The deposit is “mandatory” and required by law, it must be in cash and the owner must deposit it in the corresponding institution (the Incasòl in Catalonia) within two months from the formalization of the contract. The measure is not trivial: the returns generated by these funds serve the Government as a source of income to pay for its housing policies.
Article 23 of the Urban Leasing Law (LAU) dictates that the deposit will be “equivalent to one month's rent in the rental of housing and two in the rental for use other than housing.”
It is only legal to require two months of deposit, therefore, in those rentals of offices or industrial warehouses, to give just a few examples, or in those rentals of properties held on a seasonal basis (temporary rental).
In addition to the cash deposit, the rental law continues, the owner can request “any type of guarantee” for compliance with the obligations, which is optional. Although many others could serve as guarantee - a bank guarantee, for example - the law sets a maximum amount of cash in the case of renting a home: two monthly rent payments.
In total, then, adding the deposit and this additional guarantee, a landlord could ask for up to three monthly payments from the tenant to guarantee compliance with the rental obligations in a five-year rental (or seven, if the owner is a legal entity).
In reality, the Law has been like this since 1994. It was in 2018 that a limit of two months was established for the deposit of the additional guarantee, which was previously unlimited. At the beginning, the country's real estate agencies generally asked for the mandatory monthly deposit and, only sometimes, a guarantor.
In recent years, agencies have already begun to ask tenants for two monthly payments, one as a deposit and the other as an additional guarantee, in order to pass on to them the real estate commissions, which often corresponded to one more monthly payment or a similar amount.
But it is until very recently that real estate agencies take full advantage of the legal text. With the implementation of the Housing Law, many companies ask for a total of three monthly payments, with the intention of compensating for the fact that the owner is now obliged to pay the costs of formalizing the contract and fees, something that previously almost always fell about the tenants.
