Is there a legal AC temperature limit in Spain, and can it cut your costs?

The waste sits in an eleven-degree gap. Spain's official line said do not cool below 27°C; guests in rentals and hotels routinely set 16°C, and that behaviour can raise AC energy use by up to 70% against a 24°C setting, worth €190–450 per AC unit per season. So yes, Spain had a legal AC temperature limit. It expired in November 2023, it never governed what a guest does with the remote, and the number that saves you money is not the legal one anyway.

The short answer

Royal Decree-Law 14/2022, introduced in August 2022 as part of Spain's EU-aligned energy-saving plan, made two settings mandatory in public and commercial buildings: cooling could not be set below 27°C, and heating could not be set above 19°C. The rule explicitly covered hotels, along with shops, offices, bars, cinemas, cultural spaces, airports and stations. The mandatory period ended on 1 November 2023. Since then there has been no general legal AC temperature limit in force in Spain, though the decree remains the clearest official statement of where the Spanish state drew the line on over-cooling.

For an operator the interesting part is not the legal history. It is that an official line exists at all, and how far past it guests go. A guest setting 16°C is eleven degrees below the austerity figure the government considered defensible for an entire economy under an energy crisis.

What RD 14/2022 actually required

The decree was an energy-austerity measure, drafted in the summer of 2022 when the EU was scrambling to cut consumption after the energy crisis began. Its logic was consumption, not comfort: set the warmest cooling figure and the coolest heating figure the public could tolerate, apply them to buildings the state could inspect, and cap the national bill. Hotels were included because their common areas are commercial space. Compliance was checked at the building level, in lobbies, restaurants and shops.

What the decree never did, and never could do, is control the remote inside a guest room. No inspector attends a villa in August. The rule expired after fifteen months, and even while it was in force, the place where most of a property's AC money leaks, the individual room with a guest holding the remote, sat outside its reach.

Austerity and comfort are different numbers

This is the distinction that keeps operators from doing something useful with the 27°C figure. Energy-austerity limits answer the question: what is the warmest setting people will tolerate if the goal is to burn less? Comfort standards answer a different question: what range does a resting person in light clothing actually find pleasant? The international standard ASHRAE 55 puts the summer comfort zone at roughly 22.5–26°C. The EU's own standard, EN 16798-1, puts mechanically cooled summer comfort at roughly 23–26°C, with its premium category, the one suited to hotels, at about 23.5–25.5°C.

Nobody should run guest rooms at 27°C. To a paying guest walking in from a 33°C afternoon, 27°C reads as air conditioning that barely works, and the review will say so. The austerity figure is a foil, not a target. The practical conclusion sits between the two failure modes: guests over-cool to 16°C because a standard remote lets them, and austerity rules over-correct to 27°C because their goal was never comfort. A limit inside the 22–26°C comfort band removes the waste and is provably pleasant, because the international and EU standards say that is what pleasant means.

Why a law was never going to fix a guest room

Even a live, enforced decree acts on the wrong layer of the problem. The waste is created one room at a time by a person who pays a fixed price for their stay and nothing for electricity. A national rule cannot see that room. House rules and welcome-book pleas cannot enforce themselves either, as any operator who has written "please keep the AC at 24°C" knows. Based on our operating experience across seasons in Ibiza, guests are not malicious; they simply have no reason to behave as if electricity costs money, because for them it does not.

Enforcement has to live where the decision is made: on the controller in the room. That is a hardware question, not a legal one. The rule that works is the one the guest cannot un-follow, and it should be set at a temperature the guest never notices as a restriction.

Enforcing the comfort band without a decree

This is what Narveo was built for, by a vacation rental operator in Ibiza who watched guests leave the AC running at 16°C all day and still uses it in his own properties. Narveo replaces the AC remote, caps the minimum temperature and auto-shuts off after a set time. Units ship preset to a recommended 22–25°C limit, inside the recognised comfort band, so a guest keeps full control of a pleasant room while the settings below comfort simply stop existing. It sets up in under 2 minutes, costs €69 per unit and works with 6,000+ AC codes. No app. No WiFi. No installation.

FAQ

When Narveo is not the right solution

Narveo is designed for rentals and hotels where guests control split AC units room by room. Properties in cool climates with minimal AC use will see proportionally less return. Narveo is not compatible with ducted or centralised BMS systems, and it adds little in owner-occupied properties where usage is already self-managed. It is also not a compliance product: if a future decree returns, Narveo happens to enforce better-than-austerity settings, but its case is the electricity bill, not the regulation.