What happened to Spain's Plan MOVES, and what the EV grant pays now

Spain's Plan MOVES has a naming problem. It is the electric-car purchase grant that most people in the country remember, it has been the most searched term in its category for years, and the state programme behind it stopped being in force on 31 December 2024. It came back during 2025, went away again, and what exists today is called something else.

This page sets out exactly what happened, with the dates and the statutes, and what grant somebody buying an electric car in Spain can claim now.

The short answer

Plan MOVES III was created by Royal Decree 266/2021 and its article 4.1 set how long it ran for.³ That article was amended four times, and the last wording that has survived is the one from Royal Decree-law 4/2024, which left the programme in force «from the day after publication of this royal decree in the Official State Gazette until 31 December 2024».⁴

Since 24 July 2026 the Spanish state grant for buying an electric vehicle has been the Auto+ programme, under Royal Decree 609/2026.¹ It is a different programme in almost everything that matters to a buyer: another ministry, another territorial scope, other amounts and other criteria.

How a programme died and came back, in four steps

The history is worth telling because it explains why half the internet still describes a programme that does not exist.

First, Royal Decree-law 4/2024 extended MOVES III to 31 December 2024. Its preamble says so plainly: «given the interest observed in the MOVES III aid programme […] and in view of its imminent end on 31 July 2024, it is appropriate to extend its validity to the coming 31 December».⁴

Second, on 23 December 2024 the Government approved a decree-law extending it again, this time into 2025.

Third, and here is the detail almost nobody connects with electric cars: Parliament struck down that decree-law in full, and the Resolution of 22 January 2025 left without effect the amendment to article 4.1 of MOVES III that it contained.⁵ The extension did not fall because anybody had anything against electric-car grants: it fell because the vehicle carrying it was an omnibus decree-law with many other measures inside, and it sank with all of them. That same resolution also took down, for instance, the extension of the turnover thresholds for Spain's flat-rate tax regime for the self-employed.

Fourth, the Government had to rebuild it. Royal Decree-law 3/2025, of 1 April, re-established MOVES III and did so retroactively: «the period of validity of this programme runs from 1 January to 31 December 2025», treating as valid any application filed from 1 January onwards.⁶ There was therefore a quarter in which the programme formally did not exist, covered afterwards.

For 2026 there was no fifth step. There was a new programme.

What changes with the Auto+ programme

You no longer apply through your region

This is the structural change and the one that confuses people most. MOVES III was a «direct award of aid to the regions and to the cities of Ceuta and Melilla»: the State split the money between them and each opened its own call, with its own timetable and its own rate of exhausting the funds.³ That is why, when you search for «MOVES III», the first results are regional energy agencies.

Article 2.1 of Royal Decree 609/2026 says that «the geographical scope of the vehicle purchases covered by the aid is the whole national territory», and the calls are approved by ministerial order of the Minister for Industry and Tourism.¹ The question «how much do they give in my region?» has stopped having a different answer per region.

The responsible ministry changes too: MOVES III belonged to the Ministry for the Ecological Transition, and Auto+ belongs to the Ministry of Industry and Tourism. That is not an administrative detail; it is a change of purpose, and it shows in the criteria.

Scrappage is out and industrial policy is in

The feature most people remember about MOVES is that it paid considerably more if you deregistered an old vehicle. In the Auto+ programme that does not exist: the royal decree never mentions scrappage in any article. The only references to deregistering a vehicle are in article 10 and they point the other way, because they are the duty to keep the car for two years and the exceptions for theft, accident, serious manufacturing defect or the death of the beneficiary.¹

What has filled that space is the European criterion, which adds up to 25 % more to the maximum: 15 % if final assembly and finishing before sale took place at at least one industrial facility in the European Union, and another 10 % if part of the battery's manufacture, which must include at least the assembly of the battery packs, also took place in the Union.¹

The grant has stopped rewarding you for taking an old car off the road and has started rewarding where the one you buy was built.

The amount is a sum of criteria

This is the hardest part to explain and the part that moves the most money. The figure in the headlines (€4,500 for a car, €5,000 for a van) is the maximum in the annex, not the grant. Paragraph 2 of annexes II and III requires it to be worked out «cumulatively […] as a percentage applied to the maximum amount».¹

All four together come to exactly 100 %, and that is the only case in which the full maximum is paid. The practical consequence is that the same headline is worth very different things:

Two and a half times, on the same programme and the same vehicle category.

Who is buying changes the ceiling

The programme has two lines. Line 1 is for adults who do not carry on an economic activity and are legally resident in Spain. Line 2 is for those who do, and it also covers renting and finance leases signed in Spain on a contract of at least three years.¹

Within Line 2, annex III carries three different tables, and the gaps are wide:

Two things in that table stand out. The first is that a large company gets exactly what a private buyer gets, while a sole trader gets a third more. The second is that the largest amount in the programme, that €12,000 for a van, sits in the line co-financed by the Social Climate Fund, which in exchange only takes zero-emission vehicles and expressly excludes plug-in hybrids and range-extenders.¹

The conditions that decide whether you can claim

The zero-emissions badge is the door. Article 1.1 excludes from the programme every vehicle without the CERO badge issued by Spain's traffic authority.¹ A non-plug-in hybrid is out however little it burns.

There are price ceilings. A car cannot cost more than €45,000 and a motorcycle more than €10,000, measured on the invoice and before tax. Line 2 has an exception worth knowing: a car with eight or nine seats has no price ceiling, while one with up to seven does.

The dealer has to put in €1,000. It is the least known condition of the programme and it is not public money. Article 8.3.b).5 requires the invoice to «evidence a discount of at least 1,000 euros on the sale price (excluding taxes) of the vehicle, recorded under a heading unmistakably related to the Auto+ Programme», provided the vehicle is new and in category M1 or N1.¹ The first transitional provision exempts vehicles bought before the 2026 window opened.

You have to keep the car for two years. Article 10.1.d) requires you to keep the vehicle in your name and registered in Spain for at least two years from the award, except where it is written off through theft, an accident or irreparable damage, replaced because of a serious manufacturing defect, or the beneficiary dies. Outside those cases, the whole grant is repaid.¹

The calendar, and why it matters now

Article 6 does not fix a date: it says the application window «shall be the one established in the relevant call, and shall run until 15 October of the current year at the latest», and that it only extends to 31 December where the funding behind the call can be carried over.¹

There is a second clock, the money. Article 5.4 explains what happens when the budget runs out: later applications can still be filed, but they join a waiting list served «in strict order of filing» and only if others withdraw. The article says in as many words that «in no case shall the filing of an application and its inclusion in the waiting list referred to in this paragraph give rise to any entitlement to receive aid».¹ The 2026 call is funded with €350 million for Line 1 and €50 million for Line 2.

The first transitional provision deals with those who have already bought: for the 2026 call, new vehicles first registered in the beneficiary's name from 1 January 2026 qualify, as do vehicles bought through a dealer whose first registration as a new vehicle was on or after 1 January 2025.¹

A change from two weeks ago

The Auto+ programme has already been amended once. Royal Decree 724/2026, of 9 September, in force since 11 September 2026, rewrote article 4.2 and removed the exclusion of undertakings in difficulty that the original wording carried for Line 2.² The July version ended by saying that «undertakings in difficulty as defined in article 2.18 of that Regulation may not qualify as beneficiaries»; the version in force ends earlier, at the reference to articles 13.2 and 13.3 bis of the Subsidies Act.

It is a small change in length and a large one for whoever it touches: a company in difficulty could not apply to Line 2 until 10 September and can apply from the 11th.

A worked example with real numbers

A private buyer purchases a battery-electric car whose invoice, before tax and with extras included, comes to €30,000. The car was assembled outside the European Union.

• The maximum for its category in Line 1 is €4,500.
• The electric criterion contributes 50 %, because it is battery-electric.
• The price criterion contributes 25 %, because €30,000 does not reach the €35,000 that splits the band.
• The European criterion contributes nothing, because assembly was not in the Union.
• The total is 75 % of €4,500, which is €3,375.00.
• It falls €1,125.00 short of the maximum, and that shortfall is exactly what the two European criteria it does not meet are worth.
• On top of that come the €1,000.00 the dealer is obliged to discount on the invoice, so the total saving on the purchase is €4,375.00.

If the same buyer chose a plug-in hybrid at €40,000, the total would be 25 + 15 = 40 %, which is €1,800.00. Same programme, same week, €1,575 less.

What to do now

If you are thinking of buying, the three useful questions are which percentage your car falls into, whether the call for your line is still open, and whether the model is on the programme's White List, which is what the extra 10 % for the battery depends on under the second transitional provision.¹

The first is answered by the calculator on this page, which breaks the criteria out one by one so the figure can be checked against the gazette. The other two have to be looked up in the current call, because neither the exact date nor the list of models is in the royal decree.

And if what worries you is what the car costs once you own it, Spanish road tax is the other number you pay every year, with its own municipal reductions for electric vehicles.