Cost of living in the Canary Islands: what you really spend

How much a family in the Canary Islands spends

There's only one serious measure of household spending in Spain: the INE's Encuesta de Presupuestos Familiares, the household budget survey. In the latest published edition, for 2025, a household living in the Canary Islands spent an average of €32,921.01 a year, against €35,100.71 for the Spanish average. Per person the gap widens: €12,652.15 in the Canary Islands against €14,065.81 in Spain. The INE sums up the comparison in an index where the Spanish average is 100: the Canary Islands stand at 89.95.

Category by category: what costs less, what costs more

The same survey breaks spending down by category. Here's the average spend per person in 2025, the Canary Islands first and then Spain: this is the comparison that really shows what life here is like.

• Housing, water, electricity, gas and other fuels: €3,862.54 in the Canary Islands, €4,674.35 in Spain. It's the item that weighs most on every budget.
• Food and non-alcoholic drinks: €2,149.79 against €2,254.62.
• Transport: €1,585.24 against €1,610.89.
• Restaurants and accommodation: €1,087.90 against €1,315.06.
• Clothing and footwear: €462.17 against €567.43.
• Recreation, sport and culture: €760.13 against €710.00: here spending is higher than in the rest of Spain.
• Information and communications: €516.65 against €432.20, also higher.

In the Canary Islands you spend less on housing, on clothing and on eating out, and more on leisure and on phone and internet bills. Heating is the item that people arriving from abroad forget to take off the list: in most of the archipelago I've never once turned on a radiator.

Why so many things cost less: IGIC

The main reason lies in indirect tax. The Canary Islands sit outside the scope of Spanish VAT (IVA): the VAT law, when it lists the excluded territories, expressly names "En el Reino de España, Canarias" (in the Kingdom of Spain, the Canary Islands). In place of VAT there is IGIC, the Canary Islands' own general indirect tax. The general rate of Spanish VAT is 21%; the general rate of IGIC, under Canary Islands law, is 7%, applicable to supplies of goods and services that don't fall under any of the other rates.

There's more, and it touches everyday spending: Canary Islands law sets a zero rate for a precise list of products. It covers drinking water, bread, flour, gofio, milk, cheese, eggs, fruit, vegetables, pulses, unprocessed meat and fish, olive oil and pasta; and then medicines, books and newspapers. It isn't a shop discount: it's the law, and it shows at the end of the month.

The rates on this page are general guidance, not tax advice: for your own business or a specific purchase, speak to a qualified professional. And the spending figures are official averages across thousands of households: your own budget is a single case, not an average.

Fuel: the biggest difference of all

On fuel the gap isn't a feeling, it's a price list. The Ministerio para la Transición Ecológica publishes the prices of every Spanish service station. I downloaded the list of 15 September 2026, which covers 11,512 stations, and worked out the median myself: the calculation is mine, the prices are theirs.

• Petrol (95 octane): median of €1.490 a litre across the 496 stations in the two Canary Islands provinces, against €1.939 across the 10,451 stations in the rest of Spain.
• Diesel (Gasoleo A): median of €1.619 a litre in the Canary Islands, against €1.899 in the rest of the country.

That's almost forty-five cents a litre of difference on petrol. For anyone using a car every day, and outside the towns here you need one, it's one of the items that changes the annual budget the most.

How prices are moving, and against what incomes

The INE's consumer price index is also published by autonomous community. In the latest month with a final figure for the Canary Islands, July 2026, the archipelago's annual inflation is 3.4%, just below Spain's 3.6%. Within that average, categories move very differently: transport is up 6.7%, restaurants and accommodation up 5%, housing and energy up 2.8%, while food is up just 1.4%.

But prices have to be read alongside incomes, and this is the uncomfortable part. The INE's Encuesta de Condiciones de Vida, 2025 edition, gives the Canary Islands an average net income per person of €14,222 a year, against €15,620 for the Spanish average. You spend less, but you earn less too: an advantage for anyone arriving with a pension or remote work, and the first figure to look at for anyone coming here to find a job.

On rents I won't write figures. The only serious public source would be the Ministerio de Vivienda's index, and on the day I wrote this page its server didn't respond. From experience, and I say this as experience, the gap between the tourist areas of the south and the inland or northern towns is far bigger than any regional average.

What costs less and what costs more: how I see it

When people ask me whether life here costs less, this is what I tell them. Fuel costs less, home energy costs less because you need so little of it, fruit and fish cost less, eating out costs less and, in many areas, so does housing. Everything that arrives by ship costs more: electronics, spare parts, furniture, some supermarket brands; and travelling costs more, because every trip is a flight.

My advice to anyone doing the sums before moving is never to use the archipelago average to decide. The tables describe what a territory looks like, not what you personally will spend: two identical households, one in Costa Adeje and one twenty minutes up in the hills, have different budgets. Before buying, I have everyone do the same exercise: six months renting in the chosen area, with the bills in their own name.