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Employment Bureaucracy costs each self-employed person in Spain some 200 hours in lost time and 3,000 euros per yearThe ATA association of autónomos estimates that each person spends around four hours a week dealing with red-tape tasks
Madrid
Friday, 19 December 2025, 15:43
Administrative procedures create thousands of hours of unpaid overtime that weigh down the daily lives of the self-employed in Spain. The more than 3.4 million professionals in this group spend an average of 200 hours a year exclusively on bureaucratic procedures and the fulfilment of tax, labour and social security obligations, as the national federation of associations of self-employed workers (ATA) explains.
Self-employed workers have to specifically put time aside for bureaucracy, at the expense of their active and rest hours. Moreover, this activity has a direct economic impact. At an average cost of 15 euros per hour, bureaucracy represents an annual outlay of around 3,000 euros for each self-employed worker, according to ATA calculations. This amounts to 10 billion euros per year and more than 650 million hours spent on administrative procedures for the entire professional segment.
The magnitude of the problem is amplified when compared to the average working hours in the sector. Self-employed persons work 47 hours a week on average and spend around four hours a week just to fulfil their administrative duties. Overall, the time spent on bureaucracy is equivalent to the full weekly workload of 278,000 self-employed workers.
More rules and costs
Beyond the purely economic aspect, the cost is also social. For nine out of ten self-employed people, the bureaucratic burden has increased in the last year, which significantly reduces their ability to reconcile work and rest. "Every day, we spend more time on paperwork and less on generating wealth," president of ATA Lorenzo Amor says.
Workers with dependent employees, who account for almost one million of the self-employed in Spain, have to also add the increasing complexity of labour regulations, which multiplies the time and administrative costs they spend on their personal obligations. "We have been hearing about administrative simplification and reduction of burdens for years, but this never comes. There are more and more rules, more restrictions and more costs," Amor says, as he calls for a profound change in the relationship between bureaucracy and the self-employed.
ATA warns that, if there is no real reduction in bureaucracy, the excessive hours spent on administrative obligations will keep hampering productivity, competitiveness and the self-employed's capacity to generate wealth, turning the administration into an obstacle rather than a facilitator of economic activity.