IRPF (personal income tax) is the tax you pay on your profit as a freelancer in Spain: what you earn after deducting expenses. During the year it's prepaid in one of two ways: through the retención your Spanish clients apply, or through the modelo 130.
IRPF is the tax you pay on your profit as a freelancer: what you earn after subtracting your business expenses. You don't pay it all at once in the annual tax return — it's prepaid throughout the year, which is why it feels more complicated than it is.
There are two ways to prepay it, and which one applies depends on who you invoice. The good news: they don't overlap, so your case is almost always just one of the two.
If you invoice Spanish companies or freelancers, they apply a retención de IRPF directly on the invoice (15%, or 7% if you're newly registered) and pay it to the tax office for you. You don't need to set that money aside — it's already taken out of your invoice.
If you invoice foreign clients or Spanish clients without retención, nobody prepays your IRPF, so you do it yourself with the modelo 130: a quarterly payment of 20% of your accumulated net profit.
Either way, everything is settled in the annual income tax return: if you prepaid too much, you get a refund; if too little, you top it up. What you prepay during the year isn't an extra tax — it's the same IRPF paid in instalments.
IRPF feels scary because it seems like every client works differently. Really, you only need to know one thing per invoice: does this client apply retención or not? From there the calculation is always the same. Cece tags it for you on each invoice so you don't have to remember.
It depends on your annual profit and your tax bracket, like any taxpayer. During the year you prepay part of it: if your Spanish clients apply retención it's usually 15% (or 7% if you're newly registered); if there's no retención and you're required to file the modelo 130, you prepay 20% of your accumulated net profit. The final adjustment happens in the annual tax return.
No. IRPF is a tax on your profit (what you earn). IVA is a tax you charge your client and then pay to the tax office: it passes through your account but is never yours. They're two separate things worth setting aside separately.
Cece takes care of what weighs on your day-to-day (projects, payments, proposals, tax calculations) and surfaces the numbers that matter, so they stop weighing on you and you can get back to what counts.
