Casa47: how to apply for the state's affordable rental homes

Casa47 is the brand name of the state housing body, built on SEPES, the public land company. Its job is to build up a state stock of affordable rental homes, and its first raw material is the 40,000 Sareb homes (Sareb is the former "bad bank") that the Government agreed to transfer to it in 2025; they are being added gradually as they become available.

In practice it works through calls for applications (convocatorias): every few months the body publishes a batch of specific homes (with a listing, photos, rent and address) and opens a period to apply for them. The body itself has said it intends to open a call roughly every three months.

• You must not own a home (this is checked for the whole household, or unidad de convivencia).
• Combined income between 2 and 7.5 times the IPREM (the state income index used to set the caps). There is a floor as well as a ceiling: you must show you can pay the rent.
• The rent you pay does not exceed 30% of the average household income in the municipality: it is capped by design, not by the market.

The yearly IPREM including the extra payments is €8,400 in 2026, so the household income band runs from roughly €16,800 to €63,000 a year. The band is deliberately wide: the programme is aimed at middle and low incomes, not only at the thresholds of traditional social housing.

The whole process is online at portal.casa47.es. No regional register is involved: it is a state channel, separate from your region's applicant registers (registros de demandantes), which you should still keep up to date; this is how.

Each home has its own listing with photos, floor area, rent and address: you choose specific homes, not an abstract quota. Once you have applied within the period, homes are allocated by a draw (sorteo) before a notary: one application number is picked at random and all the others are put in order from it, one after another. There is no points scale and no first-come, first-served: applying on the first day or the last counts the same.

Casa47 homes are not qualified protected homes (VPO): they are state-owned homes let at affordable rents. That has two practical consequences. The good one: you do not depend on the applicant register or on regional quotas, and the income band goes higher than in much social housing. The bad one: they give no right to buy and no discounts on a sale. It is renting, and it will stay that way.

The sensible strategy if you are looking for an affordable home: apply through both routes at once. Register with your region for protected-housing calls, and apply to Casa47 when a window opens in your area. The draws are independent; each application is one more ticket.