Every week someone in a Facebook expat group asks what a renovation costs here, and every week the answers range from fantasy to horror story. Both extremes are usually true for that one person and useless for everyone else. After coordinating more than fifty building and renovation projects on the Costa Blanca North, here is what I can tell you with a straight face.
What does a renovation cost per square metre?
Forget single numbers. Costs depend on the state of the house, access to the plot, the finish level you choose and, honestly, on which year you ask. Materials and labour have risen noticeably since 2021. What I can give you are the ranges I see on real invoices, on real projects, in Moraira, Jávea, Benissa and the surrounding towns.
| Renovation tier | What it includes | Cost per m2 (EUR) | Typical duration on site |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cosmetic refresh | Paint, flooring, doors, lighting, one bathroom or kitchen update | 350 - 700 | 1 - 3 months |
| Full renovation | New kitchen and bathrooms, complete electrics and plumbing, windows, climate, no structural change | 800 - 1,500 | 4 - 8 months |
| Structural renovation | Walls moved, extensions, new roof, pool works, terraces, full redesign | 1,500 - 2,500+ | 8 - 18 months |
Source: my own project records from coordinated renovations on the Costa Blanca North, 2022 to 2026; figures exclude IVA, licence taxes and professional fees. Verify current prices before budgeting.
Three things the table does not show. First, small projects cost more per square metre than large ones, because a builder's fixed costs land on fewer metres. Second, houses built before roughly 1985 almost always reveal surprises behind the walls, so I plan a contingency of 10 to 15 percent, closer to 20 on very old villas. Third, on top of construction costs come IVA (10 percent reduced rate applies to many residential renovations, 21 percent otherwise), the municipal construction tax ICIO of roughly 2 to 4 percent of the declared budget, licence fees, and professional fees for architect and aparejador, typically another 6 to 10 percent of build cost on larger projects.
Which permit do I need: obra menor or obra mayor?
Spain divides building work into two categories, and the line between them decides your paperwork, your taxes and your timeline.
- Obra menor covers work that does not touch structure, volume, facade openings or the use of the building. Think new bathrooms, kitchens, flooring, painting, replacing windows like for like. In many municipalities this now runs through a declaración responsable: you file the paperwork, pay the fee, and can often start within days or weeks.
- Obra mayor covers everything else: removing or moving load-bearing walls, extensions, new roofs, new pools, changing the footprint or height. This requires a full project signed by an architect, approved by the town hall as a licencia municipal de obras, before a single wall comes down.
The classification is not yours to choose. The town hall's technical department decides, based on the project. A surprising amount of grief on this coast comes from work sold to owners as "just obra menor" that clearly was not.
Why do permits take so long in coastal towns?
An obra mayor licence in Teulada-Moraira, Jávea or Benissa realistically takes 4 to 12 months from submission to approval. Inland municipalities are often faster. Owners find this absurd until they understand why.
Coastal town halls process an enormous volume of applications with small technical departments. Every project near the sea can trigger reports under the coastal law, the Ley de Costas. Many urbanisations sit on decades-old partial plans with quirks that must be checked file by file. And each round of questions from the town hall, called a requerimiento, restarts part of the clock.
My practical advice: treat the licence period as part of the project, not as dead time. Use it to finalise material choices, tender the work to two or three builders, and lock the contract. Owners who do this start building the week the licence arrives. Owners who do not lose another two months afterwards.
What do the architect and the aparejador actually do?
Northern Europeans often know only one professional on a building site. Spain uses two, and both matter.
- The arquitecto designs the project, signs it, and carries legal responsibility for the design. For obra mayor, nothing happens without this signature.
- The aparejador, formally the arquitecto técnico, is the site supervisor. He or she directs execution, checks quality, certifies each completed stage, and signs the final certificate, the certificado final de obra, without which you cannot register the work or update the property description.
The aparejador is your single most valuable ally as a foreign owner. Their stage certifications are what your payments should hang on. A good one costs a small percentage of the build and saves you multiples of that.
How should I structure the payments?
This is where projects are won or lost. The principle is simple: money follows completed, certified work. Never the other way around.
- Upfront payment of 10 to 15 percent maximum, essentially to reserve the builder's calendar and order long-lead materials.
- Stage payments tied to defined milestones: demolition complete, structure complete, installations roughed in, and so on. Each released only after the aparejador certifies the stage.
- A retention of 5 to 10 percent held until after final delivery and the snag list is cleared, ideally released 30 to 60 days later.
A serious Spanish builder will accept this without drama, because it is how professional projects work here. A builder who insists on 40 or 50 percent upfront is telling you something about his cash flow, and you should listen.
What are the classic traps?
After fifty projects, the failures follow a pattern. Almost all of them are one of these:
- Starting without the licence. Neighbours report works, inspectors visit, and a stop order plus fine follows. Worse, unlicensed work haunts you at resale, when the buyer's lawyer finds it in five minutes.
- Paying too far ahead of the work. The single most common disaster. Once your money leads the work by two stages, you have no leverage and the builder has three other clients.
- No written contract with a fixed scope. "We agreed it verbally" is how every budget doubles. Scope, price, milestones, penalties for delay: on paper, in a language you fully understand.
- Skipping the aparejador to save money. Then nobody independent certifies anything, and you are relying on the builder to grade his own homework.
- Believing the first timeline. Add the licence months, add the contingency, and plan your first summer in the house one season later than the optimistic version. If it finishes early, wonderful.
So what does a realistic full picture look like?
For a full, non-structural renovation of a 200 m2 villa: roughly 160,000 to 300,000 EUR of construction cost, one to three months of permits, four to eight months on site, and a total calendar of about a year from decision to finished house.
For a structural renovation of the same villa: often 350,000 to 500,000 EUR or more all in, four to twelve months of licence process, eight to eighteen months of building, so realistically 18 to 30 months door to door.
Neither number is meant to frighten you. Renovated well, an older villa in a first-class location on this coast is often the smartest money you can spend here. But it rewards the owner who respects the process: honest budget, correct permit, independent supervision, and payments that never run ahead of the work.
