The number of people declaring exceptionally high incomes in Andalucia has surged since the pandemic, significantly outpacing growth across Spain as a whole.

New figures from Spain’s Tax Agency show that 1,501 taxpayers in Andalucia declared annual income of more than €601,000 in 2024, making it the first time the region has broken through the 1,500 mark.

That represents an 88% increase since 2020, when there were around 800 people in the highest income bracket.

In other words, Andalucia has added 702 people earning more than €601,000 per year in just five years.

The increase has also accelerated recently. There were 316 more people in the top bracket in 2024 than in 2023, despite the number having dipped by 45 the previous year.

Meanwhile, the number of Andalucian taxpayers declaring between €150,000 and €601,000 has jumped by 121% since 2020, more than doubling in five years.

That compares with an increase of 88% across Spain.

Andalucia is catching up with richer parts of Spain

Andalucia started from a relatively low base.

Despite accounting for around 17% of Spain’s population, in 2020 it was home to only about 7% of taxpayers earning more than €601,000. That proportion has now climbed to 8%.

Among people earning between €150,000 and €601,000, Andalucia’s share of the Spanish total has risen more dramatically, from around 8% to 10%.

It means the region remains underrepresented among Spain’s wealthiest residents, but the gap is narrowing.

The figures also coincide with a profound economic transformation in parts of Andalucia, particularly Malaga and the Costa del Sol, which have increasingly attracted wealthy international residents, entrepreneurs and executives.

Malaga’s expansion as a technology and business hub, coupled with the Costa del Sol’s booming luxury property market, provides one plausible contributor to the trend, although the Tax Agency statistics themselves do not establish where individual high earners came from or why their incomes increased.

Another factor is the broader rise in nominal incomes, business profits, investment returns and asset values since 2020.

Because the tax brackets in the statistics are fixed in euro terms, inflation and rising earnings can also push more taxpayers above thresholds such as €150,000 or €601,000 without necessarily representing an equivalent increase in their real purchasing power.

Andalucia’s income-tax haul has soared 60%

The transformation has helped drive a dramatic increase in the amount of income tax collected in the region.

IRPF (income tax) revenue in Andalucia jumped 13.9% in 2024 alone to around €17.3billion, one percentage point faster than the increase recorded across Spain.

Since 2020, Andalucia’s income-tax receipts have risen by approximately 60%, compared with 53% nationally.

There are also simply far more people filing tax returns.

The number of taxpayers in Andalucia increased from approximately 3.8 million in 2020 to 4.4 million in 2024, an increase of more than 600,000, or 17%.

Despite the rapid growth, however, Andalucia remains some way behind Spain’s wealthier regions.

It accounts for around 18% of the country’s taxpayers but generates only 13% of Spain’s total IRPF revenue.

So while the number of wealthy people is rising remarkably quickly, the figures suggest something closer to Andalucia catching up from a relatively low starting point than suddenly becoming one of Spain’s richest regions.

Read more Andalucia news at the Spanish Eye.