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Spain has seen the biggest increase in wage tax pressure among Europe’s largest economies since the pandemic. The latest OECD report shows that the share of a worker’s labour cost going towards income tax and social security contributions, known as the tax wedge, has risen from 39.8% in 2019 to 41.4% in 2025.

 

That 1.6 percentage point rise has pushed Spain up from 16th to 11th place in the OECD ranking of countries that tax wages most heavily. The country is still below Germany, France and Italy, but it remains above the OECD average of 35.1%.

 

The report breaks Spain’s 41.4% tax wedge down into 13.1% for personal income tax, 5% for employee social security contributions and 23.4% for employer contributions. If employer contributions are left out, the amount taken from the salary that actually reaches the worker falls to 23.5%, made up of 17.1% income tax and 6.5% employee social security contributions.

 

One of the main reasons for the rise in Spain is personal income tax. For a single worker on the OECD’s average Spanish salary of €32,678, the income tax rate has gone from 15.4% in 2019 to 17.1% in 2025. That has happened while gross wages have also risen, but years of high inflation have meant there has been little or no real improvement in purchasing power.

 

The OECD data also shows that the burden is not the same for everyone. For a low-income single worker earning €21,895 in 2025, the tax wedge is 37.9%. For a high-income salaried worker on €54,573, it rises to 46.2%.

 

Families are treated differently too. Households with the lowest tax burden are low-income single parents with children, whose wedge is 28.5% of wages. That rises to 36.8% for married parents with children on a single income, and to 38.7% when both parents earn the average wage.

 

The report also points to what economists call the poverty trap. For very low-income families, especially those with children, earning a little more can mean losing public benefits linked to income thresholds. In practice, that can leave some households facing a situation where every extra euro earned costs them more than €1 in tax and lost support.