |
| Sant Andreu | 13.99 | 14.21 | +1.6% | −10.7% |
| Nou Barris | 13.49 | 13.68 | +1.4% | −23.7% |
| Sants-Montjuïc | 16.37 | 16.55 | +1.1% | −9.2% |
| Eixample | 16.86 | 16.89 | +0.2% | −14.7% |
| Barcelona | 16.39 | 16.84 | +2.7% | −16.7% |
Every district costs more per m² than before, but mostly not by much: 2.7% for the city over two years. Eixample hardly moved.
Ciutat Vella is the odd one out. It rose 8%, it's the only district signing more contracts than before, and per m² it's now the second most expensive district in the city after Sarrià-Sant Gervasi. The flats there are small, so the monthly rent (€1,025 on average) still looks modest.
At the other end, Nou Barris and Sant Martí lost more than a fifth of their contracts.
What these numbers can't tell you
- What would have happened without the cap. There's no second Barcelona to compare with, and prices were already slowing before it arrived, from 12.5% a year in early 2023 to 6.9% in early 2024.
- What sitting tenants pay. These are new contracts only. If you've been in the same flat since 2022, nothing here describes your rent.
- Seasonal contracts. They're a story of their own, and post 010 covers how landlords used them to get around the cap.
My reading, for what it's worth: the cap gave new tenants about a year of flat or falling prices. It didn't stop prices rising after that, and it arrived when the number of contracts was already shrinking. Whether that counts as working depends on what you expected from it.
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