Spanish student grant amounts: what each threshold pays

Spain's general study grant is not paid as an amount. It is paid as a set of components, and the income threshold your household falls in decides which of them you receive. That distinction looks like a technicality, and it is what makes two students with very similar family incomes end up with different sums and a different composition. It is also what gets lost in almost every summary.

This year's figures are in Royal Decree 179/2026 of 11 March, which the sector calls "the threshold decree"¹. That decree does not regulate the grant: it puts numbers on a regime that lives in another rule, Royal Decree 1721/2007³. Which is why the amounts change every course and the rules almost never do.

The 2026-2027 amounts

There are six possible components and no grant pays all of them. Four have a closed figure, one has only a minimum, and the last is not a figure at all.

The residence amount carries a condition worth reading: article 4.1.b) requires proof of the need to live away from the family home "by reason of the distance" between that home and the institution, the transport available and the timetable, and it specifies that the family home that counts is the one nearest the institution in which any computable member habitually resides, "even if it does not coincide with the legal domicile" of the applicant¹. It also provides that the amount may not exceed the real cost of the accommodation.

The two amounts nobody can calculate

The variable amount is the component that distributes what is left over. Article 5.1 applies the funds first to the basic grants and the fixed amounts, and article 5.2 assigns "the amount which, where applicable, remains after carrying out the operations indicated" to the variable amount, shared among applicants according to their family income and academic performance using the formula of article 9.2 of Royal Decree 1721/2007¹. Because the share depends on the budget remaining and on how many people obtain the grant, there is no honest way to anticipate it. The only certainty is the statutory minimum of EUR 60. One more detail: to obtain the variable amount the income may not exceed threshold 2.

The tuition grant is not an amount either. Article 4.1.e) defines it as the official public price of the academic services corresponding to the credits the student enrols in for the first time in the course, and it expressly excludes any beyond the minimum needed to obtain the qualification. At private universities and at affiliated centres that do not apply public prices, the amount equals the minimum price the autonomous community sets for a degree with the same experimental content at a public university in that same community.

The threshold selects a set, and on one branch it is not nested

This is the part most often told wrongly. Article 3.2 assigns, for upper secondary, vocational training and the other studies of letters a) to h), a set of components to each threshold, and it does so by reference to the letters of article 3.1¹:

Read the first two rows together. Letter a) is the income-linked amount of EUR 1,700 and letter c) is the basic grant of EUR 300. Threshold 1 receives letter a) and not letter c); threshold 2 receives letter c) and not letter a). Neither set is a subset of the other: moving up a threshold does not drop a component, it exchanges one for another.

That does not happen on the university branch. Article 4.2 builds a clean chain of subsets, because article 4.1 contains no basic grant at all: threshold 2 is threshold 1 minus the income-linked amount, and threshold 3 keeps excellence and tuition. Two branches of the same decree with different monotonicity, and the difference is created by a component that exists in only one of them.

The practical consequence is that you cannot add up "all the components" for the lowest threshold. In upper secondary, a calculation that adds the EUR 1,700 and the EUR 300 together overstates the answer by exactly EUR 300 for any student at threshold 1.

And off the full in-person track the sets shrink further

Paragraphs 3 and 4 of article 3 cut more. A student in a mode other than in person, even at full enrolment, may receive the basic grant, the excellence amount and the minimum variable amount, and nothing else: the income-linked and residence amounts disappear. A student taking language courses, access courses or basic vocational programmes, or choosing partial enrolment, or only doing the final project, is left with the basic grant and the minimum variable amount¹.

On the university branch there is an intermediate case that deserves its own line. The second paragraph of article 4.2 allows a student enrolled in person but partially, with at least 48 credits, to obtain the income-linked and residence amounts "in the sum of EUR 350" each, on top of the tuition grant and the minimum variable amount. Those are the same two components that at full enrolment are worth EUR 1,700 and EUR 2,700.

The thresholds are intervals

The article 8.1 table does not publish three figures per household size. It publishes an interval for threshold 1, a single figure for threshold 2 and another interval for threshold 3¹.

Each member beyond the eighth adds EUR 3,536 to the lower end of threshold 1, EUR 3,725 to the upper end, EUR 3,340 to threshold 2, EUR 3,561 to the lower end of threshold 3 and EUR 3,740 to its upper end.

Compare that table with the one the Ministry itself publishes and you will see that its version has three columns rather than five, and that its figures are 8,843, 13,898 and 14,818 for a single person². Those are exactly the lower end of threshold 1, threshold 2 and the lower end of threshold 3. The Ministry publishes the lower ends, and not for simplicity: article 8.2 says that it finances the grants "subject to the lower end of the interval", that grants awarded to a student inside the interval "shall be financed fifty per cent" between the Ministry and the convoking autonomous community, and that "grants within the interval exceeding its lower end may only be awarded" where the call of a community that has taken on the full competences provides for it¹.

The first transitional provision adds one more route for 2026-2027: communities that have begun negotiating the transfer may agree by convention to convoke and co-finance fifty per cent of those grants. And paragraph Ten of the first final provision names Royal Decree 261/2025 of 1 April, by which those functions were extended to Catalonia¹, so the list of communities with full competence is not static.

Put plainly: below the lower end the answer is the same across Spain, and between the two ends it depends on which administration convokes.

The special-support call has a column of its own

The same article 8.1 table reserves a separate column, with a single threshold 1 and higher figures, for the call for students with specific educational support needs: EUR 12,534 for a single person against the EUR 8,843 of the general call, EUR 31,801 for four members and EUR 48,031 for eight¹. Article 10 also changes two of its deductions, which become EUR 2,000 per sibling in a large family and EUR 4,000 for disability.

The income compared against that table is not your earnings

Article 9.2 defines family income in two steps. First it adds the general taxable base and the savings taxable base, excluding the negative net balances of capital gains and losses from 2021 to 2024 and the negative net balance of capital income over the same period. Then, and this is the step that gets forgotten, "the tax due on the self-assessment shall be subtracted from this result"¹. The tax paid lowers the figure the threshold is measured against. For members who had income and did not file, article 9.3 follows the same route and subtracts the payments on account.

The year is fixed too: the last paragraph of article 9.1 says that for the purposes of the 2026-2027 grants "the 2025 tax year shall be computed".

The six deductions of article 10 then apply to that result:

The deduction in letter d) carries a condition that reads in passing and decides whether it exists at all: it applies only "where two or more" students reside away from the family home by reason of university or higher artistic studies. With a single student away from home there is no deduction.

The asset gate is summed, not checked bar by bar

Article 11.1 sets four asset elements, each with its own limit¹: EUR 47,200 of cadastral value in urban property other than the habitual residence, EUR 47,200 in buildings on rural land, EUR 14,450 per computable member in rural land and special-nature property, and EUR 1,900 of net reduced capital income plus the positive net balance of capital gains and losses.

Read that way the list looks like four independent bars, and the Ministry's own summary presents it as "any of these four situations"². Article 11.2 says otherwise, and it is worth quoting in full: "Where the computable members of the household hold several of the asset elements described in the preceding paragraph, the percentage of the value of each element against the corresponding threshold shall be calculated. The study grants applied for shall be refused when the sum of those percentages exceeds the value one hundred"¹.

In other words: a household at 59 % of one limit and 50 % of another adds up to 109 and is out, having cleared both separately. And two further rules move the arithmetic before the percentages are calculated. Cadastral values are weighted by a coefficient that depends on the year of the last cadastral revision, and article 11.4 discounts 50 % of the value of elements belonging to members who are not the main earners.

The coefficient has a shape worth looking at:

It is not a ramp: it falls to its minimum of 0.25 for revisions dated 2007 and 2008 and rises again afterwards, so valuations fixed at the top of the Spanish property cycle are discounted hardest, while the oldest ones, from 1990 to 2002, carry the highest coefficient of all. For property in Navarre the cadastral value is always multiplied by 0.50, whatever the year¹. If you do not know the year of your municipality's last revision, article 11.1.a) itself instructs the Directorate-General for the Cadastre to make that information available electronically.

Separately from all of that, article 11.3 refuses the grant where income from economic activities, under direct or objective assessment, or from holdings in entities, exceeds EUR 172,000. That limit does not enter the sum of percentages: it refuses on its own.

A worked example with real numbers

A household of four computable members. For 2025 it declared a general and savings taxable base of EUR 25,000 and tax due of EUR 2,000, with none of the article 10 deductions.

Its family income is not EUR 25,000, it is EUR 23,000, because article 9.2.b) subtracts the tax due. Those EUR 23,000 fall between the two ends of threshold 1 for four members, which run from EUR 22,107 to EUR 23,286. They are inside the interval: the State finances up to the lower end and the rest is co-financed fifty fifty with the autonomous community, which additionally has to have provided for it in its call.

Now the assets. The household owns an inherited flat that is not its habitual residence, with a cadastral value of EUR 78,000 and a last cadastral revision in 2015, and EUR 950 of capital income. The 2015 coefficient is 0.36, so the property counts as EUR 28,080, which is 59.49 % of its EUR 47,200 threshold. The EUR 950 are exactly 50.00 % of the EUR 1,900 threshold. Neither exceeds its own limit. The sum is 109.49 %, and article 11.2 refuses the grant there.

If that EUR 950 of capital income were EUR 700, the sum would fall to 96.33 % and the household would pass the gate. Suppose it does, with an upper-secondary student enrolled in person and in full, a grade average of 8.6 and a proven need to live away from home. At threshold 1 the student is entitled to EUR 1,700 of income-linked amount, EUR 2,700 of residence, EUR 75 of excellence and the EUR 60 minimum variable amount: EUR 4,535 computable. And no basic grant, because threshold 1 does not receive it.

The mark that counts is not always the mark you got

The amount linked to academic excellence runs in grade bands: EUR 50 between 8.00 and 8.49, EUR 75 between 8.50 and 8.99, EUR 100 between 9.00 and 9.49 and EUR 125 from 9.50¹. So far it is a table and it reads itself.

The second paragraph of article 4.1.c) adds a rule that changes the result and almost nobody carries: the mark of students enrolled in the second year of a degree or later, and in the first year of a university master's, has a corrective coefficient applied to it of 1.17 in the field of architecture and engineering, 1.11 in sciences and 1.05 in health sciences¹.

A 7.00 in engineering becomes an 8.19 and enters the first band: EUR 50. The same 7.00 in health sciences stays at 7.35 and enters none. The same mark, the same decree and two different answers, decided by the field studied. For a student in the first year of a degree the coefficient does not apply; what operates instead is the one in article 9.2 of Royal Decree 1721/2007 on the access mark³.

And what this article does not cover

Everything above is the economic gate, which is the part that depends on published figures. The grant also carries academic requirements that sit in Royal Decree 1721/2007 and that each call specifies³, such as the number of credits you must enrol in, the proportion you must pass and, for students entering university through the access examination, the 5.00 points required by its article 23.1 following the amendment in the first final provision of this course's decree¹.

There is also something the Ministry itself notes in its summary: the full requirements are in the call, and what its pages publish is "a summary of the most important ones"⁴. For a case sitting near any of these lines, the call is what decides.