# Spain's minimum income (IMV) through Sen's capability approach: a right that 55% never claim > Spain's Ingreso Mínimo Vital (IMV) reached 860,458 households and 2.6 million people in June 2026, but the fiscal watchdog AIReF found that 55% of eligible households did not claim it in 2024 and that it reaches about one in five households in poverty. Read through Amartya Sen's capability approach, a benefit that people cannot reach gives them no real freedom. The fix combines a guaranteed floor, a redesigned work incentive so that work always pays, and automatic delivery that makes take-up the headline measure of success. - URL: https://www.radicalcentre.eu/en/articles/spain-minimum-income-imv-capabilities-sen - Language: en - Publisher: radical centre / centro radical - Published: 2026-10-10 - Topic: Public services - Author: radical centre - Licence: CC BY 4.0 ## Key points - In June 2026 the IMV reached 860,458 households and 2,627,344 people, with an average of €507 a month per household; about 41% of beneficiaries are children. - AIReF's February 2026 evaluation found a non-take-up rate of 55% in 2024: more than half of eligible households did not apply. - The IMV reaches roughly one in five households in poverty; its design would allow it to reach about half. - It cut the poverty gap by 30% and the poverty rate by 9.5%; at full potential those effects would be 58% and 16.2%. - AIReF recommends automatic verification, a redesigned employment incentive and automatic granting of the child supplement from birth registration. Spain created the Ingreso Mínimo Vital in 2020, a national minimum income for households without enough to live on. Six years later it is a large programme. In June 2026, according to the Ministry of Inclusion, it reached 860,458 households in which 2,627,344 people live, 16.6% more people than a year earlier. The average payment was €507 a month per household and the monthly bill €465.7 million. Children are the heart of it: 1,070,918 beneficiaries, almost 41% of the total, and about 70% of the households have minors in them. Women hold 68% of the benefits. Those are big numbers. The more important one comes from the fiscal watchdog. In February 2026 AIReF, the Independent Authority for Fiscal Responsibility, published its evaluation of the IMV as part of the government's spending review, after more than five years of operation and four earlier opinions. It found that 55% of the households entitled to the benefit in 2024 did not claim it. ## What AIReF found The headline is coverage. The IMV reaches roughly one in five households in poverty (21.3% of households at risk of poverty, in the figure reported by The Objective). Its design would allow it to reach around half of them. That gap shows up in the results. The benefit reduced the poverty gap, how far poor households fall below the line, by 30%, and the poverty rate by 9.5%. If it reached everyone it was designed for, those figures would be 58% and 16.2%. The cost is modest for what it does. AIReF put the annual bill at €3,106 million at the end of 2024; reaching its full potential would cost €6,145 million a year, and lifting every household above a threshold of 40% of median income would cost €9,110 million. For children, the IMV together with the child supplement, the CAPI, reaches 29% of households in child poverty. Non-take-up of the CAPI is around 72%. The watchdog also found problems in the design. Verifying who belongs to each household, the unidad de convivencia, is hard to automate and is the main reason applications are refused. And the benefit has a negative effect on labour participation, which risks creating poverty traps. Its recommendations follow from that: set measurable targets with deadlines; verify eligibility automatically with up-to-date data; redesign the employment incentive completely; grant the CAPI automatically from the child's birth registration; produce comparable statistics on the regions' own minimum incomes; and strengthen information campaigns and one-to-one support. ## Sen's lens: a right on paper and a real freedom Amartya Sen's capability approach, which he restates in *The Idea of Justice*, gives a precise language for this. Sen judges policy by capabilities, the real freedoms people have to be and do what they have reason to value. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy illustrates the difference with a voter who has the right to vote but lives far from the polling station with no transport. The right exists. The freedom does not. A minimum income that more than half of those entitled never receive is the same case at national scale. The households that miss out face what the capability literature calls conversion factors: the personal, social and environmental circumstances that decide how well someone can turn a resource into a real opportunity. Not knowing the benefit exists, finding the paperwork impossible, living in a household arrangement that the system struggles to verify, or calculating that a small top-up is not worth the bother: each of these stands between the legal entitlement and the money arriving. Sen's comparative method also tells us how to judge the IMV. The question is how it compares with the real alternatives: the regions' own minimum incomes that run alongside it, a version with automatic enrolment, a version with a stronger work incentive. AIReF's spending review is exactly that kind of comparison, made with microdata, and it points clearly at the better option. ## A position from three traditions From the left comes the conviction that a guaranteed minimum income is a right and that it should reach every household entitled to it. A benefit that halves the poverty gap only when people claim it should be delivered to them. From the market-liberal side comes AIReF's warning about work: a benefit that discourages taking a job traps the people it is meant to help, so the employment incentive must be rebuilt so that every extra hour of work leaves a household better off, and every euro spent should be tied to measurable objectives. And from neither tradition comes Sen's test: measure a benefit by the real freedom it creates. That makes take-up the first indicator of success, ahead of spending or the number of applications processed. In practice the state should do the paperwork. The tax agency and Social Security already hold most of the information needed to identify who qualifies. The CAPI can start at birth registration, as AIReF proposes. The IMV can be offered by default to households the data shows are eligible, with a simple confirmation in place of an application, and paired with a work incentive that tapers gently as earnings rise. Publish the take-up rate every year, region by region, next to the poverty figures. The IMV already works for those who reach it. The task now is to make the right real for the other half, and to make sure that, once it arrives, taking a job always adds to the household's income. ## FAQ ### How many people receive Spain's Ingreso Mínimo Vital? In June 2026, according to the Ministry of Inclusion, 860,458 households in which 2,627,344 people live, with an average benefit of €507 a month per household. Just over a million beneficiaries are children. ### Why do so many eligible households not claim the IMV? AIReF estimates non-take-up at 55% in 2024. It points to barriers of information and access and to the difficulty of verifying who belongs to each household, the main reason claims are refused, and recommends automatic verification, information campaigns and individual support. ### What is the capability approach? Amartya Sen's way of judging well-being by people's real freedoms to be and do what they have reason to value. It asks what people can actually do with the resources and rights they formally have. ## Sources - [El Ingreso Mínimo Vital llega en junio a más de 2,6 millones de personas que residen en 860.458 hogares](https://www.lamoncloa.gob.es/serviciosdeprensa/notasprensa/inclusion/Paginas/2026/070726-ingreso-minimo-vital-junio.aspx), La Moncloa (2026) - [AIReF constata que el IMV llega al 20% de hogares en pobreza, pero advierte de que podría beneficiar al 50%](https://www.bolsamania.com/noticias/economia/economia--airef-constata-que-el-imv-llega-al-20-de-hogares-en-pobreza-pero-advierte-de-que-podria-beneficiar-al-50--21607160.html), Europa Press / Bolsamanía (2026) - [La Airef calcula que el ingreso mínimo solo llega al 21,3% de los hogares en situación de pobreza](https://theobjective.com/economia/2026-02-04/airef-ingreso-minimo-hogares-pobreza/), The Objective (2026) - [The Capability Approach](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/capability-approach/), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2025)