Mandatory equality plan in Spain: a complete guide

Women in Spain earn €4,781 a year less than men (INE, 2025). That pay gap of 15.74% — calculated from the Spanish structure of earnings survey using 2023 data — is the lowest in the historical series, but it is still significant. The equality plan is the legal tool designed to close that gap, and since March 2022 it has been mandatory for every company with 50 or more employees.

If your company should already have a plan and has not drawn one up, or if you need to renew it before it expires, this guide explains step by step what to do, what the penalties for non-compliance are and how to fund the work with public grants.

What an equality plan is and why it is mandatory

An equality plan is an ordered set of measures a company adopts after carrying out a situation assessment, with the aim of guaranteeing equal treatment and opportunity between women and men and eliminating any form of discrimination on grounds of sex.

Two Spanish rules make it mandatory:

• Ley Orgánica 3/2007, of 22 March, on effective equality between women and men, which set the general framework
• Real Decreto 901/2020, of 13 October, which governs equality plans, their minimum content and their compulsory registration

Real Decreto-Ley 6/2019 extended the obligation in stages, with deadlines that ran out in March 2022 for every company with 50 or more employees.

Which companies must have an equality plan?

Your company needs a mandatory equality plan if it meets any of these conditions:

• It has 50 or more employees on the payroll (the most common threshold)
• Its collective agreement requires one, whatever the size of the company
• The Spanish Labour Inspectorate has agreed it in enforcement proceedings as a substitute for ancillary penalties

The headcount covers every workplace of the company and includes people on temporary and part-time contracts as well as staff supplied by temporary work agencies. Once the threshold of 50 is reached, the company has three months to set up the negotiating committee and start the process.

Companies with fewer than 50 employees can draw one up voluntarily, and there are also specific grants to encourage them.

Mandatory content and drafting phases

Real Decreto 901/2020 sets a minimum content that every equality plan must include. The process runs in three phases:

Phase 1: Setting up the negotiating committee

The company and the employees' legal representatives form a joint committee that steers the whole process. Without this committee, the plan is not valid.

Phase 2: Situation assessment

The committee analyses the real state of equality in the company. The assessment must cover these mandatory areas:

• Selection and recruitment
• Job classification
• Training
• Career progression
• Working conditions, including the pay audit (mandatory under Real Decreto 902/2020, the Spanish equal pay regulation, and linked to the mandatory pay register)
• Shared exercise of personal, family and working life rights
• Under-representation of women
• Prevention of sexual harassment and harassment on grounds of sex

The pay audit is a critical point: under Real Decreto 902/2020, if it finds a pay gap of more than 25% in any professional group with no objective justification, the company must include an action plan to correct it.

Phase 3: Design, approval and registration

With the assessment complete, the committee sets specific objectives, measures, an implementation timetable, monitoring indicators and a budget. The plan is negotiated, approved and must then be registered in REGCON (the Spanish register of collective agreements) within a maximum of 15 working days from signature.

A plan lasts a maximum of four years, after which it has to be renewed. We recommend starting to negotiate the next plan at least three months before it expires.

Do you need help with the assessment or with drafting the plan? At Tecnocim Innova we work with you through the whole process, from the initial assessment to registration in REGCON. Request a consultation.

Penalties for not having an equality plan

Breaches of equality obligations are penalised under the Ley sobre Infracciones y Sanciones en el Orden Social (LISOS), the Spanish law on employment offences and penalties. The consequences go well beyond the fines:

But the fines are not the worst of it. Non-compliance also brings:

• Automatic loss of Social Security contribution reductions and employment support from the date of the offence
• Exclusion from public grants for six months
• Inability to contract with public administrations (a critical obstacle for companies that bid for tenders)
• More frequent inspections afterwards

With the Spanish Labour Inspectorate stepping up its equality monitoring campaigns, the risk of a penalty is real and growing.

What grants are available to draw up an equality plan?

The good news is that there is public funding to pay for drawing up and implementing equality plans, aimed above all at SMEs that are not yet under the obligation but want to get ahead of it.

At national level

The Instituto de las Mujeres (the Spanish women's institute, under the Ministry of Equality) regularly runs calls for small and medium-sized companies that want to draw up and implement their first equality plan.

At regional level

Spain's autonomous communities run their own grant lines:

• Catalunya: the Departament d'Igualtat i Feminismes has approved grants for companies with fewer than 50 employees, co-funded 40% by the European Social Fund Plus (ESF+). A two-year 2025–2026 budget of more than €17.8 million for equality projects
• Andalucía: Line 7 of the regional government funds the drafting of plans in companies with 10 to 49 employees registered in Andalucía
• Galicia: the Xunta allocates up to €1.4 million on a competitive basis for workplace equality measures in companies with 10 to 49 employees
• Castilla-La Mancha: funding of up to €8,000 per project for companies with fewer than 50 employees

Can your company access this funding? Our team identifies the open calls and manages the whole application. See our grants service.

EU Directive 2023/970: what is coming in June 2026

Beyond the Spanish rules already in force, companies need to prepare for a new European obligation. Directive (EU) 2023/970 on pay transparency must be transposed into Spanish law before 7 June 2026, and it tightens equal pay requirements considerably.

The main changes it introduces:

• Duty to disclose pay bands in job adverts, before any negotiation
• Ban on asking candidates about their pay history
• 5% alert threshold: if the pay gap in a professional group exceeds 5% with no objective justification, the company must carry out a joint assessment with the employee representatives
• Mandatory reporting by size: annual for companies with more than 250 employees (from 2027), every three years for 150–249, and phased in for the rest

Spain already has part of this infrastructure thanks to Real Decreto 901/2020 and Real Decreto 902/2020 (pay register, pay audit), but the European directive sets tougher thresholds — 5% against the current 25% — and new rights of access to information for employees.

Keeping an up-to-date equality plan and a rigorous pay register does more than meet the law as it stands: it puts your company in a better position to adapt to the European obligations that take effect this year.

Next step

An equality plan is not only a legal obligation: it is a tool that improves the working climate, reduces staff turnover and strengthens your company's reputation. Penalties for non-compliance can reach €225,000, and exclusion from public tenders and grants multiplies the financial impact.

Tecnocim Innova has more than 30 years' experience advising companies in Spain on regulatory compliance and on obtaining public funding. We help you draw up your equality plan, register it in REGCON and identify the grants available to fund the process.

Request your free assessment and we will tell you exactly what your company needs in order to comply.