Paying Spanish Inheritance Tax without accepting the inheritance: what heirs need to know

If you’ve inherited property or assets in Spain, you’ve probably hit a confusing moment: you must file and pay Inheritance Tax within six months of the death, even if you’re not yet ready to formally accept the inheritance before a notary. Does paying the tax mean you’ve accepted the inheritance, whether you meant to or not? The short answer is no. But the fuller answer is complicated and getting it wrong can create real problems.

Heirs have six months from the date of death to file and pay Inheritance Tax, regardless of whether the estate has been divided or everyone is ready to sign. This deadline can be extended by another six months (bringing the total to twelve months), but the extension must be requested within the first five months after death. Even with the extension, twelve months is very often not enough time to complete the Spanish Inheritance Tax process, especially in estates where the heirs are in dispute, something we, as lawyers, see often when administering estates. Very often the heirs have not reached an agreement and cannot proceed to sign the necessary Deed of Inheritance before a Notary Public.

For this reason, Spanish tax rules let you file the return with a simple private declaration of assets instead of a notarised deed. This private document lists the deceased’s assets and typically includes a standard sentence along the lines of “accepts the assets forming part of the estate in the proportion corresponding to them.” That sentence is exactly where the uncertainty arises: does signing it, combined with paying the tax, turn the signer into an heir for all purposes, including under civil law? Under the Spanish Civil Code, an inheritance is “tacitly” accepted when someone carries out an act that only an heir would have the right to do, or that necessarily shows an intention to accept, such as selling an inherited asset or otherwise treating it as their own. Simply complying with a tax deadline is not obviously that kind of act, but an unqualified written statement that you “accept” the estate looks, on its face, exactly like one.

This question reached the High Court of Justice of Catalonia in the first half of 2026. Tax authorities were pursuing an heir, in enforcement proceedings, for a debt owed by the deceased. The heir argued that he had never accepted the inheritance: he had only filed the tax return, via a private declaration of assets, to meet his potential tax obligation.

The tax authority disagreed: since the private declaration contained the phrase “accepts the assets forming part of the estate in the proportion corresponding to them,” with nothing flagging it as tax-only, an acceptance had, in its view, taken place.

Applying Catalan civil law, which has its own rules on inheritance, the court sided with the taxpayer: filing the return does not, on its own, amount to implicit acceptance. Naming the heir as the person liable for the tax does not mean paying it implies acceptance, because paying is simply an administrative act, and someone who pays and later renounces can reclaim it from the true heir.

Is the Catalan ruling an outlier, or the position across Spain? The latter. The Directorate General for Taxes has repeatedly confirmed, in binding rulings that merely filing the return and requesting and paying the tax does not by itself amount to tacit acceptance of the inheritance, a position resting on consolidated Supreme Court case law that regional High Courts, tax tribunals, and the Audiencia Nacional have also followed.

But this remains a tricky area, because the case raises two separate questions that are easy to blur together:

1. Does filing the tax return, as a plain act of tax compliance, amount to accepting the inheritance?
2. Does the private declaration of assets that comes with that tax return, given that it literally states “accepts the assets forming part of the estate,” amount to an explicit acceptance made in a private document?

The answer to the first question is simple: paying the tax is just meeting a deadline, not a clear act of acceptance.

The second question is trickier. An inheritance can be validly accepted in a public deed (a document signed before a notary) or a private document (one simply signed between the parties, without a notary). An unqualified acceptance sentence in the private declaration risks being read, in a different dispute or before a different court, as a genuine, binding acceptance, regardless of its real tax-only purpose.

So, an option to avoid the risk is: don’t file the standard declaration as-is. Add a sentence making clear the assets are accepted for tax purposes only. Formal acceptance, express or implicit, can always follow later once the heirs are ready to sign the notarised deed.

This matters most when not everyone entitled to inherit is willing or able to sign the deed by the tax deadline, for example when a co-heir goes silent or the heirs haven’t agreed how to divide the assets. A tax-only qualification lets you meet the deadline without locking in an undecided civil law position.

The general rule is reassuring: filing through a private declaration of assets doesn’t, by itself, mean you’ve accepted the inheritance. It’s simply meeting a tax deadline, distinct from the civil law decision to accept or renounce to an inheritance. But it calls for careful drafting: state that the filing is for tax purposes only and ensure the declaration can’t be read as a binding acceptance. A poorly worded qualification, or a mismatch, can have consequences well beyond tax.

If you need legal support, you can contact Antonio Guillen HERE.