An agent showed me a ground-floor local in Chamberí and told me the change of use was straightforward. He had done two of them and he was not lying. He was quoting a rule from the year he did them.
The question underneath every one of these conversations is the same. Can this flat, or this local, legally become tourist accommodation. Madrid has answered it six times in eight years, and each answer was correct on the day somebody relied on it.
The six answers
January 2018. A criterion agreed by the PGOUM's monitoring commission held that a tourist flat which did not occupy a whole building needed no street door of its own.1 People bought on that basis, and it is the most permissive the rule has ever been.
March 2019. The Plan Especial de Hospedaje reversed it and drew three concentric rings around the centre, each ring with its own conditions.2
2023. The plan's contents were carried into the Normas Urbanísticas of the PGOU, which is the version most people have actually read, and the version most summaries online still describe.
April 2024. The city suspended licences and declaraciones responsables for this use altogether. For nearly a year and a half the answer was no, provisionally, whatever your building looked like.3
September 2025. Plan RESIDE replaced the three rings with two zones and lifted the suspension. Inside the historic centre, the APE 00.01, tourist accommodation scattered through residential buildings is finished. Outside it the use survives, but every local must now have its own access from the street without passing through the building's common areas, ground floor included.4
January 2026. The Tribunal Superior de Justicia de Madrid annulled seven fines of 30.001 euros in a run of rulings from one section. The city had treated a missing independent access as an incompatible use, which is the grave infraction in article 204.3.b). The court held that the two are different things: no independent access stops the activity being authorised, it does not make the use incompatible.5
Note what that sixth one is and is not. The courts moved on how the city was punishing people. Nothing moved on whether the use is allowed.
What is true this month
"The centre is closed" is roughly right and expensively imprecise. Inside the APE 00.01 there are still ways in, and they are narrow enough to be worth stating.
Tourist use can go into an exclusive building. Where that building is already residential and catalogued at protection level 3, it is allowed as a vivienda de uso turístico, conditional on restoration works, and the authorisation expires after fifteen years. The building then returns to housing, and the alternative uses its zonal norm would otherwise allow no longer apply to it. Protection levels 1 and 2 need a plan especial de protección of their own. Vacant plots and uncatalogued buildings at use levels A and B are out. Use level E is out entirely.6
Outside the centre the zonal norms decide, and several of those were narrowed in the same move. Under zonal norms 4 and 5 the use dropped from any position in the building to basement, ground and first floor only. On the designated commercial streets a ground-floor local can now be turned into neither housing nor lodging.7
That is the answer on 8 September 2026, and it is the sixth one.
The direction is the point
Five of the six changes made this harder. The one that did not was a court telling the city it had used the wrong article to fine people. If you are holding a building on the strength of a change of use you have not yet applied for, that is the thing to price. Not the risk that the rule moves, but the fact that it has only ever moved one way.
Which means waiting carries a cost that appears nowhere in the model. The local you were going to convert next year converts under next year's rule.
What I would do instead of learning this
Nobody running buildings can hold six versions of a planning rule in their head, and I would not try. Two habits do the work.
Put a date on every planning fact you are relying on. Not the date you were told it, the date the rule was published. A fact about Madrid with no date attached is a rumour, and most acquisition files I open are full of them.
Then re-read it at the moment money moves. Before an offer, before a refurbishment, before signing a management contract on a building whose use you have not checked yourself. The seven people whose fines were thrown out in January had done nothing wrong except stop checking.
Everyone should have a radar on their own field
I do not think this is a Madrid problem, or a tourist-flat problem. Anyone whose business sits under rules that move has the same gap. The rule changes in a bulletin nobody reads, and you find out from the fine.
What I want, and what I am building, is a radar. Something that watches the sources for one field, notices what moved, and says which of your buildings it touches. Not a newsletter. A watch on the specific rules your assets sit under, with the date attached.
It is being built now and it is not finished. If you would find one useful for your own field, write to me and I will tell you when it is.
I am not a lawyer and this is not advice. The dates and articles here come from the published text and from two legal notes on it rather than from a summary, which I would recommend to anyone before they move anything.
Notes
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Acuerdo of 23 January 2018 of the Comisión de Seguimiento del PGOUM, relied on by the TSJM in the 2026 rulings below: owners had acted on the city's own published interpretation, which changed only in March 2019. ↩
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Plan Especial de regulación del uso de servicios terciarios en la clase de hospedaje, approved 27 March 2019, covering Centro, Arganzuela, Retiro, Salamanca, Chamartín, Tetuán, Chamberí, Moncloa-Aravaca, Latina, Carabanchel and Usera. ↩
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The suspension of licences and declaraciones responsables ran from 25 April 2024 until Plan RESIDE entered into force. Pérez-Llorca, nota jurídica of 6 October 2025. ↩
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Plan RESIDE, definitively approved by the Consejo de Gobierno of the Comunidad de Madrid on 27 August 2025 (expediente 135-2024-00206) and published in full in the BOCM of 22 September 2025, from which date it takes effect. BOCM núm. 226, 22 September 2025. The independent access requirement is the new article 7.1.4.4 of the PGOUM: where the regime of compatible uses allows destinations other than residential, each local must have independent access from the exterior without recourse to the common areas of the building. ↩
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Seven sentencias of the Sección Segunda of the Sala de lo Contencioso-Administrativo of the TSJM, January and February 2026, the lead one of 26 January 2026. The article is 204.3.b) of the Ley del Suelo, "implantación y desarrollo de usos incompatibles con la ordenación urbanística"; the court held that applying it here was analogía in malam partem, prohibited by article 25.1 of the Constitution. Analysis by Juan Ramón Méndez, who argued them. Two of them are STSJ M 77/2026 (rec. 1430/2024, 26 January) and STSJ M 86/2026 (rec. 1782/2024, 28 January). ↩
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New article 7.6.3 bis of the PGOUM, which sets out how terciario hospedaje may be established on parcels with a residential qualified use inside the APE 00.01. The fifteen-year limit, the return to collective housing and the loss of the zonal norm's alternative uses afterwards are all in it. Cuatrecasas, legal flash of September 2025. ↩
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Same source. Norma Zonal 3 loses the complementary use on upper floors at use levels B and C; Normas Zonales 4 and 5 move it from any situation to planta inferior a la baja, baja y primera; and on the ejes terciarios, ground-floor and basement locals in non-residential use may be converted to neither residential use nor hospedaje. ↩