Spanish working days: which rule your deadline uses

The short answer

A working day is a day that counts towards a deadline, and which days count is decided by the statute that sets that deadline. There is no single definition.

In an administrative procedure, Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays drop out¹. In a civil lawsuit the whole of August drops out as well, and so does every day from 24 December to 6 January². In a private contract nothing drops out: the Civil Code says, in those words, that "in the civil counting of periods, non-working days are not excluded"⁵.

Three regimes, three answers

The confusion here does not come from the rule being hard. It comes from there being three rules and almost nobody saying which one they are applying.

The administrative regime is article 30.2 of Act 39/2015: "where periods are set in days, they are understood to be working days, excluding Saturdays, Sundays and days declared holidays"¹. It is the one that runs when the deadline comes from the tax agency, social security, a town hall or any other public authority.

The civil procedural regime is article 130.2 of the Civil Procedure Act, and it is wider: non-working days are "Saturdays and Sundays, and the days falling between 24 December and 6 January of the following year, both inclusive, national holidays and days that are holidays for employment purposes in the relevant Autonomous Community or locality", and "the days of the month of August shall also be non-working"². Article 133.2 closes the circle: "in counting periods set in days, non-working days shall be excluded"³.

The civil regime is article 5 of the Civil Code, and it is the only one that excludes nothing. Its paragraph 2 contains the line that settles half the doubts on this page: non-working days "are not excluded"⁵. It applies to a period arising from a contract when no special statute says otherwise.

And there is a useful safeguard for telling which one you are in. Article 30.2 itself requires that, where a statute sets a period in calendar days, "that circumstance shall be stated in the corresponding notifications"¹. If an administrative notification says nothing, they are working days.

August and Christmas are not where almost everyone looks

If you search for which days are non-working for a Spanish court, the answer you will nearly always find cites article 182 of the Organic Act on the Judiciary. Read it today and it says only this: "non-working days for procedural purposes are Saturdays and Sundays, national holidays and days that are holidays for employment purposes in the relevant Autonomous Community or locality"⁴.

Neither August nor December. Read alone, that article says 24 and 31 December are working days. They are not.

What happened is that final provision one of Organic Act 14/2022 did two things at once⁷. It removed 24 and 31 December from article 182, where they had been since 2003. And it rewrote article 183, which until then said "the days of the month of August shall be non-working" and now says "the days of the month of August, as well as every day from 24 December to 6 January of the following year, both inclusive"⁴.

So the Christmas closure did not disappear: it grew from two scattered days to fourteen consecutive ones, and changed article on the way. Anyone consulting the article everyone quotes will get December wrong, and by fourteen days.

The same reform amended article 130.2 of the Civil Procedure Act on the same day, which is where that list appears in full and in one place².

Counting starts the following day

Here the three regimes agree, which is fortunate because it is the commonest error.

Article 30.3 of Act 39/2015 says periods in days "shall be counted from the day following the one on which the notification or publication takes place"¹. Article 5.1 of the Civil Code says the starting day "shall be excluded from the count, which shall begin on the following day"⁵. And article 133.1 of the Civil Procedure Act says periods "shall begin to run from the day following", adding a detail worth keeping: the day it falls due does count, and expires at midnight³.

Periods in months are not counted in days

A period of one month is not thirty days, and three months is not ninety.

Periods in months or years fall due date to date: on the same day of the month it expires in. One month from 15 March falls due on 15 April. Article 30.4 of Act 39/2015, article 5.1 of the Civil Code and article 133.3 of the Civil Procedure Act all say so¹⁵³.

And all three add the same clamp for the awkward case. If the month it falls due in has no equivalent day, "the period shall be deemed to expire on the last day of that month"¹. One month from 31 January 2026 therefore falls due on 28 February, not 3 March. It is a short rule with a counter-intuitive consequence: a one-month period starting on 31 January lasts twenty-eight days, and one starting on 28 January lasts thirty-one.

That same example shows the two rules chaining. 28 February 2026 is a Saturday, so in an administrative period the clamp takes it to the 28th and the extension takes it to 2 March; in a contractual period it stays on the 28th.

If it falls on a Saturday, it depends on the regime

Article 30.5 of Act 39/2015 is as short as it is clear: "where the last day of the period is a non-working day, it shall be deemed extended to the first following working day"¹. Article 133.4 of the Civil Procedure Act says the same for court proceedings³.

That extension is what produces the odd dates on official calendars. The Spanish tax agency, for instance, publishes form 347 as due "by 2 March" in 2026 even though its own Order says February, because 28 February 2026 is a Saturday; and form 349 for July and August as due "by 21 September", because the 20th is a Sunday. These are not exceptions: they are article 30.5 applied.

And here is the asymmetry almost nobody mentions. The Civil Code has no equivalent rule, and its article 5.1 opens with "unless otherwise provided"⁵. The extension is created by article 30.5 and article 133.4, each for its own regime. In a purely contractual period, therefore, a Sunday expiry is the expiry.

Only four days are holidays across the whole of Spain

There is a reason no calculator can give you an exact answer without asking where you live, and it is legal rather than technical.

Article 37.2 of the Workers' Statute caps holidays at fourteen a year, "two of which shall be local". It then guarantees, "in every case", exactly four national ones: Christmas Day, New Year's Day, 1 May and 12 October⁶. No others.

Everything else (6 January, Good Friday, 15 August, 1 November, 6 and 8 December) is set by each year's calendar, and the same article lets the autonomous communities replace those national holidays with others "traditionally their own"⁶.

That is why a national calendar is always an approximation. Article 30.7 makes each region publish its own calendar of non-working days in its official gazette, and says expressly that the calendar "shall include the non-working days of the local authorities within its territorial scope"¹. Two days per municipality across more than eight thousand municipalities: there is no national register to read them from.

The rule that turns one town's holiday into everyone's problem

The next paragraph of that same article is the most useful thing in Act 39/2015 for this, and is hardly ever quoted:

Where a day is a working day in the municipality or Autonomous Community in which the interested party resides, and non-working at the seat of the administrative body, or the other way round, it shall be treated as non-working in every case¹.

In other words: it is enough for the day to be non-working for one of the two sides for it to drop out of the deadline for both. Your town's patron-saint holiday extends your deadline with an authority in Madrid, and the holiday of the region where that authority sits extends it too, even if your own town is working.

One last clarification that avoids a frequent confusion: article 30.8 warns that declaring a day working or non-working "does not in itself determine the operation of the public administration's workplaces, the organisation of working time or their hours"¹. A day can be non-working for deadline purposes with people at their desks, and the other way round.

A worked example with real numbers

A period of twenty days starting to run on 1 August 2026. Three answers:

Thirty-eight days between the first and the last, on the same start date and the same number of days. The gap between the first two rows is the weekends; the gap between the second and the third is the whole of August.

The same interval seen the other way round, from 1 August to 30 September 2026, gives 60 calendar days, 43 administrative working days and 22 court ones: the 21 weekdays of August disappear from the procedural count and not from the administrative one.

And a period of fifteen working days starting on 22 December 2026 falls due on 6 January under the civil regime, 15 January under the administrative one and 26 January under the court one.

How to tell which one is yours

In practice the question is settled by looking at where the deadline came from, not at what it says.

If it arrives in a decision, a notification or a demand from a public authority, it is administrative, and the notification itself must warn you if exceptionally it runs in calendar days¹. If it arrives from a court, it is procedural, and then it also matters whether the proceeding has been declared urgent: article 133.2 says that in those "the days of the month of August shall not be treated as non-working and only Saturdays, Sundays and holidays shall be excluded"³. If it arises from a contract between private parties and no special statute provides otherwise, it is civil and runs in calendar days.

And if you are going to file something on the last day, remember article 135.1: electronic filing is possible "on every day of the year, twenty-four hours a day", but a filing made on a non-working day or hour "shall be deemed made on the next working day and hour"³. The registry does not close; the effect moves.