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Background Heart failure (HF) is the leading cause of hospitalization in people over age 65. Predictive hospital admission models have been developed to help reduce the number of these patients. Aim To develop and internally validate a model to predict hospital admission in one-year for any non-programmed cause in heart failure patients receiving primary care treatment. Design and setting Cohort study, prospective. Patients treated in family medicine clinics. Methods Logistic regression analysis was used to estimate the association between the predictors and the outcome, i.e. unplanned hospitalization over a 12-month period. The predictive model was built in several steps. The initial examination included a set of 31 predictors. Bootstrapping was used for internal validation. Results The study included 251 patients, 64 (25.5%) of whom were admitted to hospital for some unplanned cause over the 12 months following their date of inclusion in the study. Four predictive variables of hospitalization were identified: NYHA class III-IV, OR (95% CI) 2.46 (1.23–4.91); diabetes OR (95% CI) 1.94 (1.05–3.58); COPD OR (95% CI) 3.17 (1.45–6.94); MLHFQ Emotional OR (95% CI) 1.07 (1.02–1.12). AUC 0.723; R2N 0.17; Hosmer-Lemeshow 0.815. Internal validation AUC 0.706.; R2N 0.134 Conclusion This is a simple model to predict hospitalization over a 12-month period based on four variables: NYHA functional class, diabetes, COPD and the emotional dimension of the MLHFQ scale. It has an acceptable discriminative capacity enabling the identification of patients at risk of hospitalization., This study was financed by the Health Research Fund (FIS), grant no. PI 14/01677 and co-financed with ERDF funds from the European Union: REDISSEC - Project ISCIII (Red de Investigación en Enfermedades Crónicas del Servicio de Salud - Instituto de Salud Carlos III) concession no. RD16/0001/0004. The Foundation for Biosanitary Research and Innovation in Primary Health Care (FIIBAP) financed the costs of publishing the article