The Spanish statutory interest rate: who sets it and what it is in 2026

The short answer

The Spanish statutory interest rate is 3.25 %, and it has been since 2023, because the last budget act passed fixed it and none has been passed since².

Almost every other late-payment rate hangs off that figure. The two that do not are unpaid wages, at a flat 10 %¹⁰, and an invoice between businesses, which follows the European Central Bank and stands today at 10.40 %⁸.

What the statutory interest rate is

It is the compensation the law prescribes by default when somebody owes money and pays late. Article 1108 of the Civil Code says it in one line: if the obligation consists of paying a sum of money and the debtor is in default, the compensation shall consist «of paying the agreed interest and, in the absence of agreement, the statutory interest»⁵.

That sentence contains the whole order of priority. What was agreed comes first. If the contract fixes a late-payment rate, that is the one that applies, and the statutory rate only steps in where there is no agreement, which is the commonest case between private parties.

And it does not serve only that purpose. Because it is the one figure the State fixes each year under that name, other statutes use it as a reference: the General Tax Act takes it as the base of its own late-payment interest, the Civil Procedure Act adds two points to it and the Insurance Contract Act increases it by 50 %. Moving the statutory rate moves four rates at once.

Who sets it, and why it is not the Banco de España

When you look the figure up, the first result is usually a Banco de España table. That is where the commonest misunderstanding about this number comes from: the Banco de España publishes it, it does not decide it.

It is decided by Parliament, inside the annual budget. Article 1 of Ley 24/1984 of 29 June, whose very title is «changing the statutory interest rate», says the statutory rate «shall be set in the State Budget Act»¹. Before that statute the rate lived in isolated laws and could sit still for decades: the Civil Code itself still carries notes recalling that an 1899 act put it at 5 % and a 1939 one at 4 %⁵.

There is also a second route almost no page mentions. The second paragraph of that same article, added by Ley 65/1997, lets the Government «revise the rate set for the year by the State Budget Act» in the light of how public-debt yields have moved¹. It is not theoretical: it is exactly what happened in 2009, which is why that year has two rates.

Why it has not moved in four years

The last State Budget Act passed is Ley 31/2022, for the 2023 financial year. Its 42nd additional provision sets the statutory rate at 3.25 % with a tail worth reading in full: «until 31 December 2023»².

In other words, the provision holding up the 2026 figure ran out by its own terms almost three years ago, and that block has not been amended once since publication. What keeps 3.25 % standing is article 134.4 of the Constitution: if the budget act is not passed before the first day of the financial year, «the previous year's budget shall be considered automatically rolled over until the new one is approved»⁴. And the Banco de España publishes 3.25 % for 2024, for 2025 and for 2026³.

The practical consequence is easy to state and hard to find written down: nobody has decided the 2026 statutory rate. It is the 2023 one, carried forward by a budget rollover. That is why the answer to «what is the statutory rate this year» has been the same for four years.

The series, and the year that split in two

The double row for 2009 is the fingerprint of that second route³. It matters because an old debt is not worked out at «the rate of the time» but at the rate of each window: a debt running from 2008 to 2011 has to be split into four pieces, each at its own rate. That is the tedious part of the calculation and it is where almost everyone doing it by hand goes wrong.

The six regimes, which is the real question

Hardly anyone arrives here asking what the statutory rate is. They arrive asking how much they are owed, and for that the first question is not the rate but what kind of debt theirs is.

Three of those rows are worth pausing on.

The guarantee row. Article 26.6 of the General Tax Act sets the 25 % uplift and then adds that, where a debt is deferred, paid in instalments or suspended and is guaranteed in full by a bank guarantee, a mutual guarantee company or a surety insurance certificate, «the interest payable shall be the statutory rate»⁶. Posting the guarantee cuts the rate by 0.8125 points.

The wages row. Article 29.3 of the Workers' Statute says, literally, that «interest for late payment of wages shall be ten per cent of the amount owed»¹⁰. It never writes the word «annual», although in practice it is settled as an annual rate. It is three times the statutory rate, and it is what makes running late on payroll expensive for a Spanish employer.

The invoice row. That is the one that surprises people, and it has a section of its own.

The formula for tax late-payment interest is a default, not a rule

Article 26.6 of the General Tax Act is always quoted by half: late-payment interest is the statutory rate «increased by 25 per cent». The other half of the sentence is «unless the State Budget Act sets a different one»⁶, and that proviso is not decorative.

Compare the two series the Banco de España publishes, the statutory one and the tax late-payment one, and see in which years multiplying by 1.25 gives the published figure³. It gives it exactly in 2005, 2006 and 2007, and in every year from 2010 to today. It does not in 2008, nor in any year before 2005: in 1998 the statutory rate was 5.50 % and the formula would ask for 6.875 %, while the published rate was 7.50 %.

Put another way: for well over a decade the budget act was using its proviso and setting the late-payment rate by hand, and then stopped. That is why this page stores the published series instead of deriving it: the formula is right today, and wrong on the old debt somebody may be settling now.

The invoice between businesses has pulled away from the rest

Article 7 of Ley 3/2004 does not fix a number: it fixes an operation. The rate is the one the European Central Bank applied in its last main refinancing operation before the half-year, plus eight percentage points, and the Treasury publishes it every six months in the official gazette⁷.

In the first half of 2026 the European Central Bank stood at 2.15 %, so the rate was 10.15 %. In the second it rose to 2.40 % and the rate is 10.40 %⁸.

And there is the contrast that explains the whole page. While the statutory rate has been frozen since 2023 because it depends on a law nobody passes, the commercial one has moved six times over the same period because it depends on an auction held every week: a flat 8.00 % from 2016 to 2022, then 10.50, 12.00, 12.50, 12.25, 11.15, 10.15 and 10.40. The two rates diverged for a reason with nothing legal about it.

A fixed amount is added to the interest as well. Article 8.1 requires 40 € for recovery costs «in every case and without any express request», and allows evidenced costs above that to be claimed too⁷. On a 500 € invoice paid a month late, the interest is 4.17 € and the compensation is 40 €: nearly ten times more.

When the clock starts

The start date is the other half of the calculation, and the six cases do not answer it alike.

In civil law default does not begin on its own. Article 1100 of the Civil Code requires the creditor to demand payment, in or out of court, unless the obligation or a statute expressly says otherwise or the agreed date was a determining reason for the contract⁵. In practice the day that counts is usually the formal demand.

On a commercial transaction the opposite applies: article 6 of Ley 3/2004 grants the interest on two conditions only, that the creditor performed and that payment did not arrive on time⁷. No warning is needed.

With the tax office the same holds, with a harsher twist: article 26.1 says that charging late-payment interest «does not require a prior demand from the administration nor a culpable delay»⁶. In exchange, paragraph 4 stops the clock when it is the administration that misses its own deadlines to decide.

With a judgment, article 576 counts from the moment it is given at first instance, not from the moment it becomes final, and its paragraph 3 reaches every jurisdiction and also arbitration awards and mediation agreements⁹.

And with insurance, the clock starts on the date of the loss, not on the claim nor on the insurer's refusal¹¹.

A worked example with real numbers

A debt of 10,000 € demanded on 20 September 2025 and paid on 20 September 2026. That is 365 days. The same money and the same dates, under all six regimes:

Between the first figure and the last there is more than a threefold gap, and neither the amount nor the calendar has changed. All that changes is who owes whom.

The commercial row is not a round number because the period crosses 1 July: 181 days at 10.15 % and 184 at 10.40 %. It is the same window-by-window split any debt crossing a rate change needs, and it is what the Spanish statutory interest calculator does without anyone having to do it by hand.

How it is worked out, in one line

Simple interest, day by day: the amount owed times the rate of the window, times the days in that window, divided by the days in its year, which is 366 in a leap year. Then the windows are added up.

Simple rather than compound, for a specific reason: article 1109 of the Civil Code makes interest that has already accrued earn the statutory rate itself only «from the moment it is claimed in court»⁵. Before that moment, compounding it means claiming something the statute does not give.