Your Neighbours Had Us Check Their Electricity Bills. That Most Were Fine Is the Verdict Nobody Sells.

A week and a half ago, we bolted a free checking machine onto the most complained-about bill in Spain and asked you to feed it. You did. Roughly a hundred real electricity bills have now gone through the contract check for customers from Octopus, Iberdrola, Endesa, GANA, and Fenie Energía across the Costa. Confirmed July 2026.

Here is the finding nobody would pay to advertise: not one real bill produced a "switch supplier now" verdict.

What the machine actually caught was small, boring, and fixable. A Mijas reader was paying €8.65 a month for a removable services pack on a tariff shaped wrong for her usage, worth €20 to €28 a month back once corrected. We told that story last Friday. Another reader was paying €5.35 a month for an "assistance" add-on, which was flagged for removal. One bill earned the rarest verdict in the entire expat economy: your contract is priced correctly, keep it.

A hundred self-selected bills are a small sample, and this is our read of it, no more. But the shape of it matters. The catastrophe everyone warns about did not show up. The leaks that did show up cost less than a menú del día a month, and each one took an afternoon to fix.

George P., a reader in Torrevieja, wrote to us after our piece on why we stay in Spain despite the friction. He described the American-expat Facebook groups he follows: hundreds of stories about Spanish banks freezing accounts, all frightening, all anonymous, all short on details.

Then he checked with friends who have run a travel agency for years and keep a client book full of foreign residents. Real frozen accounts they know of: one. A petrol-station franchise with a tax mix-up, since resolved.

His counter-evidence is the kind that never goes viral. SUMA, the tax collector for Alicante province, emails him twice a year and debits exactly the stated amount on exactly the stated date. Málaga's equivalent, the Patronato de Recaudación Provincial — the provincial tax collection agency run by the Diputación de Málaga, works the same way across most Costa towns for the IBI — the annual property tax and car tax. A traffic fine paid promptly discounts itself by half. The systems, mostly, do what they say.

Here is the part worth sitting with over coffee: fear on the Costa has a supply side.

When cita previa — prior appointment slots at extranjería — immigration office desks became scarce, a market grew in the gap. In November 2024 the Policía Nacional dismantled an organisation that used bots to block the free appointment slots and resell them at €15 to €30 each, earning members around €9,000 a month; 21 people were arrested across Alicante, Murcia, and Valencia. Reported November 2024. By 2025, resale listings in Madrid reached €400, and fake-appointment scams ran €300 to €1,000. Reported May 2025. The appointment itself has always cost nothing.

The same arithmetic runs at lower temperatures everywhere. Form-filling sold at €100 for forms that are free downloads. Monthly premiums paid to route around a public system your household has already paid for, which we took apart in June. Services priced to the size of your worry rather than the size of your problem.

The scarier a system feels, the larger the service you can be sold to survive it. Nobody advertises "you are probably fine." There is no margin in it. Which is why that sentence has to come from your own checked paperwork, or from a newsletter with no commission behind its verdicts.

To be fair to the trade: most of the Costa's gestores — licensed administrative agents, brokers, and advisers are honest, and the good ones are worth every euro on genuinely hard problems. The fear-shaped corner of the market is a corner. But it prices off the folklore, and the folklore is louder than the ledger.

We are quietly mapping that corner: who sells what on the Costa, at what markup, against what the thing actually costs at the counter. That work is underway. It will take some weeks to do properly, and we would rather do it properly.

You can point the machine. Hit reply with the scariest claim currently circulating in your group, or the next bill you want us to build a checker for. Water, bank fees, and traffic fines are already on the whiteboard. The electricity check stays free and stays open if you have not run yours yet.

We will run what you send us to ground the same way we ran the bills: against the source, with the receipts shown, whatever the answer turns out to be.

Bulo — a rumour or hoax. The word Spaniards use for the story everyone shares and nobody can source. "Eso es un bulo" ends a lot of café arguments.

Pronto pago — early payment, the discount for paying quickly. On most traffic fines it is 50% inside the stated window, which turns panic into a ten-minute online payment.

Fifteen bills in, the community audit says the Costa mostly charges what it agreed to charge, and the real leaks are small, findable, and cheap to fix. Some horror stories are true. All of them are somebody's sales funnel. The one verdict no one will ever sell you is the one our machine kept returning: you are probably fine. We would rather keep proving that with your paperwork than argue with the folklore.

Enjoy the weekend — A. and the WaypointSur team, receipts in hand.