Xabia Tributa: Why Paying Property Taxes in Javea Works Differently

Own a home in Javea and wondering why your tax letters look nothing like the ones your friends in Moraira or Denia receive? Short answer: Javea collects its own property taxes. Your IBI, the plusvalia when you sell, the new waste charge, all of it is billed by the town hall's own collection service, Xàbia Tributa, and not by SUMA, the provincial agency almost every other Costa Blanca town uses.

I am Daniel Bertomeu, the tax adviser at our family firm. My father, Juan Antonio Bertomeu Valles, is the lawyer, ICALI 4643. Our offices are in Moraira and Denia, 15 to 25 minutes from Javea, and we work across Javea every week, well over 100 completed purchases here over the years. The SUMA confusion comes up constantly with foreign owners, so let me explain it properly.

One naming note first. Xàbia is the town's Valencian name and Javea the Castilian one. Same place. The collection service uses the Valencian spelling, so Xàbia Tributa it is.

SUMA everywhere else, Xàbia Tributa here

Across Alicante province, the normal arrangement is that a town hall hands its tax collection to SUMA, the provincial agency. Denia does it. Calpe, Benissa and Teulada do it. So if you have owned property elsewhere on this coast, SUMA is probably the name printed on every local tax bill you have ever paid.

Javea took a different road. It is one of the very few municipalities in the whole province, alongside Alicante city and Elche, that self-manages collection. The service is called Xàbia Tributa. It runs a website at xabiagt.com, with an English version and online payment, and it has a physical office at Calle Major 15.

In practice this means two things. First, your Javea bills will never appear in a SUMA account, so if you set one up for a previous property in Denia and assume it covers you here, it does not. Second, when something goes wrong, a duplicate bill or a surcharge that should not be there, you deal with an office in Javea itself rather than a provincial body. In my experience that is usually faster, but you do need to know the office exists.

What Xàbia Tributa actually bills you

The core annual bill is IBI, the council property tax, calculated on your cadastral value. The 2023 rate for urban property was 0.85 percent, and in 2025 the council announced a small cut, with a figure of around 0.83 percent mentioned, partly to soften the arrival of the new waste tax. These figures move, so treat them as orientation and check the current ordinance, or have us confirm it as part of our tax advice in Javea.

Then there is the waste charge. Since August 2025 Javea bills a separate residuos tax, required by national law, and it lands as its own line rather than being buried inside IBI. Plenty of owners saw it for the first time in 2025 and assumed it was a mistake. It is not.

And when you sell, the municipal plusvalia, the tax on the increase in land value, is declared and paid through Xàbia Tributa too. The town's ceiling rate has stood at 30 percent, again something to confirm against the ordinance in force when you actually sell. If a sale is on your horizon, our page on selling property in Javea walks through the full cost picture.

Direct debits, and how bills get missed

The classic non-resident failure mode is simple: the bill goes to the property, you are in Manchester or Dusseldorf, the payment window closes, and a surcharge appears. With SUMA towns and with Javea alike, the fix is the same. Set up a direct debit from a Spanish bank account once, then let it run.

With Xàbia Tributa you arrange that domiciliación through their portal or at the Calle Major office. Do it in your first year of ownership, honestly, do it the week after completion. We set this up for buyers as part of the post-completion work in a Javea purchase, because it is the small task everyone forgets.

The tax Xàbia Tributa never touches

Now, the big one. None of the above covers your national non-resident income tax, the Modelo 210. That is a state tax filed with the Agencia Tributaria, not with any town hall, and no local office will ever remind you it exists. Every non-resident owner in Javea owes it annually, even with the property empty, at 19 percent for EU residents and 24 percent for non-EU residents, which since Brexit includes the British.

So a Javea owner really runs two parallel tax lives: the local one through Xàbia Tributa, and the national one through the 210. Full detail on the second is in our guide to the Modelo 210 in Javea. If your situation is the simple one, a single owner or couple with one property and no rental income, our firm's online tier at Easy210Spain handles the filing at a fixed price. If you rent out, own with several people, or have back years to fix, that is a job for a person, and you can reach us through the contact form. We reply within 24 hours.

One last thing. If you are buying in Javea from a non-resident seller, remember the 3 percent retention on the price, filed to the state on Modelo 211, sits alongside the local apportionments of IBI and plusvalia at completion. Local and national, again, side by side. Once you know which desk handles which tax, Javea is no harder than anywhere else. You just need to know the desk is a different one.