Spain’s Supreme Court has allowed a parent in a shared-custody case to claim the descendants’ minimum alongside tax relief for court-ordered child support. The benefits must be coordinated by periods of cohabitation and absence.
The dispute began with taxpayers who shared custody of their children in alternating weeks but were also ordered by a court to pay maintenance. Spain’s Supreme Court has confirmed that, in such cases, a parent may apply the descendants’ minimum and the special tax treatment for maintenance payments in the same tax year.
The two benefits must be applied successively, according to periods when the children live with the parent and periods when they do not. They cannot overlap.
The court says this approach avoids taxing income used for maintenance at higher marginal rates under the progressive scale. It also preserves an increased technical reduction of €1,980 in the calculation of the personal and family minimum. The ruling concerns tax treatment rather than the wider family-support measures covered in an earlier benefits report.
The Supreme Court dismissed the State Attorney’s appeal in three judgments dated 1 October and 6 October 2026. The cases concerned IRPF assessments for 2020 and 2021. The taxpayers had declared 50% of the descendants’ minimum alongside the special regime for maintenance payments; the tax administration rejected that treatment, as did the regional tax tribunal in all three cases.
The High Court of Justice of the Valencian Community had ruled for the taxpayers, finding that the IRPF legislation did not expressly make the two benefits incompatible in shared-custody cases. The State Attorney then appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that Articles 64 and 75 of the IRPF law had been breached. The Supreme Court’s interpretation draws on Articles 58, 61.1, 64 and 75 of Law 35/2006, as amended by Law 26/2014.
The panel also relied on constitutional provisions on equality and family protection, as well as the fair distribution of tax burdens. Its reasoning refers to the Constitutional Court’s judgment 19/2012, which held that family protection does not require continuous physical cohabitation when there is a legal duty to provide financial support. The judges also considered Civil Code provisions on shared custody and earlier Supreme Court rulings that support shared parenting as a normal and desirable arrangement.
The judgments were delivered by magistrates Córdoba Castroverde and Gandarillas Martos. A dissent by Fernández-Lomana García and Toledano Cantero argues for strict incompatibility, citing the 2014 reform and Parliament’s rejection of amendments that would have introduced a right to choose between the benefits.
