Territorial taxes — VAT, IGIC and IPSI

Mainland Spain and the Balearic Islands charge VAT. The Canary Islands charge IGIC. Ceuta and Melilla charge IPSI. They are three different taxes with three different rate grids, three different AEAT codes and three different administrations — and treating them as one is how a Canary Islands company ends up over-declaring its VAT.

When this applies

The applicable regime derives from the AEAT zone of the issuing company: mainland → VAT, Canary Islands → IGIC, Ceuta and Melilla → IPSI (BR-TAX-020, art. 1.3 RRSIF).

Derivation is the fallback, not the whole story. Since operations can be located somewhere other than where the issuer is established, a document may override the regime explicitly (BR-TAX-027) — see Choosing the regime.

The three rate grids

Each regime has a closed grid of legal rates and a general rate (BR-TAX-020):

0% is valid in all three — it represents the exempt operation.

The grid is enforced when creating or editing an IGIC or IPSI tax: a rate outside its regime's grid answers 422 listing the legal rates (BR-TAX-021). Moving an existing tax to another zone re-validates its rate against the new regime, so a 21% tax cannot be relabelled as Canary Islands without changing the rate first.

VAT is deliberately not narrowed this way. The seeded catalogue contains historical and transitional rates — 2%, 5%, 7.5% from the anti-inflation measures — that do not belong to a closed grid, and rejecting them would break existing data.

What the API sends

Finding the right taxes

GET /v1/taxes accepts both country_aeat_zone (peninsula, canarias, ceuta, melilla) and the derived indirect_tax_regime (iva, igic, ipsi). The two are equivalent views of the same dimension: ?indirect_tax_regime=igic matches ?country_aeat_zone=canarias (BR-TAX-026).

curl "https://api.factuarea.com/v1/taxes?indirect_tax_regime=igic" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer fact_live_3pXnR2VbY7TcA9eFmN5z8KqW"

Each tax exposes its indirect_tax_regime, derived read-only from its zone, and linked_surcharge_taxes_id, the equivalence surcharge legally paired with it. An unknown regime in the filter degenerates to an empty list — it never invents results. Taxes that are not consumption taxes — withholdings, surcharges — carry a null regime.

Choosing the regime for a document

lines[].indirect_tax_regime accepts iva, igic or ipsi on POST /v1/invoices and PUT /v1/invoices/{id}. Precedence is override over zone (BR-TAX-027):

Two guards apply, both 422:

• A value outside iva|igic|ipsi is rejected as a domain invariant, not just a form-level one — the same answer whichever surface sends it.
• All lines of a document must share the same regime. The override is document-wide, not per line; mixing two regimes answers 422 with a business-rule violation. Lines with no regime are ignored by the check, so a document combining explicit igic lines with untyped lines is homogeneous.

{
  "lines": [
    { "description": "Servicio prestado en Canarias", "quantity": 1, "unit_price": 100, "indirect_tax_regime": "igic" },
    { "description": "Materiales", "quantity": 2, "unit_price": 50, "indirect_tax_regime": "igic" }
  ]
}

The chosen regime is part of the line's immutable fiscal snapshot, so it survives conversion: a quote or pro-forma converted into an invoice inherits the regime that was chosen, rather than recomputing it from today's company zone (BR-TAX-023). The companion field aeat_tax_code is always derived from the tax and is never overridable; an incoming value is ignored.

What appears on the PDF

The tax column and the totals block show the rates that were actually applied, so an IGIC invoice prints IGIC rates. The regime name itself is not a separate printed element; it is visible through the rates and, when the document carries one, the legal mention of its exemption cause (BR-TAX-024).

Because the snapshot is immutable, a company that later moves its registered address does not retroactively change the documents it has already issued.

What reaches the AEAT

In the VeriFactu record, the Impuesto field of each breakdown group is derived from the line's regime — 01 for VAT, 02 for IPSI, 03 for IGIC — and is never hardcoded (BR-VFC-034). A mixed invoice produces one breakdown group per (rate, regime) pair, and the fingerprint seals the set. Historical lines with no regime snapshot keep 01, so the XML of invoices already declared is not altered.

The regime key travels differently: under IPSI it is not emitted at all, and under VAT and IGIC it is derived rather than hardcoded — see Regime keys.

In the quarterly VAT return, the rule is absolute: POST /v1/tax_reports/303 aggregates only lines whose regime is VAT (BR-TXR-039, BR-TXR-020):

• Output tax. A line of any other regime is skipped. It never reaches a VAT box.
• Input tax. The base and quota of non-VAT lines are subtracted from the invoice total, so a purely VAT purchase keeps exactly its previous amount, and a mixed purchase contributes only its VAT part. IGIC and IPSI borne are not deductible in this return — they are different taxes.

IGIC is settled with the Canary Islands tax agency; IPSI with the local administration of Ceuta or Melilla. Neither has anything to do with the state VAT return.

Snapshot lines are grouped by the composite key (regime, rate) rather than by rate alone, which is what prevents an IPSI line at 10% from merging with a VAT line at 10% (BR-TXR-038). Among VAT lines, every rate present is emitted — including 2%, 5% and 7.5% — so nothing is lost from the AEAT file because it falls outside the usual three.

The territorial notice is a warning, never a block

A company in a special territory that generates its VAT return receives a Spanish-language warning in the warnings list, naming the administration before which the indirect tax is settled. The file is still produced, with the VAT part only (BR-TXR-040).

It is deliberately not a 422. A Canary Islands company can have perfectly legitimate VAT — sales to the mainland, for instance — and blocking would deny it a valid return. The warning appears only when the zone is special and the period actually contains indirect-tax operations, and it accumulates with the other fiscal-quality warnings.

The annual third-party operations return (Modelo 347) behaves differently: it does include IGIC and IPSI operations at their total amount including tax, because it is agnostic to which indirect tax applies. See Disbursements for what changes its base.

Traceability

Derived from the domain rules of the Factuarea backend:

• BR-TAX-020 — the indirect tax regime as a value object derived from the AEAT zone, its legal rate grids and its AEAT codes.
• BR-TAX-021 — rate-grid enforcement when creating or editing an IGIC or IPSI tax, and why VAT is not narrowed.
• BR-TAX-023 — the immutable per-line fiscal snapshot.
• BR-TAX-024 — the document-level exemption cause and its legal mention.
• BR-TAX-026 — catalogue filtering by zone and regime, and the exposed linked surcharge.
• BR-TAX-027 — the per-document regime override, its precedence, its two 422 guards and its survival through conversion.
• BR-VFC-034 — the breakdown Impuesto derived per line, never hardcoded.
• BR-TXR-020 — the VAT return aggregates only VAT lines, and loses no VAT rate.
• BR-TXR-038 — the snapshot groups by (regime, rate).
• BR-TXR-039 — exclusion of IGIC and IPSI from both output and input VAT.
• BR-TXR-040 — the territorial warning that never blocks generation.