Does Spain Have a National Minimum Room Height?

The requirement

The CTE sets no national minimum ceiling height for a dwelling. There is no room-height figure to hit in the national code. Each of Spain’s 17 autonomous communities sets its own, in its decreto de habitabilidad (housing decree). The one hard national number the CTE does set for every home is ventilation.

No fixed ceiling height in the CTE. A full search of DB-SUA, DB-SE-C and DB-HS finds no habitable-room height minimum. The only height figure in the code is DB-SUA 2’s headroom rule. That rule says 2.10 m in restricted-use circulation zones and 2.20 m elsewhere. The Ministry’s own note on the clause limits it to circulation zones. That means hallways and landings, not a living or sleeping room. Don’t read a headroom figure onto a bedroom ceiling.

Ceiling height and room area are regional. Ireland’s TGDs simply leave the question open. Spain instead hands it to a different legal instrument. Its 17 autonomous communities each set their own minimum room height and floor area. Each region writes them into its own habitability decree. That decree is not a Documento Básico. It does not get amended alongside the CTE, and it runs on its own numbering. So this page gives no single figure. With 17 separate decrees, one region’s number would be wrong for most readers. Need a room-height or room-area figure for your job? Check the decree for the region you are building in, not the CTE.

No national daylight rule either. We found no window-area-to-floor-area rule in the CTE for a dwelling’s rooms. No daylight-factor rule appears in DB-HS or anywhere else in the code. If a natural-light figure applies to your job, it too comes from the regional decree.

The one hard, national number: ventilation

Ventilation is where the CTE bites, for every dwelling in Spain. The rule is DB-HS, Sección HS 3 (“Calidad del aire interior”), Tabla 2.1. It sets minimum constant-flow ventilation rates by dwelling size:

Alongside the table:

• 1.5 l/s per habitable room during unoccupied periods. It is a background, purge-type minimum (§2, point 2).
• 50 l/s minimum extract at the kitchen cooking zone. It sits on top of the general figures above (§2, point 4).
• The design basis behind the table: mean annual CO₂ under 900 ppm. The yearly excess above 1600 ppm must stay under 500,000 ppm·h (§2, point 1).

Work it out on site

Say you are designing a 2-bedroom dwelling and need to check the ventilation totals. Floor area is 75 m².

1. Read the table for 2 bedrooms. Main bedroom 8 l/s. Other bedroom 4 l/s. Living/dining 8 l/s. That is a dry-room total of 24 l/s.
2. Add the wet rooms. A bathroom and a kitchen at 7 l/s each add 14 l/s.
3. Add the kitchen extract on top. The 50 l/s cooking-zone extract is separate from the figures above. It goes on top, not folded in.

The 24 l/s dry-room total and the 7 l/s per wet room are Table 2.1’s own numbers. Your real dwelling’s room count and layout change which rows apply. There is no calculator on this page for this. The ventilation table is a design input. It is not a single-number sum like a stair riser or a concrete volume.

Related

• Part of the Spanish Building Regulations hub — one national code, with the DBs that set the rules.
• Building the stairs, and need the headroom and step numbers? See Spanish stair & barrier rules: riser, going, handrails, guarding.

Sources

• CTE DB-HS — Salubridad, Sección HS 3 “Calidad del aire interior”, Tabla 2.1 (constant-flow ventilation minima), §2 points 1–2 (CO₂ design criterion, unoccupied-period minimum), and §2 point 4 (kitchen extract). Read it at codigotecnico.org.
• Regional habitability decrees. Minimum ceiling height, room area and (where it exists) natural light are set by each autonomous community’s own decreto de habitabilidad — a separate instrument from the CTE, not verified or enumerated here. Check the decree for the autonomous community you’re building in.

Read this first. These ventilation figures are from the current DB-HS articulado (Real Decreto 450/2022, de 14 de junio). Always confirm the current DB-HS text at codigotecnico.org before you rely on any figure here.