Los días efectivos trabajados aumentan un 12,9% desde el nivel previo a la pandemia y las horas cotizadas lo hacen un 12,3% en el primer trimestre de 2025

The Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration has published for the second time the statistics on the days paid to the Social Security along with the actual hours worked and hours paid corresponding to the first quarter of 2025. This information is calculated from the membership records and the reports of the contribution bases held by the General Treasury of Social Security (TGSS).

In the case of quoted days, the data are calculated from the time series that the TGSS registers and that starts in January 2019. This offers a disaggregation by sex, activity section and contract type.

The Secretary of State for Social Security and Pensions, Borja Suárez, highlights that these data “allow a much more detailed photograph of the labor market, which shows us that the job created is of higher quality.”

In order to have a real view of the situation of the labour market, it is necessary to deduct from the calculation of the days paid by the members: the days in ERTE (Temporary Employment Regulation Files, both partial and total), temporary disabilities and other benefits (birth and care of minors, risk during pregnancy and during natural breastfeeding). If these special situations are not neglected, the index has grown by 15.1%.

This information disaggregated by sex allows us to observe that the percentage of days quoted by women has grown more than that of men in this period. If you compare the figures recorded in the fourth quarter of 2019, women contributed 47.4% of the days when currently they represent 48.1%. For their part, men have gone from 52.6% to 51.9%.

By sections of activity, the high added value ones lead the growth of effective days since 2019, before the pandemic. Where the activity of Education has increased the effective days quoted above the average (+37.8% in total), while Information and Communications and Professional, Scientific and Technical Activities have grown more than 32.5% and 24.6%, respectively.

In turn, the effects of labor reform are visualized in the evolution of the effective days quoted by type of contract. In fact, in December 2021, before its entry into force, the days quoted by workers with indefinite contracts stood at 72.3% compared to 27.7% for workers with temporary contracts.

However, in March 2025, these percentages are reversed. Thus, indefinite contracts already account for 88.4% of the total number of days quoted; while the remaining 11.6% corresponds to temporary contracts.

Statistics of quoted and effective hours worked

As for the actual hours quoted in the first quarter of 2025, they are 12.3% higher than those of the last quarter of 2019 - reference date, of pre-pandemic levels - if the data of each of these quarters are compared.

To avoid the volatility that exists between the different quarters and to appreciate the medium-term evolution of the effective hours worked, an index based on the moving average of four quarters is included. In the first quarter of 2025 it was 112.3 points, 100 being the reference data corresponding to the last quarter of 2019, which means that the effective hours worked have experienced an increase of 12.3% compared to the level prior to the pandemic.

Maintaining the quality of employment

There are more and more contributors within the General Social Security System. This increase has a direct impact on the number of hours quoted.

 
As the following graph reflects, the evolution of this index is very similar to that obtained with the data corresponding to the Quarterly Labour Cost Survey (ETCL) of the INE, which is slightly higher and evidences an increase of 13.8% in the effective hours worked compared to the pre-pandemic period. However, these results are significantly higher than those observed in the latest available statistics from the Active Population Survey (EPA) and the National Quarterly Accounting (CNTR), according to which, in the first quarter of 2025, the effective hours worked would have barely increased by 6.9% and 6%, respectively, compared to the level prior to the pandemic. This break in the series relationship is also observed from the end of the year 2021.

(*) Observation: The comparison is restricted to the population area of the ETCL (mainly, sections of activity from B to S of the CNAE-09), except for CNTR that includes up to section T.