Buying a Spanish rental contract online: what to check before you pay

First: what the international platforms get right

• A genuinely Spain-specific product. LawDepot sells a “Contrato de Alquiler de Vivienda” with “validez legal en toda España”, built on the LAU and the Código Civil. The wizard asks for the purpose of use first (residential, temporary or room rental) and explicitly excludes tourist lets — exactly the distinction drawn by art. 2 and 3.2 LAU, and more than many free templates manage.
• At some providers: demonstrable currency. Wonder.Legal shows a reference date per document (24 May 2026 on our visit) and cites the legislation in force correctly, down to RD 390/2021 for the energy certificate.
• Single documents can be affordable. If all you want is a basic document, Wonder.Legal lets you pay per document (€1.98–60) with no subscription required.

In short: if you read Spanish fluently and your situation is standard, these platforms can give you a usable document. The four checks below decide whether that also holds for your situation.

Check 1: are you paying once, or starting a trial that rolls on?

The most common online grief has nothing to do with tenancy law. LawDepot's Spanish pricing page is open about it: “Prueba gratuita por 7 días … Después de una semana, se renueva a 29 € por mes.” Seven days free, then €29 per month renewing automatically — alongside an annual licence of €72 that also auto-renews.

On Trustpilot, LawDepot scores a respectable 4.0 (“Great”, close to 8,000 reviews — the large majority satisfied). But across the 564 one-star reviews (around 7%) one pattern keeps returning: forgetting to cancel the trial and being charged month after month — $49.99 per month in the US. One reviewer wrote on 22 July 2026: “they’ve locked me into a monthly subscription I’ll never use. Very misleading.” The company's reply confirms the mechanism: you can cancel “at any time before renewal”. The subscription is not a bug but the business model — and cancelling on time is your job. Rocket Lawyer (7 days free, then €39.90/month) and Wonder.Legal (optionally: 7 days free, then €39.95/month) run the same model.

So check before you enter card details: are you buying a price or starting a trial? If you do want to use a trial week, put the cancellation date in your calendar straight away. We have an easy story here: our packages (€29.95–149) are one-off — there is nothing to cancel.

Check 2: is “up to date” a single date, or a source and reference date per clause?

Almost every legal site shows a recent update date. That only tells you something was updated — not that the rule you are relying on is correct. LawDepot shows a site-wide “Última actualización: 18 de junio de 2026” and advertises alignment with the 2023 Ley de Vivienda, yet the same pages still describe laws that have been in force for years in the future tense (“se producirán cambios”; the 2025 rent indexation “estará limitado” under the new IRAV), and the residential page cites RD 235/2013 for the energy certificate — a decree that was repealed and replaced by RD 390/2021. Tellingly, their own commercial-premises page cites the new decree correctly.

That does not mean no maintenance ever happens. It does mean: one site-wide date is not evidence. Ask any provider: does every claim carry its own source and reference date, and do I, as a buyer, get notified and receive a revision when the law changes? Wonder.Legal has part of this in place (a reference date per document); we record it per clause, with twelve months of revisions.

Check 3: does it handle your region's deposit, or is it one sentence?

The deposit is the most regional piece of Spanish tenancy law: one month for residential lets, two months for seasonal lets (art. 36.1 LAU), and each autonomous region has its own lodging office, deadline and fining regime. The LawDepot wizard keeps it at a generic “una mensualidad”, and the FAQ points to “el organismo competente de su Comunidad Autónoma” with a short list of exceptions — no office named, no deadline, no amount per region. That research stays on your plate.

One observation from our test session we report with care, because we had not entered an address or region: even after choosing “temporal o esporádica”, the deposit stayed at one month, where art. 36.1 LAU prescribes two months for that use. The takeaway: check for yourself whether the deposit amount follows the regime you select — with any generator. Wonder.Legal states the national rule (one month, plus a maximum of two months' additional guarantee) correctly, but there too you look up your region's office and deadline yourself. How that works per region is in our deposit guide.

Check 4: can you read what you are signing?

Here is the part that catches English-speaking buyers in particular. When we searched for “spanish rental contract template” on 2 August 2026, the first ad we saw was LawDepot's — with an English headline. Click through, and the entire product is Spanish-only: every wizard question, every explanation, every clause, and the document itself. The ad is in English; the product is not. There is no translation and no bilingual guidance anywhere in the flow.

To be clear: the contract that gets signed should be in Spanish — only that text binds the parties. The problem is not the Spanish contract; it is signing one without a single line of explanation in a language you read. In a dispute, “I didn't know what it said” is no argument. So demand a clause-by-clause explanation in your own language — from a lawyer, a bilingual friend, or a product that delivers the Spanish contract with a full English companion document as standard, as ours does.

The comparison, with no thumb on the scales