Do public sellers show the energy label when they announce property sales in Spain's Official Gazette? A lot-by-lot audit of BOE notices, January 2025 – September 2026

Spain's Royal Decree 390/2021 requires that the energy-efficiency label «se incluirá en toda oferta, promoción y publicidad dirigida a la venta o arrendamiento del edificio o de parte del mismo» (art. 15.2). Anyone who publishes information on a sale «estará obligada a incluir la información relativa a su calificación de eficiencia energética» (art. 17.3). Public bodies that sell property must announce the sale in the Boletín Oficial del Estado (BOE).

We read every candidate property-sale notice the BOE published between 1 January 2025 and 30 September 2026: 361 candidate notices from its open-data summaries. We kept the 254 sale notices that offer property to the public and split them into 2,833 lots. Each lot was classified against the Royal Decree's scope (art. 3, the exclusions of art. 3.2, art. 2.h, and the ministry's FAQ). An AI agent reviewed the lots without the label, the uncertain lots and the excluded lots other than land, plus random samples, and an independent AI agent re-read 40 of them (40 of 40 agreed).

144 of 306 covered lots announced in the BOE in the period (47.1%, 95% CI 41.5–52.7%) did not include the energy rating. With the lot parser as frozen, before a fix to how lots were split, the figure is 92 of 255 (36.1%). The fix added 52 lots without the rating, all of them INVIED premises that the frozen parser had merged. The other 2,527 lots were land, garages, low-demand industrial buildings, lots the seller declared exempt, or lots whose scope the notice does not let us determine.

By seller (notice content only; see the caveat below):

• Tesorería General de la Seguridad Social (TGSS): 14 of 160 (8.8%). TGSS states the rating in all covered lots of 89 of its 96 notices with covered lots.
• Delegaciones de Economía y Hacienda (Patrimonio del Estado): 17 of 33 (51.5%), with the rating in all covered lots of 12 of its 24 notices.
• INVIED (Ministry of Defence): 86 of 86 (100.0%), mostly commercial premises. INVIED's own website lists the certificate of its premises on sale as «En tramitación».
• GIESE (Ministry of the Interior), former Guardia Civil and police buildings: 21 of 21 (100.0%).
• FOGASA: 5 of 5. One port authority: 1 of 1.

At notice level, 135 notices with at least one covered lot were published; 33 of them include the rating for none of their covered lots.

Caveat. Whether a BOE notice is «oferta, promoción y publicidad» has not been settled by any authority. These figures describe what the notices say, not a legal finding about any body. The paper sets out both readings: for coverage, the words «toda oferta» and «publique … información sobre la venta», and the patrimony law's own reference to «otros medios de publicidad»; against, the notice's nature as a mandatory publication of an administrative act.

Other points:

• Exemptions. Land, garages, storage rooms, shell premises and low-demand industrial buildings are outside the Royal Decree's scope and are not counted. So are 23 lots that the seller declared exempt. 9 of them invoke the demolition-or-reform exclusion (art. 3.2.e), 7 of them for a flat or part of a building. The regulation gives that declaration to «el propietario del edificio o de parte del edificio», so we accept it. The ministry's non-binding FAQ reads it as whole buildings only.
• How the rules were made. The classification rules were written on 2024 notices and frozen before this study read the study period. A pilot by the lab had already read the same period the day before, so the freeze was not blind, and its evidence is local.

The result under other rules:

• requiring both letters, for consumption and emissions (the press-ad minimum of the recognised document to which art. 17.3 refers): 149 of 306;
• counting a statement that a certificate exists, or is being obtained, as stating the rating: 143 of 306;
• the FAQ's reading of art. 3.2.e: 151 of 313;
• also counting declared exemptions with no valid ground: 157 of 319;
• counting a property announced several times once: 123 of 250.