Average Salary in Spain: What People Earn by Region and Job

The average salary in Spain is €29,540 gross a year, according to the latest annual wage survey from the INE, Spain’s national statistics office. That survey covers 2024 and came out in May 2026; it is the newest annual figure there is. Spaniards are usually paid in 14 instalments, so that works out at about €2,110 a month before tax, or €2,462 if you spread it over 12 months.

That figure is a mean, and a few high earners pull it up. The median salary, the point where half of workers earn more and half earn less, was €24,497. If you are weighing a job offer, a move or a visa, the median is the better guide to what an ordinary job pays.

Average salary in Spain per month: 14 payments or 12

Most Spanish employment contracts pay 14 times a year: 12 monthly payslips plus two extra payments, normally in June or July and in December. Some employers spread those extras across the year instead, so the same annual salary can look like two different monthly numbers. Always ask which one a job advert means.

Source: INE, Annual Wage Structure Survey 2024 (May 2026); minimum wage: Royal Decree 126/2026. Monthly columns are the annual figure divided by 14 or 12.

All of these are gross figures. Income tax and the employee’s Social Security contribution come off before the money reaches your account, and how much depends on your region, your family and the rest of your income. To see a net figure for a specific salary, run it through our Spain salary and tax calculator.

Average vs median wage in Spain: which number to use

Spain’s statistics office says it plainly in its own release: many more people sit in the low pay bands than in the high ones, so the mean ends up above both the median and the most common salary. In 2024 the most common annual salary was €16,520, and 29.5% of employees earned between €16,000 and €23,000. If that looks lower than the minimum wage in the table above, remember the survey year: the minimum wage in 2024 was €15,876 a year, and it has risen since.

The survey covers employees, full time and part time. It leaves out the self-employed, farm workers and household staff. In practice: a salary of €29,540 puts you above the typical Spanish worker, not in the middle. And a €24,000 job is not a bad offer in Spain. It is roughly what the typical worker earns.

There is also a gender gap in the averages. Men averaged €32,058 and women €26,905 in 2024, although the survey notes that contract type, hours and occupation explain a large part of that difference.

Why other sites show a different average wage for Spain

Search for the average wage or average income in Spain and you will see anything from about €1,600 a month to over €30,000 a year. Most of those numbers are not wrong. They measure different things:

• Quarterly wage cost. The INE’s quarterly labour cost survey put the average wage cost at €2,512.68 per worker per month in the second quarter of 2026, which is about €30,150 over a year (it is a monthly average that includes any extra payments made in the quarter, so here it is simply multiplied by 12). It is newer than the annual survey, but it is a monthly cost per employee, part-timers included, not an annual salary. It does not include the employer’s Social Security contributions.
• Net instead of gross. European wage tables (Wikipedia’s included) often show net monthly pay after tax, which looks far lower than a gross annual salary.
• Older years. Many guides still quote the 2022 or 2023 survey, or a minimum wage from two years ago. Spanish pay has risen every year since, with the average up 5.3% in 2024 alone.
• Job-site averages. Salary portals average the job adverts posted on their site, which lean towards office and tech roles in Madrid and Barcelona.

We use the annual survey figure for salaries in Spain because it is the one the Spanish government itself uses. It is built from Social Security and tax agency records for about 250,000 workers, and the salary threshold of the EU Blue Card is calculated from it (more on that below).

Average wage in Spain by region

The Basque Country and the Madrid region pay the most, at over €34,000 a year. Extremadura and the Canary Islands pay the least, at about €25,000. Pay follows the big employers: head offices, finance and tech cluster in Madrid, Barcelona and the Basque Country, while tourism and farming weigh more in the regions at the bottom.

Source: INE, Annual Wage Structure Survey 2024 (May 2026). Spain average: €29,540.

The salary survey is not published city by city, so treat the regional figure as the guide for Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia or Málaga. Pay inside the cities tends to run above the regional figure, and pay in rural areas below it. If cost matters more than salary, our list of the cheapest cities to live in Spain compares rents city by city.

Salaries in Spain by sector and job

Energy and finance are the best-paid sectors, both above €50,000 a year on average. Hospitality is the lowest, at €17,653, which is barely above the 2026 minimum wage. Tech pays well by Spanish standards, but a software developer moving from the US or the UK should expect a lower number than at home.

Source: INE, Annual Wage Structure Survey 2024 (May 2026).

By occupation, directors and managers averaged €63,865 in 2024, more than double the national figure. Health and teaching professionals, the survey group that includes doctors, graduate nurses and teachers, averaged €40,555. Unskilled service workers were at the other end with €16,063. The INE calls occupation one of the variables that most affects pay, so compare a job offer against people in the same role, not against the national average.

Minimum wage in Spain in 2026

The minimum wage in Spain for 2026 is €1,221 a month in 14 payments, or €17,094 a year, for full-time work. Royal Decree 126/2026 set it in February 2026, backdated to 1 January, a 3.1% rise on 2025. Paid in 12 instalments, it comes to €1,424.50 a month.

It applies in every sector and to every worker, whatever their nationality, and part-time workers are paid it in proportion to their hours. Many collective agreements (convenios colectivos, the sector pay deals that cover most Spanish employees) set higher minimums for particular jobs, so the legal floor is often not the real floor.

What is a good salary in Spain?

Anything above the median of €24,497 gross means you earn more than half of Spanish employees. Above the average of €29,540 you are clearly in the upper part of the pay scale, and €40,000 or more is a salary most Spaniards would call good, especially outside Madrid and Barcelona.

Where you live changes that. €30,000 in Extremadura, where the regional average is under €25,000, goes much further than the same money in central Madrid, where rents eat a bigger share. For a family, a single salary near the average is tight in the big cities and comfortable in most of the rest of the country.

Spanish salaries compared with visa income requirements

This is the part most salary guides leave out. If you are moving to Spain, the income your visa asks for is set by law, and it sits close to, or above, what Spaniards earn. Here is how the main routes compare with the €29,540 average. The figures are for the main applicant. For the non-lucrative and digital nomad visas, each family member who moves with you raises the amount. The Blue Card and work permit salary floors stay the same whatever the size of your family.

Source: Royal Decree 1155/2024; Law 14/2013; Order PJC/44/2026; Royal Decree 126/2026; note of the UGE (the immigration unit for large employers) on Blue Card salary thresholds, June 2026; INE 2024. Thresholds for 2026, main applicant only.

The Blue Card link is direct. The salary floor is 1.4 times the average annual salary in Spain from this survey, so when the 2024 edition came out the threshold moved with it, to €41,356.36 for applications filed from 28 June 2026. The reduced threshold, 1.12 times the average, applies to some hard-to-fill skilled occupations and to people who got their qualification in the three years before applying. Our EU Blue Card guide covers who qualifies for it.

Two things trip people up. The non-lucrative visa asks for passive income or savings and does not let you work at all, not even remotely, so a salary does not count towards it. And the digital nomad visa threshold rises when the minimum wage rises, so a figure from a 2024 article will be too low today. For a job with a Spanish company, the route is the Spain work visa, where your employer starts the process.

Average salary in Spain: common questions

Sources

• INE, Annual Wage Structure Survey (Encuesta Anual de Estructura Salarial), year 2024, final data, published 28 May 2026.
• INE, Quarterly Labour Cost Survey (Encuesta Trimestral de Coste Laboral), second quarter of 2026, published 17 September 2026.
• Royal Decree 126/2026, minimum wage for 2026 (BOE, 19 February 2026).
• Royal Decree 1155/2024, immigration regulation; Law 14/2013 on entrepreneurs (digital nomad visa and EU Blue Card); Order PJC/44/2026 on the Blue Card salary threshold (BOE, 30 January 2026); UGE note on Blue Card salary thresholds, June 2026.
• European Central Bank euro reference rates, 13 November 2026.