Want to retire early in Spain without a penalty? Just work for 40 years first

Fancy retiring early in Spain without having your pension cut? Congress has just taken the first step towards making that possible, provided you have already spent 40 years paying into Social Security.

Yes, 40 years. Someone who started contributing at 25 would reach that milestone at 65. Start at 22 and you would get there at 62. So Spain’s potential new version of penalty free early retirement still requires what most people would consider a seriously long working life.

But behind the irony is a potentially important change for hundreds of thousands of workers and pensioners.

What Spain has actually approved

On September 22, Congress voted by 178 votes to 33, with 136 abstentions, to begin processing legislation that would remove the reduction currently applied to the pensions of people who retire early after accumulating at least 40 years of contributions.

The proposal covers both voluntary early retirement and cases where people are forced out of work before reaching their ordinary retirement age.

Spain already has different retirement ages depending on contribution history, as EWN explained in its guide to Spain’s 2026 retirement timetable.

There is an important catch. This is not law yet.

Congress has agreed to start processing the proposal. It must now go through the parliamentary procedure, where it can be amended and will require further approval before anything changes.

The Spanish Congress confirmed the vote and next stages of the proposal on September 22.

Already retired? This is where it gets interesting

The potentially bigger story concerns people who have already retired.

Under the proposal, someone who retired early after accumulating 40 years of contributions and had their pension permanently reduced could ask Spain’s INSS to recalculate their pension.

Any increase would apply from the moment the request was made.

That could eventually matter to foreign residents who have spent a substantial part of their working lives contributing in Spain.

It also comes as Spain approaches another important pension milestone in 2027, when the ordinary retirement age reaches 67 for workers without the required contribution history. EWN has a full guide to Spain’s pension changes coming in 2027.

So Spain may indeed be preparing to make early retirement a little less painful.

You just need to get those 40 years of work out of the way first.