Escrivá proposes a declining contribution system until 2025 for the self-employed who earn less | Economy

One day after meeting with the unions and the most representative organizations of the self-employed group, the Ministry of Social Security has provided the social agents with more details about the umpteenth proposal on the contribution system for real income with which it intends to consider resolved the negotiation. It is a proposal that maintains the general lines of the document provided on Monday ―in which quotas of between 230 and 590 euros per month are contemplated―, and where the contributions for the years 2023, 2024 and 2025 are specified based on the net income tranches. Until reaching the final values, self-employed workers with lower incomes would start paying 245 euros per month, and would see this amount decrease in the next two years; while those with higher billings would start at 500 euros, and would progressively increase their contribution to Social Security. In other words, the self-employed who invoice the least would have a system of decreasing quotas until 2025 and those who earn the most would have a growing path until the end of the period.

The one presented this Tuesday is an offer that incorporates the evolution of the quotas in the next three years, as demanded at yesterday’s meeting by the self-employed groups, and which has once again been well received by most of them. “The negotiation is coming to an end. We are very confident, but we are at crucial moments. We have been working on this structural reform for more than a year, which is going to cause a cultural change”, said Lorenzo Amor, president of the Federation of Associations of Self-Employed Workers (ATA). The highest representative of this organization – integrated into the Spanish Confederation of Business Organizations (CEOE) – has advanced that it is likely that the definitive scheme will end up being agreed “throughout this week”.

The president of the Union of Professionals and Self-Employed Workers (UPTA), Eduardo Abad, for his part, has pointed out that this progressive proposal “is very much in line” with his demands, and that it would be “a real irresponsibility not to make the definitive change in the model of contribution” for the self-employed, since the current system is “absolutely unfair” and “only benefits the self-employed with the highest incomes”. “All of us who are in the heat of the negotiation must have the self-employed with less income in our sights,” he added.

However, sources from the Union of Associations of Self-Employed Workers and Entrepreneurs (UATAE) lament that “with the new proposal the quotas of the lower brackets are not improved” and denounce that “with an application for three years it is prevented that those who least enter can see their quota reduced from the first moment of their application”. Along with this reproach, these same sources consider that after the establishment of a contribution system for real income once the nine-year transition period ends, “improvements in social protection must also be addressed” for this group.

time limit

According to the proposal prepared by the department headed by José Luis Escrivá, self-employed workers with income equal to or less than 670 euros would have to pay a fee of 245 euros in 2023 (which would be 49 euros less than the current one); of 237 euros in 2024 (57 euros less than the current one); and 230 euros in 2024 (64 euros less than the current one). With this new system, of the 15 income brackets that the intended contribution scheme has, those workers framed in the first six (between 670 and 1,700 euros per month, the largest branch), would be especially benefited.

On the contrary, and in response to another of the demands of some organizations, those self-employed with higher incomes (more than 6,000 euros) would have to contribute to a greater extent within this new contribution paradigm: they would start with a fee of 500 euros per month in 2023; which would rise to 530 in 2024 and 590 in 2024. At the end of this three-year journey, the fee to be paid would be 296 euros higher than the one currently paid.

In the absence of the final regulatory text being drafted, if resolved favorably throughout this week, the Government would comply with the times agreed with Brussels before June 30 (this Thursday), although the rule must be approved by the Executive and subsequently processed in Parliament, which would delay its entry into force until 2023.