Private swimming pool regulations in Spain

What Real Decreto 742/2013 covers, and what it leaves alone

The state framework is Real Decreto 742/2013, of 27 September, which sets the technical and public-health criteria for swimming pools and was published in the BOE of 11 October 2013. Read it and you find a public-health instrument: water quality, treatment, sampling, records, the information a bather is entitled to see. It was written for pools that groups of people use, and nearly all of it applies only to those.

A single-family pool at a private house is left outside most of it. The one article that reaches the private owner is article 13, which requires health incidents to be reported to the health authority. That is the whole of the duty. There is nothing in the decree about barriers, fences, alarms or covers, because protecting a child from the water is simply not the subject the text is dealing with.

This is worth holding on to when somebody tells you that a cover is required by Real Decreto 742/2013. The decree is real and the reference sounds solid, but the conclusion does not follow from the text. Beyond that single reporting duty, nothing in the decree classifies a cover as a compulsory safety device, and nothing in it obliges you to put anything at all over the water.

Which technical standard actually applies to a cover

If no law obliges you to fit a cover, one question still deserves a precise answer: when a cover is sold as a safety cover, what does that actually mean? The reference is NF P90-308, a French standard written for covers on private pools. It asks three things of the closed cover: that it keeps a child under five out of the water and carries a 100 kg adult applied at any point without breaking, sinking, taking permanent deformation or pulling out of its anchors; that it opens only by a deliberate adult action, from a remote control, a push button or a key, and never by accident; and that it covers the whole water surface, with no gap and no corner left open. It is an anti-drowning standard, and that is all it claims to be.

What it is not — and this is where most English-language advice goes wrong — is a certificate that the cover can be walked on. Deliberately standing on a closed cover, treating it as a terrace, is a structural question of a different order, and it belongs to the Eurocode: EN 1991-1-1, category A, the loading rules for domestic floors. A cover built to NF P90-308 will hold someone who steps or falls onto it. It is not a floor, and it should never be used as one.

The other reference you may see quoted in cover paperwork is the UNE-EN 13451 series. It does not apply. That series covers equipment for public-use pools classified under EN 15288: part 2 deals with ladders, step ladders and handrails, part 11 with movable floors and bulkheads. Covers for private pools are outside its scope, so a document offering UNE-EN 13451 as proof that a cover is compliant is quoting the wrong book.

So what is a French standard worth in Spain? Spanish law does not name it, and no Spanish pool regulation asks for it. What it changes is the conversation with the installer, because it turns a vague promise into a specification: a cover has either been built to NF P90-308 as a barrier or it has not. Every cover we build in our own workshop in Torrijos, near Toledo, where we have made them since 2005, is made to it.

If nothing is compulsory, why do owners fit a cover?

Because the legal obligation and the real reason for fitting one are different things. A regulation can say what has to be measured, recorded and reported; it cannot say who will be in the garden on a Tuesday afternoon. What a private pool carries is not the risk of an inspection but the risk of an unattended minute, and none of the regulations in the table was written with that minute in mind. Closing that gap is what an owner is buying.

A closed cover also earns its place in ways no regulation has an opinion about. Across a season it cuts evaporation by roughly 70 to 80 per cent, which is water you never have to put back. Chemical use falls by about a third, because far less sunlight and debris reach the water. Where the pool has a heat pump, keeping the surface closed cuts seasonal consumption by roughly 50 to 60 per cent. Nothing requires any of it; it is simply what a cover does once it is there.

If it is the safety argument you want in detail — what the 100 kg test actually involves, how a closed cover compares with a perimeter fence or an immersion alarm, why opening it has to be a deliberate adult action, what happens when a pet wanders onto it — that is set out on our page on child safety and NF P90-308. This page stops where the law stops.