Employment income · Spain · 2024
The 30.5 million people in Spain who received a salary, pension or unemployment benefit, each counted only once. The median pension is €15,378 and the median salary €20,126: pensions do not sit below salaries; the two distributions overlap.
Everything paid in Spain in 2024 for working or having worked, in €5,000 rungs all the way to the top. Each bar combines salaries and pensions of that amount. The unit is payments, not people: 852,922 people received both and contribute one payment to each side.
Outside this picture: Spain's Minimum Living Income. 860,458 households—2,627,344 people, including 1.07 million minors—receive an average of €507 per month. This benefit is exempt from income tax and therefore absent from the tax statistics. The bar is scaled in households, not payments: it uses a different unit and date (Social Security, June 2026).
Source: Spanish Tax Agency, Labour market and pensions in tax records 2024. Official salary bands are multiples of the minimum wage (€15,876), while pension bands use the reference pension (€10,966); the €5,000 rungs are interpolated from those cumulative curves, as on the salary page. Unemployment benefit is not shown here because the Tax Agency does not break it down by amount; it appears in the next chart.
The same population, but counting people rather than payments: each person appears once, in the band for their total employment income and in the corresponding group. Unemployment benefit is included here. The cost of this precision is resolution: the Tax Agency publishes only eight bands, €3,000 or €6,000 wide, and the last is open-ended. Each rung's height is proportional to the euros it spans.
Source: Spanish Tax Agency, Population groups by type of remuneration, 2024. The seven groups total 30,462,424 people and reconcile exactly with the published totals. These are the official bands—€3,000 and €6,000 wide, with an open final band—so the chart is not pyramid-shaped: “more than €30,000” contains 7.9 million people. Combined groups use stripes in their component colours.
Because almost nobody in those bands receives only one pension. The clue is a column published by the Tax Agency but omitted from the chart: payments per person. Exactly where the right wing should disappear, that figure doubles.
| Annual pension band | Pensioners | Mean pension | Pensions per person |
|---|---|---|---|
| €0–€5,483 | 528,939 | €2,734 | 1.04 |
| €5,483–€10,966 | 1,846,974 | €8,934 | 1.05 |
| €10,966–€16,449 | 2,978,261 | €13,100 | 1.05 |
| €16,449–€21,932 | 1,269,459 | €19,004 | 1.09 |
| €21,932–€27,415 | 910,090 | €24,506 | 1.13 |
| €27,415–€32,898 | 615,621 | €29,922 | 1.18 |
| €32,898–€38,381 | 427,238 | €35,578 | 1.23 |
| €38,381–€43,864 | 500,091 | €40,868 | 1.27 |
| €43,864–€49,347the 2024 cap, €44,450, falls inside this band | 581,900 | €45,083 | 1.32 |
| €49,347–€54,830 | 65,926 | €51,596 | 2.05 |
| €54,830–€82,245 | 64,199 | €63,375 | 2.24 |
| €82,245–€109,660 | 9,266 | €93,117 | 2.40 |
| More than €109,660 | 7,347 | €183,131 | 2.48 |
Code B on tax form 190 covers article 17.2.a of Spain's income-tax law: besides Social Security and civil-service pensions, it includes benefits from pension plans, mutual provident societies and employer group insurance. A lump-sum pension-plan withdrawal is assigned entirely to one tax year, explaining the €183,131 mean in the final band.
Retirement plus survivor's pension, or Social Security plus a civil-service pension, with cap rules specific to each combination.
Residents of Spain who receive a pension from another country pay tax on it here, and Spain's domestic cap does not apply.
The statistics record what was paid during the year, so adjustments relating to earlier years can accumulate in a single year.
The revaluation decree limits the initial amount of public pensions, not the total a person may ultimately receive through several channels over the years.
| Annual income band | Employees | % of employees | Pensioners | % of pensioners |
|---|
The main chart comes entirely from the Spanish Tax Agency's Labour market and pensions in tax records, 2024: 20,637,992 employees with a mean salary of €24,962 and 9,805,311 pensioners with a mean pension of €19,720.
The Tax Agency is used instead of INE because it is the only source measuring salaries and pensions on the same basis: total annual euros, same year and same definition of recipient. This makes the lower part of the salary distribution wider than on the INE page, which annualises pay differently.
The bulge on the right is not noise: Spain's maximum pension in 2024 was €44,450.56 a year (€3,175.04 in fourteen payments). Between €40,000 and €50,000 sit 955,622 pensioners, nearly one in ten. In 2026 the cap rose to €47,034.40 a year.
The cap falls inside an official Tax Agency band (€43,864–€49,347), so the statistics cannot identify exactly who exceeds it. What can be stated is that 146,738 people remain above €49,347.