La Mesa de Diálogo Social se reunirá el 14 de julio para negociar el nuevo esquema de cotización de autónomos

The Secretary of State for Social Security and Pensions, Borja Suárez, announced today in the Congress of Deputies that next Monday, July 14, the Social Dialogue Table has been convened with business organizations, unions and associations of self-employed workers to start negotiating the new scheme of contributions of self-employed workers for the next three years.

The new contribution model for real income, included in Royal Decree-Law 13/2022 and which entered into force in 2023, provided for a gradual implementation according to which, every three years, within the social dialogue, the timetable of application of this system must be determined with a new deployment of the scale of income tranches and contribution bases that, on this occasion, will be in force between 2026 and 2028.

Suárez, who appeared on the Committee on Labour, Social Economy, Inclusion, Social Security and Migration, stressed that: “The goal is to maintain a fair, understandable and predictable system, within a framework of dialogue, transparency and accountability.”

“In 2025, the first of these transitional periods will end, while we have completed the first process of regularizing the quotas for the 2023 financial year derived from this new system. We can say that its implementation is being a success, in a context where the self-employed have an increasing weight in our labor market, never in history have we had so many self-employed in our country, more than 3.4 million. Since 2023, when this system came into force, RETA has registered 114,000 more affiliates,” he added.

Balance first regularization process

The Secretary of State has put this reform in context, which has its origin in the recommendations of the Toledo Pact of 2020, and was integrated into the Government’s Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan. In 2022, after a broad agreement in the Social Dialogue Table —with the participation of unions, employers and associations representing the UPTA, ATA and UATAE collective— its implementation was approved. The RDL was approved in Congress with more than 75% of the votes in favor.

“This reform responds to the principles of contributory justice, progressive equity and sustainability, and puts an end to a system that represented pensions for the self-employed that were much lower than those of salaried workers,” said Suárez, who has provided data such as that more than 80% of these workers were paid by the minimum base, with pensions up to 37% lower than those of other regimes and that in 36% of cases they need minimum supplements.

Suárez has given the details of this regularization process that began in October 2024, after the closure of the IRPF campaign of 2023. Its management has required complex technical and administrative coordination, with more than 1.5 billion updates of data from the Tax Agency, the General Treasury of Social Security (TGSS), the mutual funds, the SEPE and the foral haciendas. In total, the contributions of more than 3.7 million self-employed have been reviewed and more than 4.2 million notifications have been issued.

For more than two million people it has not been necessary to make adjustments: 1.3 million were listed within the corresponding tranche and another 800,000 were in non-regularizable situations, such as flat rates, subsidies or pensions. About 1.6 million have been subject to regularization. Of these, some 796,000 were underquoted and have had to pay for differences. More than 460,000 did so over and they have received a refund.In addition, 324,000 did not submit a return declaration, for different reasons. On the other hand, there have been more than 429,377 waivers of the quota refund.

Work-pension compatibility

The Secretary of State for Social Security and Pensions has also presented the first results of the new regulation to make work and pension compatible, agreed with social agents and which entered into force in April of this year.

Suarez stressed that “the new set of measures approved in RDL 11/2024 seeks to complement the measures of the pension reform and respond to the structural changes that occur in our society, while correcting an anomaly of our labor market in which we move from a full employment situation to retirement abruptly, from one day to the next, due to lack of options when reaching retirement age.”

The Secretary of State has reviewed the measures taken previously that are yielding good results. The delayed retirements already represent 11.4% of the total of the new hikes, compared to 4.8% in 2019. This change reflects the impact of the delay incentives in place since 2022 and the reconfiguration of the early retirement framework. As a result, the average age of access to retirement is 65.2 years, compared to 64.4 years in 2019. So far this year alone, the year-on-year growth compared to that accumulated in May of 24 shows a 25.3% growth for delayed retirements .

Borja Suárez has reviewed the objectives of these new measures, which include increasing flexibility in the combination of work and pension, promoting access to partial and active retirement, ensuring the possibility of a gradual transition from employment to retirement, making delayed retirement more attractive and encouraging the voluntary extension of working life.

To this end, the new measures aim to ensure fair access to partial retirement, improve incentives for delayed retirement and promote active retirement.

With regard to active retirement, the requirement of having a full contribution career is eliminated, which facilitates their access and has a special impact from a gender perspective.

In this form of retirement, which makes it possible to make the pension and work compatible for a certain time once the retirement situation is accessed, the requirement of having a full contribution career is eliminated. This has a special impact from a gender perspective, favoring groups with shorter and intermittent contribution careers, as has historically happened in the case of women for the care of children or other family members.

Active retirement makes it possible that, each year that work and pension are compatible, the percentage to be applied in the receipt of the benefit is increased, according to a scale. Thus, if the delay is one year, the corresponding percentage of the pension will be 45%; if it is two, 55%, if it is 3.65%, if it is 4.80% and, if the delay is five or more years, it will be possible to receive up to 100% of the benefit.  

In addition, every 12 months of uninterrupted professional activity in this active retirement, the percentage of the pension will be increased by 5 percentage points, without, in any case, exceeding 100% of the pension.

Another important novelty is that this type of retirement will be compatible with the incentives of delay, which until now were not received in this modality.

The new regulation also improves delayed retirement, by giving the possibility of receiving an additional incentive of 2% for every six months of delay from the second year and not only for every twelve months.

With regard to partial retirement, the new regulation establishes the extension from 2 to 3 years of the possibility of advance access to the retirement age, however, with adaptations in the reduction of the working day. In addition, the conditions of the reregist worker are improved, whose hiring will have to be indefinite and full-time.