Spain over time

Between 2015 and 2025, house prices rose 80%, the average wage per worker 25% and consumer prices 27%. Adjusted for inflation, buying a home costs 42% more than ten years ago, while the average wage buys 1.5% less than it did then.

See also: Note: real wages and the minimum wage since 2008

Seen from 2008, the cycle is complete: after the bubble, house prices fell 35% until 2013 and have almost doubled since. In 2025 they were 22% above their previous peak, in current euros.

At the end of September the government approved two rental decrees: they capped the annual rent update at 2%, allowed leases to be extended and set compensation if the landlord did not renew them. On 2 October Congress did not validate them and they were struck down. Three days later the election was called.

What this data does not say. The prices in the charts for Spain and the regions are sale prices. For rents we only use the deposits lodged with the Catalan government, so rents in Catalonia cannot be compared with other regions using the same source. The deposits cover long-term residential leases with a lodged deposit: they do not include seasonal lets or contracts without a deposit. The comparison between Catalan municipalities with and without a cap is not an experiment: capped municipalities are more urban and more expensive, so the difference cannot be attributed to the rule alone. And the tenants' cost overburden comes from a European survey, with its margin of error.

See also: The parliament in data: wages, jobs and public finances since 2023

Read the full theme, with all three lenses

Who votes with whom

If two parties almost always vote the same way, they are stable allies; if almost never, they are in opposing blocs. PP and PSOE have voted the same way in 39% of the votes. The pairs that agree most are PP and UPN (91%), ERC and EH Bildu (85%) and PSOE and Sumar (83%).

The partners who backed the 2023 investiture do not vote as a bloc. The PSOE agrees with the PNV in 75% of the votes and with Junts in 62%. And PP and Vox, the two largest opposition parties, have voted the same way 63% of the time.

Who wins the votes

The PSOE, the governing party, has been on the winning side in 84% of the votes of this parliament, and the PP, the main opposition party, in 68%. The gap has narrowed: in 2024 the PSOE won between 84% and 94% of the votes each quarter, and in 2026, between 71% and 81%. The PP has gone from between 58% and 74% in 2024 to between 75% and 80% in 2026.

The decrees that fell

A decree-law comes into force when the government approves it, but Congress has to validate it within a month. This parliament has struck down 13: the 11 already in the open data and the two rental decrees struck down on 2 October 2026, three days before the election was called.

In the 11 with a published vote, PP and Vox always voted against, and Junts in 10 of them. PSOE, Sumar, ERC and EH Bildu always voted in favour. One more decree, 8/2023, tied at 171 votes and was saved in the repeat vote, which is not in the open data.

These figures count every vote equally: a motion with no legal effect weighs the same as a law. They show alliances and trends, not the importance of what was voted on.

Read the full theme, with all three lenses

An economy can grow because more people are working and spending or because each person produces more. Between 2019, the last year before the pandemic, and 2025, Spain's GDP grew 10.0%. Population rose 4.8% and GDP per person 5.0%: half of the growth is due to each factor. Since 2023, GDP per person has grown faster (4.2%) than population (2.1%).

The Bank of Spain, in its 2025 Annual Report, attributes the rise in the economy's potential growth, above 2%, to population dynamism, faster productivity growth and investment. Much of the population growth is due to immigration.

See also: Immigration in data

Between 2023 and 2025, the average wage per worker rose 7.2% and consumer prices 5.5%. Adjusted for inflation, the average wage has gained 1.6% in purchasing power. That gain comes after the loss of 2022, when prices rose 8.4% and wages 4.6%: compared with 2019, before the pandemic, the purchasing power of the average wage is practically unchanged. Taking a longer view, since 2008, the real average wage is 3.7% lower.

See also: Note: real wages and the minimum wage since 2008

The public deficit, the difference between what all levels of government spend and what they take in, fell from 3.3% of GDP in 2023 to 2.4% in 2025, the lowest in the series, which starts in 2008, and below the EU average of 3.1%. Revenue went from 42.1% to 42.9% of GDP, the highest in the series, and spending from 45.4% to 45.3%: almost all the improvement is on the revenue side.

AIReF, Spain's independent fiscal authority (report on the initial 2026 budgets, April 2026), explains the 2025 fall, from 3.2% to 2.4%: it is mainly due to the lower cost of the measures for the energy crisis and the DANA floods (eight tenths of a point) and of one-off operations (three tenths), while the rest of revenue and spending pushed the deficit up by three tenths. For 2026, AIReF expects the deficit to rise to 2.6% of GDP, mainly because of two packages of measures approved that year: one for the storms and another for the crisis in the Middle East.

What this data does not say. None of these figures depends on the central government alone: the European economic cycle, population growth, energy prices and the decisions of regions and local councils, which also count towards the deficit and debt, all play a part. Revenue rising as a share of GDP can be due to tax rises, more jobs and profits, or inflation lifting tax takings, and the aggregate data does not separate those effects. Eurostat's 2025 data is provisional and may be revised. This review describes how Spain has changed during the parliament; it does not hand out credit or blame.

Read the full theme, with all three lenses

Policy file: the 2021 labour reform

1. What it is. Royal Decree-law 32/2021 of 28 December, agreed by the government with the trade unions and employers' organisations. It abolished the project-based contract (obra y servicio), limited temporary contracts to specific, short-term causes, tightened the rules on chaining contracts and widened the use of the permanent seasonal contract (fijo discontinuo).
2. When. It came into force on 31 December 2021, but the contract changes have applied since 30 March 2022.
3. What should happen. Fewer temporary contracts and more stable jobs. The risk its critics pointed to was that temporary contracts would turn into permanent ones that were just as unstable, especially permanent seasonal ones.
4. What we compare it with. With the public sector, which mostly hires under its own rules. It is not a perfect comparison: Law 20/2021 to reduce temporary employment among interim staff was passed at the same time.

Between 2008 and 2021, temporary employment in the private sector rose and fell with the cycle, but it did not drop below 21% in any quarter. In 2021, the average was 23.7%. Since the new contracts have applied it has fallen quickly, and in the last year it was 12.4%, the lowest level in the series, which starts in 2008. In the public sector, temporary employment kept rising to over 32% in the year ending in the second quarter of 2022, and has since fallen to 27.0%, a level similar to 2019. Between 2021 and the last year, temporary employment has fallen 11.3 points in the private sector and 4.2 in the public sector.

Part of the change has gone into permanent seasonal contracts (fijos discontinuos), a permanent contract for seasonal or intermittent work in which no wage is paid between one period of activity and the next. They were 2.5% of private-sector employees in 2021 and 4.1% in the last year. If they are added to temporary workers, the share falls from 26.2% to 16.5%: almost 10 points, less than temporary employment alone, but still a big drop.

What the independent evaluations say. The Bank of Spain (Annual Report 2023) concluded that job stability as a whole had increased slightly, because permanent contracts weigh much more, although new permanent contracts, and especially permanent seasonal ones, last somewhat less than before. Of the contracts signed in March 2022, 16.1% were still active a year later, against 11% of those signed in March 2017 and 2018. It warns that the comparison is not causal.

AIReF, Spain's independent fiscal authority (technical paper, September 2025), compares the sectors and occupations most exposed to temporary employment with the rest. It finds that the reform slightly reduced the probability of losing a job and somewhat improved the probability of finding one, and that it increased the shift from temporary to permanent seasonal contracts, but it finds no clear effect on the shift to ordinary permanent contracts or on total job growth. It urges caution: these are average effects, over a few years and with many other changes at the same time.

In short: temporary employment has fallen much more in the private sector than in the public sector and than in Europe, and both evaluations link that fall to the reform. What is still under debate is how much more stable the jobs that replaced it are.

What this data does not say. The EPA (Labour Force Survey) is a survey of people, not a register of contracts: it says how many employees have a temporary contract, but not how many contracts are signed or how long they last. That requires Social Security registration records, which are what the Bank of Spain and AIReF use. The public sector is not a perfect comparison group, because it had its own law against temporary employment at the same time. And the youth unemployment rate is calculated over young people looking for work, not all of them: many under-25s are studying and do not count as active.

See also: Note: real wages and the minimum wage since 2008

See also: The parliament in data: unemployment, growth and the employment rate since 2023

Read the full theme, with all three lenses

Each dot is a published poll; the line is our average. The average gives more weight to recent polls and to those with large samples, and counts each pollster only once a week so that those that publish more often do not dominate. Online panels without probability sampling and polls commissioned by parties are shown, but they do not enter the average.

A poll is not a forecast. It measures stated intention over a few specific days, with a margin of error of two to three points for a sample of a thousand interviews, and each pollster adjusts its data with its own method. That is why polls differ from one another and why it is better to look at the average than at a single figure.

Read the full theme, with all three lenses

In 1975 Spain had 2.77 children per woman. In 1981 the indicator fell below 2.1 for the first time (2.04), the level at which a population stays stable without migration, and kept falling to 1.13 in 1998. It recovered to 1.44 in 2008 and has fallen again since: 1.10 in 2024, the lowest figure in the series. In the EU only Malta has fewer children per woman, and no country reaches 2.1.

Why is spending rising? Between 2008 and 2024, pension spending adjusted for inflation grew 53.5%. Two reasons add up: the number of pensioners rose 21.4%, to 10.4 million, and real spending per pensioner 26.4%. Roughly, 45% of the rise is because there are more pensioners and 55% because they receive more.

The average pension does not rise only because existing pensions are uprated. New retirees had, on average, higher wages and longer contribution records than the people whose pensions stop being paid. That is why the average pension can grow faster than inflation even though each pension is only uprated in line with it.

What comes next? According to INE's projections, the dependency ratio will go from 31.7 in 2025 to 51.8 in 2050. It would reach 52.2 in 2054, fall slightly and rise again to 53.1 in 2075.

INE's central scenario assumes that immigrants keep arriving at the pace of recent years. If as many people arrived as left, the ratio would reach 69.9 in 2050 and 90.4 in 2075. The difference between those two scenarios is much larger than between INE's own high and low fertility scenarios: of the assumptions INE tests, net migration is the one that moves the projection most.

See also: Immigration in data: who arrives, where they work and how much they weigh in the population

Policy file: the 2021 and 2023 pension reforms

1. What it is. Two laws. Law 21/2021 goes back to uprating pensions every year in line with average inflation. Royal Decree-law 2/2023 raises the system's revenue: an earmarked contribution, the Intergenerational Equity Mechanism (MEI), which starts at 0.6 points in 2023 and rises by a tenth a year to 1.2 in 2029; an increase in the maximum contribution base of 1.2 points a year above inflation between 2024 and 2050; an additional solidarity contribution on wages above that base, from 2025; and the option of calculating the pension over the last 29 years, discarding the 24 worst months.
2. Who and when. Parliament passed Law 21/2021 in December 2021. The Council of Ministers approved Royal Decree-law 2/2023 in March 2023 and Congress validated it.
3. What should happen. Pensions should keep their purchasing power and the new revenue should cover part of the rise in spending. The law includes a safeguard clause: every three years, AIReF (Spain's independent fiscal authority) checks whether average pension spending between 2022 and 2050, net of the new revenue, exceeds 13.3% of GDP. If it does, the government must propose measures or, failing that, raise the MEI.
4. What we compare it with. With the spending projections of AIReF and the European Commission, and with the rest of the public finances.

What the independent evaluations say. AIReF (Study 1/2026, May 2026) concludes that the rule is being met: spending net of the new revenue measures will average 13.0% of GDP between 2022 and 2050, below 13.3%. Those measures would bring in 1.6% of GDP a year on average, 0.4% from the MEI. But AIReF itself warns that the rule is not a good indicator of sustainability: it expects gross pension spending to go from 13% to 16.4% of GDP between 2025 and 2050, transfers from the State and other Social Security funds to pay for it to rise by 2.3 points of GDP, to 3.0%, and, if policies do not change, public debt to reach 123% of GDP in 2050.

Ángel de la Fuente (Fedea, April 2025) shares those doubts and questions how the rule was applied in its first evaluation: he criticises counting State transfers as system revenue and the upward revision of GDP forecasts, and points out that a tenth of a point either way would have changed the result. The evidence is therefore inconclusive: the rule is met, but there is no agreement that this guarantees the system is sustainable without new measures.

What this data does not say. Pension spending is measured in different ways: Eurostat's includes civil servants and is broader than Social Security's, and AIReF's does not match either, so the figures cannot be added to or subtracted from each other. People in work in the EPA are not the same as contributors registered with Social Security, nor does everyone over 64 draw a pension. The replacement ratio compares two different groups of people and does not say whether pensions are adequate, nor does it capture poverty among older people. Projections show what would happen if their assumptions held, not what will happen. And none of this data makes it possible to attribute the trend in spending to a particular government: it depends above all on demographics and on rules passed over decades.

Read the full theme, with all three lenses

Arrivals have not been steady. Between 2002 and 2009, the foreign-born went from 5.7% to 13.5% of the population. With the crisis, the figure stalled and then fell slightly, to 12.7% in 2015 and 2016. Since 2017 it has been rising again, and faster since 2023. The population of foreign nationality follows the same curve, lower down (14.6% in 2026). The gap between the two lines corresponds to people born abroad who hold Spanish nationality, net of foreign nationals born in Spain.

All of Spain's population growth since 2013 is due to the foreign-born. The population born in Spain peaked that year, at 40.5 million people, and has fallen every year since, to 39.6 million in 2026. The foreign-born population has gone, over the same period, from 6.2 to 10.0 million.

Where they come from has changed too. Between 2005 and 2019, the largest group were people born in other European countries, mostly in the EU. Since 2020 it has been people born in South America: 3.7 million on 1 January 2025, almost five times more than in 2002 (0.8 million). By country, the first is Morocco (1.17 million), followed by Colombia (0.98), Venezuela (0.69), Romania (0.52) and Ecuador (0.47).

The foreign-born are, above all, people of working age. On 1 January 2026 they were 25.5% of the population aged 15 to 64, against 6.8% in 2002. Among people born in Spain there are 38.8 people aged 65 or over for every 100 aged 15 to 64; among the foreign-born, 11.1. For the whole population, the figure is 31.7. The ratio of older people to people of working age is one of the factors behind pension spending. But immigrants age too: between 2004 and 2026, the ratio for the foreign-born has gone from 7.0 to 11.1.

See also: Demographics and pensions: an ageing country

Policy file: the 2026 extraordinary regularisation

1. What it is. An exceptional route to a one-year residence and work permit, intended for foreign nationals who were already in Spain before 1 January 2026 without a permit, or who had applied for international protection before that date. It is governed by Royal Decree 316/2026, which amends the 2024 Immigration Regulation.
2. Who and when. The Council of Ministers approved it on 14 April 2026 and it was published in the official gazette (BOE) the next day. Applications could be submitted from 16 April to 30 June. Applicants needed at least five consecutive months in Spain and no criminal record and, under the general route, to have worked or want to work, to live with minor children or other dependent relatives, or to be in a certified situation of vulnerability. According to the government, there have been six earlier processes since 1986, with almost 1.3 million people regularised.
3. What should happen. People who already live and work in Spain should move into the formal economy, contribute to Social Security and pay taxes. Its critics point to the risk that it encourages more people to arrive irregularly, the so-called «pull effect».
4. What we compare it with. There is no official data on its results yet. The most studied precedent is the 2005 regularisation.

What research says about 2005: Ferran Elias, Joan Monras and Javier Vázquez-Grenno (Journal of Labor Economics, 2025) study that process, in which almost 600,000 people obtained a residence and work permit. They find that social security contributions rose by at least 4,000 euros a year for each regularised worker, that the wages of low-skilled native workers in the formal sector rose and that arrivals did not increase. Also that some of those regularised later returned to the informal economy. It is a single episode, in the middle of an economic boom, and need not repeat itself in the same way in 2026.

On the effect of immigration on the economy, the Bank of Spain estimates in its 2025 Annual Report that the arrival of immigrants would explain around half of GDP growth and more than two thirds of the rise in employment in recent years. Measured per person, the effect is smaller: between 2022 and 2024, the foreign population contributed between 0.4 and 0.7 points to annual growth in GDP per capita, which was 2.9% (Cuadrado and Regil, Economic Bulletin, 2025). These are accounting breakdowns, not causal estimates, and they do not say what the long-term fiscal balance will be when today's immigrants draw their pensions.

What this data does not say. Population figures do not distinguish between people with a residence permit and people without one, so they cannot tell how many people are in an irregular situation. Each year's arrivals and departures cannot be followed in a long series either: INE changed the way it measures them in 2021 and, for that same year, the old statistic counted some 529,000 immigrations from abroad and the new one some 888,000. And unemployment by region is measured by nationality: it cannot tell how much of the gap with Spaniards is due to age, education, sector or how long they have been in Spain.

Read the full theme, with all three lenses

Until 2008, regional debt moved between 5.5% and 6.7% of GDP. With the crisis it tripled in five years, to 18.3% at the end of 2012, and since 2014 it has not fallen below 20%. As a share of GDP it has fallen since 2021, but in euros it keeps growing: from 303,992 million at the end of 2020 to 355,241 million in June 2026.

In July 2012, with many regions struggling to borrow on the markets, central government created the Regional Liquidity Fund, a voluntary mechanism to lend them the money they needed to meet their maturities. Other central government mechanisms with the same aim have operated alongside it. Since then, much of the regions' new debt has been lent by central government: at the end of 2024 it was the creditor for 62.8% of it. In the first half of 2026, debt owed to banks, markets and other creditors grew by 16,500 million euros, while debt owed to central government fell.

For government as a whole, what a region owes central government is offset by what central government has lent: that is why total public debt, the figure compared across Europe, does not count it twice. If central government takes on part of that debt, regional debt falls, but debt for government as a whole does not change: what changes is who owes it.

What this data does not say. Debt measures what is owed, not whether the money was well spent or on what. Funding per adjusted inhabitant is a Fedea calculation at equal tax effort: it does not include what each region collects above or below that by raising or lowering its taxes, and Fedea presents the 2024 results as provisional. Adjusted population is the estimate of needs set by the law itself, and it is debated. The foral regions cannot be compared with the same measure. This data does not allow a region's debt to be attributed to its funding, its management or a particular government. And the European comparison adds up levels of government that do not have the same responsibilities in each country.

See also: The parliament in data: debt and deficit for government as a whole

Read the full theme, with all three lenses

The pandemic sent waits soaring: in June 2020, patients had been on the list for 170 days on average, against 121 at the end of 2019. The average time has returned to that level (122 days at the end of 2025), but the list is longer. The peak was at the end of 2023, with 18.1 patients per 1,000 inhabitants. More patients join than before, 2.81 million in 2025 against 2.47 million in 2019, but per inhabitant almost the same number (58.2 per 1,000 against 57.2). The list per inhabitant, by contrast, is 14% longer than at the end of 2019.

In 2024, public health spending by all levels of government came to 101,739 million euros, and it is increasingly concentrated in hospitals and specialists. The prescription bill has grown much less and lost weight. Part of the change is an accounting one: medicines dispensed in hospital do not count as pharmacy but as hospital spending, and this data does not allow them to be separated. Primary care, the entry point to the system, keeps almost the same share as in 2002, around one in every seven euros.

What this data does not say. The waiting list measures how long those still on it have waited, not how long the others took to be operated on, and it leaves out those waiting by their own choice or for clinical reasons. Each region counts its own list and is responsible for its data, according to the Ministry itself, which compiles them; in the past there have been changes in counting methods that break the series, such as Andalusia's in 2018. Spending per inhabitant does not take into account the age of the population or what the civil servants' mutual funds pay in each territory. The European comparison mixes systems with different packages of services: household payments are higher where the public system covers less, such as dental care. And neither waits nor spending say anything about the quality of care or its health outcomes, nor do they allow the differences to be attributed to the management of a particular government.

See also: Regional finance: who raises the money, who receives it and whom the regions owe

See also: Demographics and pensions: an ageing country

Read the full theme, with all three lenses