Spain has asked the European Commission this Tuesday for a new payment of the recovery plan: the sixth. The amount is 6.5 billion, 5.5 billion in subsidies and the rest in credits. The European Commission now has eight weeks to evaluate the request and, if the conclusion is positive, request authorization from the Council of the EU to make the disbursement.
The Ministry of Economy had been announcing for several weeks that this step was being taken, giving an idea of imminence that the head of the portfolio, Carlos Body, was in charge of paying the day before. “We are finishing the checks of all the documentation of these more than 70 milestones and objectives with the European Commission and we hope that it will be a matter of hours before we can make the request for the sixth disbursement,” he said on Monday upon arriving at the Ideas Lab 2026 event, organized by the Center for European Policy Studies (CEPS, for its acronym in English).
Finally we had to wait almost 24 more hours. The new request comes more than half a year after the Spanish Government received the fifth payment of the plan, which amounted to 23.1 billion, the highest amount received by a country so far in a single disbursement. And this despite the fact that the European Commission reduced the payment by 1.1 billion because there were still milestones to complete. Spain has not yet fulfilled those commitments (increase in the diesel tax and the reform of the civil service, which must properly compensate interim officials) and is very close to definitively losing the opportunity to receive that money.
So far, Spain has received 55 billion in subsidies from the European recovery plan, designed to address the economic damage derived from the pandemic. In total, 79.8 billion correspond to it. It has also received 16.3 billion in credits out of a total of 22.8 billion that the Government has said it intends to request.
These numbers imply that Spain is going to have to accelerate a lot in the coming months to be able to request and execute all the money allocated to it from the recovery plan. The regulation that governs this ambitious financial tool indicates that, in principle, all resources must be executed before August 31 and the justification before the Brussels authorities must be ready on December 31. However, there are financial mechanisms that allow these deadlines to be somewhat extended.
The recovery plan was launched in 2021 in response to the deep economic crisis caused by the covid-19 pandemic. It has been the most ambitious expansionary financial measure in the history of the EU: almost 650,000 million euros between subsidies and credits for States to invest. Financing is achieved with common debt charged to an extraordinary and additional item from the EU budgets.
In the early stages, Spain was the advantaged student and the one that advanced the fastest in its deployment. But as the years have passed and the Executive has lost parliamentary solidity, Spain has been left behind. Now it is Italy, the other major beneficiary of the Recovery Fund, the country that is in a more advanced stage and the one that has received the most money at the moment.
