Year-end in Spain: chasing unpaid invoices before 31 December

If you sell to Spanish companies from abroad, December can feel like the month when your customers vanish. The Constitution and Immaculate Conception holidays (6 and 8 December) often become a long weekend, then Christmas runs into 6 January, Reyes, the traditional day for giving presents. Many small businesses run their last payment batch of the year in mid-December. An invoice that misses it usually waits until mid-January.

So the time to chase is November. Here's how to do it from outside Spain.

General information, not legal or tax advice. Rules and deadlines change: check with an adviser who knows Spanish law before acting.

Week by week

When	What to do
Early November	Pull an aged-debt report of Spanish customers; flag anything over 60 days or close to a time limit
Mid-November	Email reminder with the invoice attached, then a phone call, ideally in Spanish
Late November	Formal demand (burofax) to anyone who hasn't replied
1-15 December	Agree payment dates before their last payment run
Late December	Prepare paperwork for your accountant: VAT, write-offs, claims to file in January

The full escalation process, from friendly reminder to the Spanish monitorio and the European Payment Order, is in our guide to collecting an unpaid invoice from a Spanish company.

Call the person who pays

Small Spanish companies don't have accounts-payable teams. The owner or manager approves payments, and they answer the mobile, not the office landline. In our directory, 92.9 % of business phone numbers are mobiles. Emails to a generic info@ address get lost in December. A short call in Spanish ("Te llamo por la factura 2026-118, que venció el 3 de septiembre. ¿Me confirmas cuándo la vais a pagar?") gets a date far more often than a third email in English.

If the number you have is dead, the contact left or the company moved, look it up by its tax ID (CIF/NIF).

What Spanish law lets you add

If your contract is governed by Spanish law, Ley 3/2004 (Spain's version of the EU Late Payment Directive) gives you:

• Maximum payment term: 60 calendar days between businesses, whatever the contract says; 30 days if nothing was agreed.
• Statutory interest: automatic from the due date. For the second half of 2026 it is 10.40 % a year (BOE, 1 July 2026). The rate for the first half of 2027 is published at the end of December.
• €40 per invoice in recovery costs, added without needing to ask.

On a €3,000 invoice that is 60 days late, interest comes to about €51 (3,000 × 10.40 % × 60 / 365), plus €40. If your contract is under another EU country's law, that country's transposition of the same directive gives you similar rights.

Spanish VAT: does bad-debt relief apply to you?

It depends on how you invoiced.

• You invoiced without Spanish VAT (intra-EU B2B supply under reverse charge, or services where the Spanish customer self-accounts): you never paid Spanish VAT, so there's nothing to recover in Spain. Look at your home country's bad-debt relief.
• You are VAT-registered in Spain and charged Spanish VAT (for example, goods held in a Spanish warehouse): article 80.Cuatro of the Spanish VAT Act lets you reduce the taxable base once a year has passed since the VAT became due (six months if your turnover did not exceed €6,010,121.04 the previous year), provided you've claimed payment through the courts, a notary or another verifiable means such as a burofax. You then have six months to issue a corrective invoice, send it to the customer and notify the Spanish Tax Agency within one month using form 952.

Secured or insured debts (for the covered part), debts between related parties and customers already in insolvency proceedings follow different rules. This is one to check with a Spanish tax adviser.

Watch the time limit

Under the Spanish Civil Code, contractual claims without a special period prescribe after five years (article 1964). Some, such as professional fees or sales by a trader to a buyer who doesn't resell the goods, have three years (article 1967). An out-of-court demand interrupts the period (article 1973). If you have old Spanish invoices from 2021 or 2022 sitting in a drawer, a burofax before year end protects them.

The burofax also helps later: since 2025, most Spanish civil claims require proof of a prior attempt to negotiate, under Organic Law 1/2025.

A note on contacting Spanish businesses

Chasing a customer for money you're owed is not a marketing call, but keep it professional: say who you are, call during working hours and deal with the person responsible for payment. If you also use the call to sell something new, Spain's marketing rules apply. Companies (legal entities) can be contacted about their business; sole traders (autónomos) are individuals, so you need a legal basis and must check the Robinson opt-out list. Marketing emails are restricted by the LSSI even between businesses. See our guides to cold calling in Spain and cold email under the LSSI.

If the debtor has gone quiet or moved, start with how to locate a Spanish debtor, or see how collection agencies use IberiaData in our debt collection use case.