Yesterday, Wednesday 3 April, the window for filing online personal income tax returns for 2023 opened. The campaign will run until 1 July and 23,281,000 returns are expected to be filed, 1.2% more than last year. Of these, almost 63% – 14.6 million, 3% less – are expected to be entitled to a refund, for an estimated amount of €11.65 billion.
On the other hand, the Treasury estimates that more than seven million tax returns (10% more) will have to pay in some €18.9 billion, with which it expects a positive balance of €7.25 billion, €2.2 billion more than in last year’s income tax campaign.
In general, only people who have made less than €22,000 per year in earned income, and from a single payer, are exempt from filing a tax return.
Yesterday, coinciding with the start of the tax declaration period, the Juan de Mariana Institute stated that Spain is the second country in the European Union in which the tax burden has increased the most in the period 2019-2023, only behind Cyprus.
This has not prevented the country from increasing its indebtedness last year by more than €70 billion (to more than €1.5 trillion) and still closing the 2023 financial year with a fiscal deficit of 3.6%, something that led yesterday the Governor of the Bank of Spain, Hernandez de Cos, to insist that Spain needs to embark on a path of “fiscal consolidation”.
