Household income in 241 Spanish municipalities has come to rest more on pensions, unemployment benefit and other public transfers than on wages and economic activity combined.
The figures are drawn from the Atlas de distribución de renta de los hogares (household income distribution atlas) compiled by the Instituto Nacional de Estadística (INE), Spain’s statistics office. They refer to 2024, the most recent year available.
Most of the municipalities concerned are small, with fewer than a thousand residents. More than 50 of them are larger than that.
In San Martín del Rey Aurelio, in Asturias, northern Spain, more than 50 per cent of household income comes from pensions, unemployment benefit and other public transfers. The municipality has more than 15,000 residents.
The same applies in Aller, also in Asturias, with more than 10,000 residents, and in Bembibre and Villablino, in the province of León, northwest Spain, each with around 8,000 people on the municipal register.
Arboleas, in Almería province in the autonomous community of Andalusia, southeast Spain, is in the same position with more than 4,000 residents. In Arboleas and Villablino, pensions on their own account for 50 per cent of household income.
The pattern tracks age. The municipalities leaning hardest on transfers are the oldest ones, many of them in the thinly populated interior that Spaniards call la España vacía (empty Spain).
Among municipalities of more than 50,000 residents, Ferrol in Galicia and Ponferrada in León draw more than 30 per cent of household income from pensions, with Avilés in Asturias and Salamanca close behind.
Of the provincial capitals, Cádiz, in Andalusia, is the most reliant on public transfers, at 36.7 per cent of household income. Unemployment benefit and other non-pension transfers account for 8.5 percentage points of that figure.
Salamanca follows at 34.8 per cent. Zamora, León, Palencia, Ourense, Huelva, Santander, Oviedo, Segovia, Valladolid and Granada also sit above 30 per cent.
At the other end of the table are Boadilla del Monte and Pozuelo de Alarcón, both in the Madrid region, and Sant Cugat del Vallès, near Barcelona. Fewer than 15 per cent of household income in those three comes from pensions and benefits, and the same three record the highest average incomes in the country, according to the INE.
What marks them out is the weight of a category the atlas labels other income, above 20 per cent in each case. It covers the earnings of the self-employed and of professionals, returns on property and financial assets, and capital gains.
Among capitals, Palma de Mallorca, Madrid, Barcelona, Girona, Toledo, Murcia and Albacete all take more than 75 per cent of household income from wages and other economic activity.
The map has arrived in the middle of a general election campaign. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called the vote for November 29 in an institutional statement on October 5, saying the Government needed to “renew and expand people’s support” for its pending reforms.
Pensions have become one of the campaign’s running arguments. Social Security paid 10.55 million pensions to 9.53 million recipients in September 2026, with the average retirement pension at €1,576.10, up 4.5 per cent on the year.
There were 2.37 contributors for every pensioner in June 2026, against a record 22.5 million workers paying in at the end of July. AIReF, the independent fiscal authority, puts gross pension spending at 14.6 per cent of GDP, or 13.0 per cent once revenue measures are counted, below the 13.3 per cent ceiling agreed with Brussels, and projects 16.4 per cent by 2050.
INE projections published in June have the share of the population aged over 65 rising from 21.1 per cent to 30.9 per cent by 2076.
Spain’s spending path is already under scrutiny in the European Union. In its 2026 recommendation for the country, issued on June 3, 2026, the European Commission set out a maximum net expenditure growth rate of 3.5 per cent for the year and projected that Spain would reach 5.1 per cent, a deviation worth 0.6 per cent of GDP.
General government debt stood at 100.7 per cent of GDP at the end of 2025, down from 101.6 per cent a year earlier, and the Commission expects 99.6 per cent by the close of 2026. The text also flags rising healthcare and long-term care demand as a consequence of an ageing population.
One of its six recommendations asks the Spanish Government to tackle regional disparities in access to opportunities and services, with particular attention to areas losing population quickly. The territories identified by the INE atlas are, in large part, those same areas.
Cohesion funding is the instrument the EU brings to that problem, though it is allocated to regions rather than to the household incomes the atlas measures.
The atlas draws its income indicators from the records of the Agencia Tributaria, Spain’s tax agency, and of the foral treasuries, with data for Navarre supplied by the regional statistics body Nastat. Income is assigned to the municipality where the recipient lives, not where it is earned.
