The Council of Ministers approved a royal decree on Tuesday that will overhaul access to flexible retirement, opening the option to self-employed workers for the first time and widening the terms under which a pension can be combined with paid work. The changes will take effect in three months.
Under the reform, workers who use seguridad social flexible retirement will be able to move between a 33% and 80% partial work schedule, compared with the current range of 25% to 75%. The pension will be cut in inverse proportion to the reduction in working hours, but if the move to flexible retirement comes six months after retirement, the pensioner will receive an extra percentage on top of the payment.
For part-time schedules between 55% and 80%, the pension will rise by 25% additional. For schedules between 33% and 55%, it will rise by 15% extra. In the case of self-employed workers, the pensioner may receive up to 25% of the pension while carrying out the compatible activity. Those who want to access the system as self-employed workers must not have been registered as self-employed in the three years before retirement.
Until now, access to partial retirement was limited to salaried workers. The decree removes that barrier and also drops the requirement to wait a minimum period after retirement before applying for flexible retirement. For pensioners who had been forced into early retirement, the reform goes further: their benefit will be improved through a recalculation of the regulatory base and the percentage applied, using the new contribution period.
Elma Saiz said the aim is to give workers more and better options when retiring or combining work and pension, and described the new model as an improved flexible retirement scheme. Her comments fit a broader push that has been under way since 2021 to make the transition from employment to retirement less abrupt.
The numbers already show the effect of that shift. In May, the average age at which people began drawing a pension rose to 65.5 years, up from 64.5 years in 2018. Early retirements have fallen to 30%, while the share of workers extending their careers beyond the ordinary retirement age now stands above 12%.
That is the context for the decree: flexible retirement is one of the main tools the Ministry of Inclusion and Seguridad Social is using to lengthen working lives and move the effective retirement age closer to the legal one. The latest reform does not start a new direction so much as deepen one that has been building since 2021.
The unresolved issue is not whether the rule is changing, but how many self-employed workers will actually use it once the three-month deadline passes. The legal door is now open; the test will be whether the new terms are generous enough to make staying partially in work worth it.
