Meal vouchers in Europe Ticket restaurante rules in Spain in 2026
Ticket restaurante rules in Spain in 2026
In Spain a ticket restaurante is exempt from personal income tax up to 11 EUR per working day in 2026, with a lower figure of 9 EUR in the Basque Country. The exemption applies only to days actually worked, and it disappears entirely if the benefit can be taken as cash. The delivery format is free: paper, card or app all qualify.
What is the daily exemption in 2026?
11 EUR per working day. Amounts above that are not exempt, and the excess is treated as ordinary employment income.
The Basque Country applies 9 EUR instead, under its own tax powers. Any programme running across Spain has to be able to apply a different ceiling to one part of the workforce, which is a real configuration requirement rather than a footnote.
What counts as a working day?
Only days the employee actually worked. Weekends, public holidays and annual leave do not accrue entitlement.
This is the condition most often broken by accident. A programme that loads a flat monthly amount without reference to the calendar will, over a year, hand out entitlement for days nobody worked, and the excess loses the exemption. Loading has to follow the working pattern, and it has to cope with part time staff, shift patterns and leave.
What disqualifies the benefit?
Three things, and each one is fatal rather than partial.
- Cash substitution. If the employee can take the money instead of the meal benefit, it is pay, and it is taxed as pay.
- Withdrawal. A card that can be emptied at a cash machine is cash by another route.
- Use outside the intended purpose. The benefit exists to pay for meals on working days, and acceptance has to reflect that.
Alongside those, the amounts have to appear correctly in payroll as a social benefit. The income tax exemption is not the same as an exemption from social security contributions, and the two are assessed separately, so payroll treatment is part of the compliance picture rather than an afterthought.
Does Spain restrict who may issue?
No. There is no register of authorised issuers as there is in Italy or France, and no national accreditation for accepting merchants.
That puts Spain in the same structural group as Germany: the barrier to entry is not a licence to issue vouchers, it is the ability to demonstrate that the instrument satisfies the tax conditions. Acceptance is typically limited by merchant category rather than by a contracted merchant list.
What a Spanish programme has to be able to do
Four requirements follow directly from the rules above, and they are the ones worth checking against any platform before signing.
| Requirement | Why |
|---|---|
| Apply 11 EUR nationally and 9 EUR in the Basque Country | Regional tax powers set a different ceiling |
| Load against working days, not calendar days | Only days actually worked carry the exemption |
| Block cash withdrawal outright | Withdrawal converts the benefit into pay |
| Restrict acceptance to food | The exemption is tied to the purpose |
The first two are the ones generic prepaid platforms tend to miss, because they are payroll logic rather than card logic.
Does the format matter: paper, card or app?
Not to the exemption. Spanish rules leave the delivery format open, so paper vouchers, a payment card and a mobile app all qualify on the same terms. What has to be demonstrable is the substance: that the amount was used for meals on days actually worked, and that the employee could not have taken it as cash instead.
That neutrality is unusual. Belgium legislated paper out of existence, and France is doing the same by February 2027. Spain simply does not care, which means the argument for a card here is operational rather than legal: it is easier to evidence, easier to load against a working pattern, and easier to stop when someone leaves.
What employers get wrong
Three mistakes account for most of the lost exemptions, and none of them is exotic.
Loading a flat monthly amount. It is the simplest thing to configure and it is wrong, because entitlement accrues per day worked. Over a year the difference between a flat load and a working day load is significant, and the excess is taxable.
Ignoring part time and shift patterns. An employee working three days a week accrues three days of entitlement, not five. Programmes that treat headcount as a proxy for working days overpay quietly.
Missing the regional ceiling. A company headquartered in Madrid with a team in Bilbao has two ceilings to apply. Applying 11 EUR to everyone is a compliance problem for the Basque part of the workforce.
How Spain compares
Spain sits between the two European models. It has the light structure of Germany, with no register and no merchant accreditation, but a specific and unusually precise daily figure like France. The regional variation is its own complication, and it has no equivalent elsewhere in the markets covered here.
For the acceptance question that decides most programme designs, see open loop or closed loop. Every dated change across Europe sits on the calendar.