Spain's self-employed: big-company obligations, second-class protection, and one account to fix it

In her launch speech for Democracia 21 on 10 October 2026, Miriam González used a phrase that every self-employed person in Spain recognised at once: being an autónomo means big-company obligations with second-class protection. We mapped the whole speech in our overview, and this is problem 3 of its chapter on growth. It deserves a proper answer, because around three and a half million people live inside it. In July 2026 the RETA, the Social Security scheme for the self-employed, had 3,472,357 members according to the Ministry's figures as published in the Comunidad de Madrid's affiliation bulletin, 1.7% more than a year earlier.

What the autónomo carries

Start with what Spain has already fixed. Since January 2023 the self-employed pay contributions according to their real net earnings, the system brought in by Real Decreto-ley 13/2022. There are fifteen bands: a reduced table of three for people earning up to 1,166.70 euros a month and a general table of twelve above it. In 2026 the lowest monthly base is 653.59 euros and the highest is 5,101.20. That's a real improvement on the old world, where most people simply paid the minimum and collected a minimum pension for it.

The way it runs asks a lot of someone with a market stall, though. You forecast your average monthly net income for the year, pick a base inside your band, change it up to six times a year if the forecast moves, and wait for Social Security to compare it with your tax return and regularise the difference later. Meanwhile come the quarterly VAT and income-tax returns, due in the first twenty days of April, July and October and by 30 January. Under Real Decreto-ley 15/2025, anyone outside corporation tax who invoices with software must have a system meeting the Verifactu requirements before 1 July 2027, and business-to-business electronic invoicing under the Ley Crea y Crece follows after it. Each obligation has a sensible purpose. Together they add up to the paperwork of a company with a finance department, landed on one person with a phone.

Jennifer Pahlka, whose Recoding America we covered in our explainer, has the right diagnosis. Government services, she argues, build up in layers: each law and rule adds a requirement, power over the whole is diffuse, and nobody is in charge of taking anything away. Her advice to lawmakers is to stop piling on mandates and to design policy with delivery in mind. Mario Draghi made the same point at European scale in his 2024 report on competitiveness. Regulation, he writes, weighs proportionally more on small firms, and 55% of SMEs name regulatory obstacles and administrative burden as their greatest challenge. His remedies include harmonised reporting templates, de minimis thresholds and centralised reporting through one interface.

The protection that doesn't arrive

Now the other half of González's sentence. An employee who is dismissed is legally unemployed from the day the contract ends. With 360 days of contributions in the previous six years they get 120 days of benefit, rising to a maximum of 720 days. The self-employed have their own scheme, the prestación por cese de actividad, and on paper it looks similar: 12 months of contributions in the last 24 open 4 months of benefit, 48 months or more open 24, paid at 70% of the average base of the previous year, and the mutua pays your contributions while you receive it.

The difference is the door. The autónomo has to prove a legal cessation of activity. For economic reasons that means, for example, losses above 10% of income over a whole year, never counting the first year of activity, and closing the premises if they're open to the public. In the Social Security figures for 2026 up to April reported by Merca2, refusals (2,684) slightly outnumbered approvals (2,674), and 1,614 of the refusals were for failing to prove the cessation. Half the people who paid for a protection and then asked for it went home without it. That is what second-class looks like in practice.

One account that follows the worker

The left is right that someone who works for themselves deserves the same floor as someone on a payroll: income when the work disappears, sick pay, parental leave and a pension that reflects what they earned. The market-liberal tradition is right that a person starting small should face low fixed costs and simple compliance, and that every rule should be judged by what it costs the smallest firm, as Draghi asks. What joins them is a piece of plumbing that belongs to neither camp.

Give every worker one social account that follows them whether they're on a payroll, self-employed or both at once, as many young people now are. Contributions are calculated on real income as it is earned, read from the invoice records that Verifactu and electronic invoicing will produce anyway. The yearly forecast disappears, and so does the regularisation that arrives long after the money has been spent. Small earners pay small amounts, which keeps the fixed cost of starting low, and protection scales with what has actually been paid in, so a self-employed person and an employee with the same income history hold the same rights.

Then the account does the filing. The quarterly VAT and income-tax returns arrive pre-filled from the same records, and the autónomo checks and confirms them, which is Draghi's single interface brought down to the kitchen table. The cessation benefit opens on data. When the account shows that real income has fallen hard for two consecutive quarters, the right opens, the mutua confirms, and nobody has to close a shop to prove they're struggling. Spanish law already contains a version of this test for self-employed people without staff: a 75% fall in revenue over two quarters with monthly net income below the minimum wage. The account makes it the normal route and reads it automatically.

It also fits the portable severance account we proposed on day 3, where protection belongs to the person and travels with them from job to job. Here it travels across the line between employee and self-employed as well. Pahlka would add one condition, and she'd be right: build it with the people who will use it, starting with the pre-filled quarterly return, because the invoice data starts arriving in 2027 whatever else happens. Spain did the hard political work when it decided to measure real income. The next step is letting that measurement do the paperwork.