Every home rented to a new tenant in Spain needs an energy performance certificate, and the rating has to show up in the advert before anyone visits. It is a landlord obligation, not a tenant one, but it is worth understanding as a renter because the label tells you roughly what winter heating will cost and the paperwork protects you if the flat turns out to be a fridge.
It is a short technical report that scores a home from A down to G on how much energy it uses and how much it emits over a year. A qualified technician visits, measures the envelope, the windows, the heating and hot water systems, then registers the result. You end up with two things: the full report and the coloured label you will recognise from any European fridge or washing machine.
The legal basis is Real Decreto 390/2021, which took over from the earlier 2007 and 2013 rules. It obliges a certificate whenever an existing building or part of one is sold or rented to a new tenant. Putting a home on the market without one, or without showing the label, is itself a violation, so an advert with no rating is a small red flag about how the rest has been handled.
If you are moving into a place, the landlord should have a valid certificate for you. You do not need a fresh one every year. The report is valid for ten years under normal circumstances, or five if the home sits at the worst rating, G. So if the current one is still in force, the owner can use it again for a renewal with the same person, and there is no reason to ask for a new inspection.
A change of tenant, though, is a new rental to a new arrendatario, and the certificate should be there for that. If the owner let the last one lapse and the label is ten years old, expect the process to restart before you sign.
The price is not regulated, so it depends on the technician, the size of the home and the region. For an ordinary flat you are usually looking at somewhere between about 50 and 160 euros, with larger homes and busier areas pushing toward 200 or more. The owner pays. Administration fees for registering it add a little on top, and those vary by autonomous community.
Validity runs from the registration date, not from the date of the visit, which trips people up when a report sits in a drawer for a year before anyone lists the property.
In Catalonia the certificate has to be registered with ICAEN, the Catalan energy institute, to be valid, and the Generalitat is direct about what a landlord has to do: hand the tenant a copy of the report and the label, and keep the energy rating visible in the advert. Renting out in Alella or Cabrils follows the same route as renting in Barcelona. If you are shown a certificate with no registration, treat it as a draft rather than the finished article.
Two documents: the certification report itself and the label. Ideally before the contract is signed, and certainly with the contract. If you are handed a one-line printout with just a letter and a colour and nothing behind it, ask for the full report. It is what shows the assumptions about insulation and systems, and those are the things you will actually feel in February.
Penalties fall on the owner, not the tenant. They run from 300 to 600 euros for a minor breach, such as advertising a rental without the rating, up to 1,001 to 6,000 euros for the serious end, which covers falsifying data or publicising a rating with no valid registered certificate behind it. As a renter you are not the target, but the rule gives you leverage: a landlord who skipped the certificate is one who may skip other paperwork too.
A letter on a piece of paper does not warm a room. What it does is shift a real monthly cost before you commit to it. A G-rated flat with electric heating can swallow far more in winter bills than an E, and that difference lands on you every month the heating is on. So use the label the way you would use a mileage figure on a used car. Not the whole story, but a decent warning about what you are buying into.