Spain has one of the more generous leave systems in Europe, and it is built on a design choice worth understanding before the individual entitlements: a good deal of paid leave in Spain is funded by Social Security rather than by the employer, and the headline family entitlements are identical for both parents. That combination changes both who bears the cost and how the employer administers each leave, which is why running payroll in Spain is less about the length of leave and more about knowing, for each type, who pays and what the employer still has to do. Let me go through the main entitlements, flag the July 2025 expansion that increased several of them, and be clear throughout about where the cost falls.
Annual leave and public holidays
The baseline is 30 calendar days of paid annual leave a year, set by the Workers' Statute. Because those are calendar days rather than working days, 30 calendar days works out to roughly 22 working days, but the law counts them as calendar days and that is how they are granted. Leave accrues at 2.5 calendar days for each month worked, and Spain is firm that it has to be taken rather than paid off: an employer cannot buy out annual leave during employment, and the only permitted payout is for accrued-but-untaken days when someone leaves. The employer pays annual leave in full, and because Spanish salaries are structured across 14 payments a year, the holiday pay flows through that structure rather than as a separate bonus.
On top of vacation, workers get 14 public holidays a year, a mix of national, regional, and local days. The regional and local component means the exact calendar differs by where the worker is based, so two employees in different autonomous communities can have different holidays.
Birth and childcare leave: identical for both parents
The entitlement that most distinguishes Spain is birth and childcare leave, the permiso por nacimiento y cuidado de menor, and its defining feature is equality. Both parents receive the same leave, and it is individual and non-transferable, so one parent cannot hand their entitlement to the other. This is a real contrast with the many countries that give a long maternity leave and a short paternity one.
The length was 16 weeks per parent, and under Real Decreto-ley 9/2025 (July 2025) it rose to 19 weeks per parent, with an extra two weeks per child for multiple births or disability. Of the 19 weeks, the first six are mandatory, taken full-time and immediately after the birth; a further eleven can be taken flexibly until the child turns one; and the final two are for childcare and can be taken at any point until the child turns eight. Single-parent families were brought up to a substantially longer combined entitlement of 32 weeks, so a single parent is not disadvantaged by having only one entitlement to draw on.
The key point for payroll is that this leave is paid at 100 percent by Social Security, through the INSS, and paid to the worker directly, not through the employer's payroll. The employer's obligation is to hold the job open and to handle the administration around the benefit, not to fund the salary during the leave. That is very different from a system where the employer funds maternity pay, and it is the single most important thing to get right in Spanish leave administration: the money comes from Social Security, not from the employer.
Parental leave, breastfeeding, and family care
Separate from birth leave, there is the longer-standing parental leave under the EU work-life-balance rules, the permiso parental, which provides up to eight weeks to care for a child up to age eight. That leave is unpaid unless a collective bargaining agreement provides otherwise. It is distinct from the two paid childcare weeks that now form part of the 19-week birth entitlement described above.
Breastfeeding leave, the permiso de lactancia, runs until the child is nine months old and gives the worker a daily reduction of about an hour, which can often be accumulated into a block of full days instead. Family care leave was strengthened in 2023: a worker is now entitled to five paid working days a year to care for a family member or cohabitant in the event of a serious accident, illness, hospitalization, or surgery, up from the two days it used to be. And there is a separate force-majeure leave of up to four days a year, paid, for urgent unforeseeable family matters. Both of these are employer-paid, so unlike birth leave, they are processed on payroll.
The shorter statutory leaves
Spain also mandates several short paid leaves that are less common elsewhere and that the employer funds directly. Marriage or the registration of a civil partnership gives 15 calendar days of paid leave. Bereavement gives two working days, or four if travel is required, with many collective bargaining agreements extending it. There is a day of paid leave for moving home, and paid time off to attend to an unavoidable public or civic duty, such as jury service. These are small individually, but they are genuine entitlements, they are the employer's cost, and collective bargaining agreements frequently improve on the statutory minimums, so the applicable collective bargaining agreement has to be checked rather than assumed.
Sick leave and incapacitating menstruation
Sick leave in Spain runs through the temporary-incapacity (incapacidad temporal) system. After a short initial period, Social Security funds the benefit, with the employer often required to top it up to a higher percentage under the applicable collective bargaining agreement, and the employer typically acts as the paying agent even for the Social Security portion. Since 2023, Spain has also recognized medically certified incapacitating menstruation as a form of temporary incapacity, funded by Social Security from the first day rather than after the usual waiting period, which was a notable and widely discussed addition to the system.
What this means for anyone running Spanish payroll
For payroll, the key question about any Spanish leave is not how long it lasts but who pays for it. The big family entitlements, birth and childcare leave and much of sick leave, are funded by Social Security and paid to the worker, so the employer's job is to keep the position open and administer the benefit rather than to fund the salary. The shorter leaves, marriage, bereavement, family care, force majeure, moving, and civic duty, are the employer's own cost and run through payroll directly. And several of these entitlements increased in July 2025, with birth leave rising to 19 weeks per parent and enhanced provision for single parents, so an entitlement table built before mid-2025 is already out of date.
Two things in particular need to be correct. First, the employer-versus-Social-Security split, because treating a Social-Security-funded leave as an employer cost, or the reverse, produces both a wrong payslip and a wrong contribution position. Second, the applicable collective bargaining agreement, which in Spain frequently extends the statutory leaves and changes the sick-pay top-up, so the same statutory leave can have different terms from one sector or province to the next.
Flux tracks each leave type by who funds it and applies the current statutory durations, including the July 2025 increases, alongside the enhancements in the applicable collective bargaining agreement, so a worker on birth leave is administered as a Social-Security benefit while a worker on family-care leave is paid correctly by the employer. For an employer, the practical takeaways are to confirm whether each leave is Social-Security-funded or employer-paid, to check the applicable collective bargaining agreement for enhancements, and to work from the post-July-2025 durations rather than the older ones.
Greg Miaskiewicz
CEO & Co-Founder