# What is social mobility? Spain's social elevator explained, with the data

> Social mobility is how far a person's position in life, their income, education or job, depends on where they started. In Spain the OECD estimated in 2018 that a child from a low-income family could need four generations to reach the average income, and the INE's 2023 survey shows adults who grew up in hard times are less than half as likely to hold a degree as those who grew up comfortably (23.3% against 53.1%). The radical-centre response treats mobility as a public target: measured every year, with each major policy judged by how it moves it.

- URL: https://www.radicalcentre.eu/en/articles/what-is-social-mobility-spain-social-elevator-data
- Language: en
- Publisher: radical centre / centro radical
- Published: 2026-10-31
- Topic: Public services
- Author: radical centre
- Licence: CC BY 4.0

## Key points

- Social mobility measures how much a person's income, education or occupation depends on their parents'; economists distinguish absolute mobility (living better than your parents) from relative mobility (changing place in the ranking).
- The OECD's A Broken Social Elevator? (2018) estimated that a child from a low-income family in Spain could need up to four generations to reach the average income.
- In the same report, 64% of Spaniards in the bottom fifth of incomes stayed stuck there, and 72% of those at the top stayed at the top.
- INE's 2023 survey: among adults aged 25–59 who grew up in a poor household, 23.3% hold a degree, against 53.1% of those who grew up comfortably.
- Democracia 21's leader calls restoring social mobility Spain's number one priority; we propose turning it into a measured target.

When Miriam González launched Democracia 21 in Madrid on 10 October, she put recovering social mobility at the top of her list: young people, she said, have to know that with effort and work they can get on. Her own story is the classic version: granddaughter of farmers from Olmedo, she studied in Belgium thanks to a grant. It's a good moment to set out what social mobility actually is, how it is measured and what the numbers say about Spain, because the term gets used loosely.

## What the term means

Social mobility is the degree to which a person's position in life depends on the family they were born into. Position can mean income, level of education or occupation, and the answers differ depending on which one you look at. Economists separate two ideas. Absolute mobility asks whether you live better than your parents did at your age, which in a growing economy most people do. Relative mobility asks whether you changed place in the ranking: whether the child of the bottom fifth can end up in the middle or at the top, and whether the child of the top can fall. When people say the social elevator is broken, they usually mean the relative kind.

Mobility can also stall at either end. A sticky floor keeps the children of the poorest at the bottom. A sticky ceiling keeps the children of the richest at the top. A society can have both at once.

## What the OECD found

The most quoted figure comes from the OECD's 2018 report *A Broken Social Elevator? How to Promote Social Mobility*. It estimated that in Spain a child born into a low-income family could need up to four generations to reach the average income. As Público and Europa Press reported at the time, the Spanish data showed both ends stuck: 64% of people in the bottom fifth of incomes stayed there, a share that had grown since the 1990s, and 72% of those at the top stayed at the top.

Education looked like this. Of the children of highly educated parents, 69% completed higher education; of the children of parents with little education, 22% did. More than half of those children, 56%, ended up with low education themselves, against an OECD average of 42%. At least half of the children of managers became managers, while about one in five children of manual workers reached such jobs. Spaniards were also unusually aware of it: 53% said their parents' education was important for how their lives turned out, against an OECD average of 37%.

The OECD named two causes for the stuck floor that matter for the rest of this week: long-term unemployment and short-term contracts that stop people climbing the ladder, plus an early school leaving rate that was then 19.9%, one of the highest in the EU.

## What the INE shows now

Spain has newer and more direct evidence. The 2023 Living Conditions Survey (Encuesta de Condiciones de Vida) included a European module on the intergenerational transmission of poverty, published by the INE in April 2024. It asked adults aged 25 to 59 about their household's economic situation when they were teenagers and compared it with their lives today.

Among those who grew up in a poor or very poor household, 23.3% now hold a university-level qualification and 19.3% have only primary education or less. Among those who grew up in a good or very good situation, 53.1% hold a degree and 5.2% stopped at primary. Parents' education weighs just as heavily: 77.4% of adults whose parents had a degree have one too, against 36.2% of those whose parents stopped at lower secondary.

Income follows the same pattern. Of those who grew up poor, 24.6% are in the bottom fifth of incomes today and 9.2% in the top fifth. Of those who grew up comfortably, 16.9% are in the bottom fifth and 24.3% in the top.

There is some good news inside the numbers. In the 2019 edition of the module, only 15.8% of adults who grew up poor held a degree; in 2023 it was 23.3%, and among those aged 25 to 44 it reaches 25.4%. The surveys asked different people about different childhoods, so the change needs care, but the younger generation of poor children is getting to university more often than the older one. The lift moves. It moves far too slowly for a country that has spent forty years expanding education.

## Mobility as a target

Each tradition holds part of the answer. The left is right that origin still decides too much in Spain, and that public action, starting with education from the earliest years, is the way to break the inheritance of disadvantage. That is why Amartya Sen's [capability approach](/en/articles/amartya-sen-the-idea-of-justice-explained) asks what people can actually do and become, and why Halstead and Lind [put education and assets](/en/articles/halstead-lind-the-radical-center-explained) at the heart of their programme. The market-liberal tradition is right that effort and work have to pay, and the OECD's own diagnosis backs it: a labour market of long-term unemployment and short contracts keeps people on the floor however good the schools are.

What fits in neither camp is treating mobility as a target the State measures and answers for, the way it answers for the deficit. Spain already holds the records: tax returns, school and university files, Social Security histories. Linked and anonymised across generations, they would show every year how a child's income and education depend on the parents', region by region. AIReF or the INE could publish that indicator annually, and every major reform in education, housing or the labour market would carry an estimate of how it moves it, checked afterwards. A priority that is measured every year gets managed.

The rest of this week takes the pieces one by one: [grants](/en/articles/spain-student-grants-what-they-pay-cost-of-studying-away), [excellence and equality in school](/en/articles/excellence-equality-school-pisa-spain-estonia), [the first three years](/en/articles/early-years-education-0-3-spain-proposal) and the [community around the school](/en/articles/raghuram-rajan-the-third-pillar-explained).

## FAQ

### What is social mobility?

The degree to which a person's position, measured by income, education or occupation, depends on the position of the family they were born into. High mobility means a child's prospects owe little to the parents' situation; low mobility means disadvantage and advantage are inherited.

### What is the social elevator?

A common metaphor for social mobility: the idea that education and work lift people from the floor they were born on. The OECD's 2018 report asked whether it was broken, and found that in Spain it moves slowly, especially at the bottom.

### How many generations does it take to escape poverty in Spain?

The OECD estimated in 2018 that children of low-income families in Spain could need up to four generations to reach the average income. It is an estimate built from how strongly earnings pass from parents to children, and it was the figure behind the headlines about a broken lift.

### Is social mobility in Spain getting better?

The INE's 2023 survey points to some improvement in education: 23.3% of adults who grew up in a poor household now hold a degree, up from 15.8% in the 2019 survey, and the figure is 25.4% among those aged 25 to 44. The gap with those who grew up comfortably (53.1%) remains very wide.

## Sources

- [El "ascensor social" en España está "averiado"](https://www.publico.es/sociedad/ascensor-social-espana-averiado.html), Público (2018)
- [Los españoles pobres tardan hasta cuatro generaciones en alcanzar la media de ingresos](https://www.bolsamania.com/noticias_amp/economia/economia--los-espanoles-pobres-tardan-hasta-cuatro-generaciones-en-alcanzar-la-media-de-ingresos-segun-ocde--3349288.html), Bolsamanía (Europa Press) (2018)
- [Encuesta de Condiciones de Vida 2023: módulo sobre transmisión intergeneracional de la pobreza](https://ine.es/dyngs/Prensa/m2ECV2023.htm), INE (2024)
- [Democracia 21, el nuevo partido de Miriam González que busca romper los dos bloques férreos del bipartidismo, se presenta a las generales del 29N por Madrid y Barcelona](https://www.infobae.com/espana/2026/10/10/democracia-21-el-nuevo-partido-de-miriam-gonzalez-que-busca-romper-los-dos-bloques-ferreos-del-bipartidismo-se-presenta-a-las-generales-del-29n-por-madrid-y-barcelona/), Infobae (2026)