Buying or opening a restaurant in Spain: costs, payback and licences

An existing restaurant in Spain sells via traspaso for about €89,000 on average: half of 80 listings in 2026 ranged from €50,000 to €130,000, around €84,000 in Valencia and €140,000 in Barcelona.

With the premises on the coast, prices start at about €300,000; opening a mid-sized restaurant from scratch costs €150,000–250,000. Payback is 3–4 years.

Looking at a restaurant for sale in Spain?

Below: what it costs as a traspaso and together with its premises, what opening from scratch costs, which permits a kitchen needs in different regions, what is different about a beach restaurant, what a restaurant earns with staff paid under the collective agreement, how it is taxed and what to check before buying.

The page includes a payback calculator with an illustrative restaurant. If you are after a bar without a full kitchen, see Buying or opening a café or bar in Spain.

What an existing restaurant costs

We reviewed 80 traspaso listings for restaurants and bar-restaurants with kitchens (Wallapop, which also carries idealista listings, and thinkSPAIN, October 2026).

The median is €89,000, the average about €120,000, and half the properties fall between €50,000 and €130,000. These are asking prices: they come down in a deal.

A typical restaurant in the sample is about 130 m² at a rent of about €10 per m² a month. A traspaso costs on average 56 months’ rent, or about €735 per m².

There are few Madrid listings, but rents there are clearly higher: restaurant premises without a traspaso let for €4,600 a month on average, and up to €9,800 in the centre.

Examples from the sample: a 155 m² pizzeria-restaurant with extraction in Valencia’s Ruzafa district — €125,000 with rent of €1,500; an 85 m² restaurant with a professional kitchen and roof extraction in Valencia’s Campanar — €38,000 with rent of €1,540; a 300 m² restaurant with a terrace on Playa de San Juan in Alicante — €130,000 with rent of €1,095 and a lease to 2040; a 320 m² C3 bar-restaurant in Barcelona’s old town — €400,000; a 190 m² restaurant in Madrid’s Recoletos — €450,000 with rent of €9,000.

Restaurants with premises and on the beach

When a restaurant is sold with its premises (a sale, not a traspaso), prices are of a different order.

In 12 such listings, mostly on the Costa del Sol, they range from €295,000 for a 148 m² restaurant in central Nerja to €5.5m for a beach restaurant in La Cala de Mijas; the median is about €770,000.

Housing is often included: a restaurant in Mijas with an apartment — €525,000, a restaurant in Alcaucín with a house and two apartments — €649,000.

Such a purchase is both a business and commercial property.

You can let the restaurant to a tenant if running it yourself does not work out, but payback is measured differently too: income is compared with the rental yield on the premises, not with a traspaso price.

A restaurant on the sand itself, a chiringuito, is a special case: the land beneath it belongs to the state.

Seasonal beach venues operate under an authorisation that the town hall obtains for up to 4 years, and the structures are dismantled after each season (art. 113 RD 876/2014); if the enclosed area exceeds 20 m², a concession is required (art. 69.3).

The buyer gets not ownership but the right to trade until the authorisation or concession expires — and that term matters more than the price.

In one listing for a chiringuito in Marbella at €4.77m, the building is sold freehold while the beach concession is held separately, with 15 years left to run.

What a restaurant traspaso sells

Legally, a traspaso is the assignment of the premises lease, usually together with the kitchen, furniture and equipment.

The seller’s company and the premises are not included, and the licence moves through a change of holder at the town hall. For a restaurant, the key item in the deal is a permitted kitchen:

• Extraction. A kitchen must extract through its own duct taken up to the roof of the building (CTE DB-HS 3), and a duct on the façade passes through common property — usually the owners’ association has to agree. Installing extraction costs €2,000–8,000, but if the neighbours say no, no amount of money will get it. 34 of the 80 listings mention extraction explicitly.
• A restaurant licence, not a bar licence. A bar without a kitchen cannot fry or cook hot food. In Barcelona, listings still use the old classes: C1 — bar, C2 — bar-restaurant, C3 — restaurant with kitchen and extraction; C3 appears in 12 of the 31 Catalan listings in the sample.
• Staff. The cooks and waiters transfer to the buyer with all their rights — more on this in the checklist below.

What it costs to open a restaurant from scratch

According to industry suppliers, a set-menu or tapas restaurant costs €60,000–150,000, a mid-sized restaurant with its own kitchen €150,000–250,000, and a premium concept from €250,000. The main items:

• Refit — €800–1,500 per m². For a 150 m² restaurant that is €120,000–225,000 for the works alone.
• Kitchen — €20,000–40,000: cooking lines, oven, grill, fryer, cold rooms, dishwasher. Second-hand costs roughly half.
• Extraction to the roof — €2,000–8,000, if it is permitted.
• Design and licences — €3,000–6,000, dining-room furniture €5,000–20,000, opening stock and launch €5,000–20,000.
• Reserve — six months of fixed costs: a restaurant does not reach its revenue straight away. How to size it is covered in Cash gap.

Hence the main argument for a traspaso: the median €89,000 is less than the refit of restaurant premises alone, and the kitchen and extraction are already in place.

The argument against: failing locations are sold by traspaso too, so find out why the restaurant is for sale.

Which permits a restaurant needs

Spain’s retail liberalisation law (Ley 12/2012), which replaces licences with a declaration for shops up to 750 m², does not apply to restaurants: hospitality is not in its annex.

Opening a restaurant is governed by regional public-establishment laws and municipal ordinances; a kitchen adds requirements for extraction, fire safety and noise.

• Valencian Community. You open on a declaration with a technician’s project, a completion certificate and insurance; the town hall must inspect within a month, otherwise you may open after notifying it in writing (Ley 14/2010, art. 9). Venues for more than 500 people need an authorisation (art. 10).
• Catalonia. Restaurants and bar-restaurants for up to 150 people open on prior notification (comunicació prèvia); larger ones need a municipal licence. In Barcelona’s old town (Ciutat Vella), a land-use plan restricts new hospitality venues — there, an existing restaurant licence is an asset in itself.
• Madrid. Since 2022 the OLDRUAM ordinance applies: the main regime is a declaration, with a licence only where there are risks to safety, health, the environment or heritage.
• Andalusia. A permanent hospitality venue opens on a declaration to the town hall, which in itself allows trading to start (Decreto 155/2018, arts. 7 and 9); closing time is 02:00 (art. 17.1).

The food-safety register for a restaurant is kept by the region, and the restaurant itself must train staff in hygiene — the mandatory “food handler’s card” no longer exists.

A terrace needs a separate, time-limited municipal permit and a separate fee per m².

What a restaurant earns

Spain has about 84,000 restaurants and cafeterias, up 3.2% in a year.

Hospitality as a whole sells €116bn a year — about €435,000 per venue on average — but sector profitability fell in 2025.

Industry benchmarks for a restaurant: food 28–35% of revenue, staff 30–40%, operating margin 8–12%.

The main difference from a bar is staffing: a restaurant cannot run on a single working owner.

Under the Alicante province collective agreement, two-fork restaurants fall into group B: in 2026 a head chef earns €1,644.83 a month, a cook or waiter €1,388.30 and a kitchen assistant €1,308.03, 14 times a year plus an October payment of €1,235.82.

A cook earns €20,672 a year gross.

Employer contributions in 2026 add about 32%, so six positions — head chef, cook, kitchen assistant and three waiters — cost the restaurant about €167,000 a year, almost €14,000 a month.

Restaurant payback calculator

The calculator holds an illustrative two-fork restaurant with 60–80 covers: a €120,000 traspaso (a restaurant with this revenue costs more than the median) plus €30,000 to refresh the kitchen and dining room.

Revenue is €35,000 a month excluding VAT (€420,000 a year), food and drink 32%, staff €14,000 a month (six positions; the owner manages without a salary), rent €2,000 a month, other costs (kitchen gas and power, insurance, accountant, extraction servicing, marketing, terrace) €3,500 a month.

Pre-tax profit is €51,600 a year, about €41,800 after tax, and the €150,000 investment pays back in about 3.6 years.

Two caveats. First, a restaurant is even more sensitive to revenue than a bar, because kitchen staff are an almost fixed cost.

If revenue falls by 10%, pre-tax profit drops from €51,600 to €23,040; by 15%, to €8,760. Break-even is about €28,700 of revenue a month.

Second, the model has no salary for the owner, who works as the manager; hire a manager at the top grade of the collective agreement and after-tax profit falls to about €15,800, stretching payback to 9–10 years.

How to read this figure and what to compare it with is covered in Payback period.

Take revenue from bank statements, till reports and VAT returns (modelo 303), not from the seller’s word.

For how sellers justify a price, see How to value a business for sale.

Taxes: VAT and modules

• VAT. Food and drink served in a restaurant is taxed at the reduced 10% rate (art. 91.Uno.2.2º Ley 37/1992).
• Modules. In 2026 the objective assessment regime (módulos) is open only to one- and two-fork restaurants (headings 671.5 and 671.4) with up to 10 employees; restaurants of three forks and above are excluded. For a two-fork restaurant the annual base is €17,434.55 per working owner, €3,709.88 per employee, €201.55 per kW of power and €585.77 per table. Example: owner, 6 employees, 30 kW and 15 tables — about €54,500 of base a year before depreciation and reducing coefficients. That is more than the profit of our illustrative restaurant: modules are not always cheaper than actual accounts.
• Module limit. Modules are available with previous-year revenue up to €250,000 — that is the tax agency’s position, although parliament has not ratified the decrees extending these limits. The restaurant in our example, with €420,000 of revenue, no longer qualifies.
• SL. A restaurant owned by an SL pays corporate tax: in 2026, with turnover under €1m, 19% on the first €50,000 of profit and 21% above. How to take profit out is covered in Salary or dividends from a Spanish SL.

What to check before buying a restaurant

1. The lease. A business tenant may assign the lease without the landlord’s consent, but the landlord may raise the rent by 20% and must be notified within a month (art. 32 LAU). The lease may prohibit assignment or change these terms (art. 4.3 LAU). The remaining lease term is the main asset in a traspaso.
2. The licence and the kitchen. Who holds the licence and for which activity: restaurant or bar, with or without music. Do capacity, terrace and kitchen match it? In the Valencian Community a change of holder is notified to the town hall within a month of the deal, and both parties sign the notice (Ley 14/2010, art. 12).
3. Extraction and equipment. Is the duct legal, when was it last cleaned, what state are the cold rooms and ranges in: replacing a kitchen costs €20,000–40,000.
4. The numbers. Monthly revenue for 2–3 years from bank statements, the till and VAT returns; food purchases from supplier invoices; in resort towns, winter revenue.
5. Debts and staff. The buyer of a trading business is liable for the seller’s tax debts (art. 42.1.c LGT) unless they obtain a tax-debt certificate before the deal, issued within 3 months (art. 175.2 LGT); for Social Security debts (art. 168.2 LGSS); employees transfer with all their rights, and seller and buyer are jointly liable for wage debts for 3 years (art. 44 ET). For a restaurant that means the whole kitchen and floor team — ask for a staff list with contracts, seniority and rotas.
6. VAT on the deal. Selling a whole business able to operate on its own is outside VAT (art. 7.1 Ley 37/1992); a mere assignment of rights and assets usually carries 21% VAT — structure the deal with a tax lawyer.

How an existing business is checked before you pay a deposit is described on our traspaso audit page; if you are buying the company that owns the restaurant, you need full due diligence.

If you are moving to Spain for this business

A non-resident can buy a restaurant, but a non-EU citizen can live in Spain and run it personally only with a residence permit — usually a self-employment permit, for one year at first.

The golden visa has been abolished, and the startup visa does not suit an ordinary business of this kind.

How the self-employment permit works and how it differs from an employment permit is covered by Relotus in «Cuenta propia in Spain».

The sensible order is to confirm the permit first and only then pay a deposit.

Frequently asked questions

How much does it cost to buy a restaurant in Spain?

In a sample of 80 listings from 2026, a restaurant traspaso costs €89,000 on average, with half between €50,000 and €130,000. About €84,000 in Valencia and €140,000 in Barcelona. A restaurant sold with its premises on the coast costs from €300,000 to several million. These are asking prices.

How much does it cost to open a restaurant in Spain?

A set-menu or tapas restaurant costs €60,000–150,000, a mid-sized restaurant with its own kitchen €150,000–250,000. The main items are the refit at €800–1,500 per m², a kitchen at €20,000–40,000, extraction, design and licences, plus a reserve covering six months of costs.

Can you buy a beach restaurant in Spain?

A seafront restaurant in private premises is bought like any business, or together with the premises. A chiringuito on the beach itself stands on state land: the buyer gets the right to trade under an authorisation or concession, and what matters most is how many years it has left to run.

Does a restaurant need a separate kitchen licence?

Licences are issued per activity: a restaurant with a kitchen and a bar without one are different activities. To cook hot food you need extraction through your own duct to the roof. When buying, check which activity the licence covers and whether the extraction is legal.

How much does a restaurant make in Spain?

In the illustrative example with €420,000 of revenue a year and a staff of six, the restaurant makes about €41,800 after tax if the owner manages it personally. The industry benchmark for operating margin is 8–12% of revenue.

What is the payback period for a restaurant?

In the illustrative example, about 3.6 years with the owner working as manager. A restaurant is very sensitive to revenue: if it falls by 15%, pre-tax profit shrinks almost sixfold.

Can a restaurant pay tax under the module system?

Only a one- or two-fork restaurant whose owner is an individual, with up to 10 employees and previous-year revenue up to €250,000. The base is calculated on staff, power and tables, and for a restaurant with a large team it can exceed the actual profit.

Key points about buying a restaurant in Spain

• A restaurant traspaso costs €89,000 on average, about 56 months’ rent; Barcelona and Madrid are the most expensive.
• A restaurant with premises on the coast costs from €300,000 to several million; with a beach chiringuito you buy a right under an authorisation or concession, not the land.
• Opening a mid-sized restaurant from scratch costs €150,000–250,000; the refit alone usually costs more than the median traspaso.
• The key items in the deal are a permitted kitchen with extraction and the remaining lease term.
• The kitchen and floor team transfer to the buyer and make a restaurant very sensitive to revenue; payback in the example is about 3.6 years.

Sources

• Ley 12/2012 — BOE; Ley 14/2010 of the Valencian Community — alicante.es; Decreto 155/2018 (Andalusia) — BOJA.
• General Coastal Regulation (RD 876/2014), arts. 69 and 113 — BOE.
• LAU, arts. 4 and 32 — BOE; LGT, arts. 42 and 175 — BOE; Workers’ Statute, art. 44 — BOE; Ley 37/1992 (VAT) — BOE.
• Orden HAC/1425/2025 (modules for 2026) — BOE; Orden PJC/297/2026 (contributions) — BOE.
• Alicante province hospitality collective agreement: text and establishment groups — BOPA 2023, 2026 tables — BOPA 2026.
• Hostelería de España, Anuario 2025 — otea.es; start-up cost benchmarks — qamarero, habitissimo.
• Restaurant traspaso and sale listings — Wallapop, thinkSPAIN, October 2026.