Employment
In Spain, hiring is easy. Everything else isn’t.
You’ll know what every decision costs before you take it, and you’ll never sign anything without knowing what it commits you to.
Spanish employment law is not hostile. It is detailed, it is enforced, and almost none of it works the way a British or American employer expects. The difference between a company that finds it manageable and one that finds it punishing is nearly always how early they found out.
Three moments where Spain costs foreign employers money.
It doesn’t happen because the rules are unfair, but rather because the number arrives after the decision.
You agree a salary against your home benchmark, then discover employer social security of roughly 31% on top, a collective agreement that sets a floor above your figure, and pay delivered in fourteen instalments rather than twelve.
A promotion, a relocation, a shift in hours or duties. In Spain, a term you have applied consistently becomes a condition you cannot easily withdraw. What looks like a gesture becomes a commitment.
The figure you were given was 20 days per year of service. The figure you pay is frequently 33, capped at 24 months’ salary, because the dismissal was found unfair rather than objective. And in some cases the outcome isn’t money at all — it’s the person reinstated.
Every one of the three is knowable in advance. That is what we do for you.
The real cost of hiring, and of letting someone go.
33 days / year, cap 24 months
20 days / year, cap 12 months
Indicative. Employer social security at 31%; unfair dismissal at 33 days per year of service, capped at 24 months’ pay. A fair dismissal on objective grounds is lower — 20 days per year, capped at 12 months — but which of the two applies is decided after the fact, not before. Your collective agreement can change both figures. We identify the one that applies to you by activity and province before you make an offer.
The document you never signed
Someone else has already negotiated your employment terms.
Around 92% of Spanish workers are covered by a convenio colectivo — a sectoral agreement, set by activity and by province, that fixes minimum pay, working hours, extra payments, notice periods and often much more. You are bound by yours whether or not you have read it, and it is chosen by what your company does and where it does it, not by what you’d prefer.
The range is not trivial. The same role can carry a materially different cost depending on the province it sits in — a gap wide enough to change where you put a team.
The first thing we do for any employer is identify the agreement that genuinely applies, map your roles onto its categories and pay tables, and tell you where your existing contracts sit against it. For companies migrating from an EOR, that means checking what the previous employer applied, because if it was wrong, the liability arrives with the people.
What our employment advisors actually do
Payroll is the easy half. Protecting the employer is the job.
Most firms will run your payroll correctly and stop there. Correct payroll is the floor, not the service. What a foreign employer in Spain actually needs is someone whose standing instruction is to keep them out of trouble.
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We tell you what you’re committing to before you sign it.
Contracts, addenda, bonus schemes, remote-work agreements, settlement letters. In Spain the document you sign casually is the document that binds you for years.
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We tell you how to document what you agree.
Most employment claims are lost on evidence rather than on law. Verbal understandings, informal flexibility and undocumented warnings are where employers lose cases they should have won.
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We give you the view that protects the company, even when it isn’t the answer you wanted.
Sometimes the correct advice is that the employee is within their rights and the cheapest route is to accept it. You will get that answer plainly, with the risk of the alternative priced, and the decision stays yours.
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We send you the changes that affect your people, not all of them.
Not a newsletter of everything that moved in Spanish employment law. Alerts filtered by your actual workforce — your collective agreement, your activity, your headcount, your contract types. If it doesn’t touch your team, you don’t hear about it.
What we do every month.
- Payslips prepared and delivered on the date agreed, every month
- Social security filings (RLC and RNT) and payment
- Income tax withholdings on employment income, and the annual returns
- Registrations, deregistrations and contract variations with Social Security
- Contracts, addenda and settlements drafted and filed
- Sick leave, maternity and paternity, and the related benefit claims
- Holiday and time-recording records maintained
- Year-end employment reporting to your parent
- Total cost simulated before every offer goes out
- Exit scenarios calculated before any conversation begins
- The collective agreement identified and your roles mapped onto it
- Alerts on rules and case law, filtered by your workforce, and a warning 90 days before you cross the 10- or 50-employee thresholds
- Your monthly employment report
- Representation and support when a claim arrives, quoted before we start
The left-hand column, the monthly employment report and the pre-hire cost simulation are in every scope, including Managed Payroll. Exit scenarios, the law alerts filtered to your workforce, headcount-threshold warnings, your roles mapped to the agreement, and support when a claim arrives are in Tax & Employment and Full Subsidiary.
One page a month, in plain English.
Your employment costs move every month, and almost no employer finds out why until the year-end. The report covers four things:
- Cost against previous months , by employee, by department and in total — including the month a figure moves in a way that should be explained.
- Absence and its cost , which is the number most employers have never been shown and the one that most often surprises them.
- What’s coming , including agreement revisions, minimum wage changes and any increase in social security rates that will hit next year.
- Anything we noticed and think you should decide about.
Generated from your data by our own system, then read and signed off by the person who knows your business before it reaches you.
And when it goes wrong anyway.
Sooner or later a foreign employer in Spain receives a claim. It does not necessarily mean anything was done badly; it means the system has a low barrier to entry and a conciliation stage that most disputes pass through before anyone sees a courtroom.
When a claim arrives, we prepare the file and represent you at conciliation, quoted before we start, and we tell you honestly at the outset what the realistic range of outcomes is, including the one where settling early is cheaper than being right slowly. If it goes further than conciliation, you are introduced to employment counsel we work with regularly, already briefed, rather than sent to find one.
Employment on its own, if that’s all you need.
Some companies already have a finance team or a group system handling the books, and only need the employment layer run properly in Spain. That’s a real configuration and we sell it.
Payslips, social security, registrations and contracts — everything in the left-hand column above — plus the monthly employment report and the cost simulation before every offer, at one price per employee a month. A one-off onboarding fee per employee, and no charge when people join or leave.
See managed payroll pricing →What Spain requires from your first employee, and from your fiftieth
Compliance and regulatory.
Beyond filings, Spain requires foreign employers to have things in place — protocols, registers, plans, channels — that arrive with headcount rather than revenue and that almost nobody is told about. We tell you which apply today, which will within twelve months, and we implement them.
| Obligation | Applies from |
|---|---|
| Harassment protocol | First employee |
| Digital disconnection policy | First employee |
| Working-time register | First employee |
| Pay register | First employee |
| Health and safety arrangement | First employee |
| Equality plan and pay audit | 50 employees |
| LGTBI protocol | 50 employees |
| Whistleblowing channel | 50 employees |
Health and safety and data protection are delivered with specialist partners, and we say so rather than implying we do everything ourselves.
Before you make the offer, not after.
Send us the role, the salary you had in mind and the province. We’ll come back with the true cost, the collective agreement that applies, and what parting ways would cost if it ever came to that.
Replies within 24 hours.