Starting a business in Spain: the cost of opening your doors before earning a cent

The invisible toll of starting a business in Spain: 1,000 euros before your first sale

Before selling the first product or invoicing the first euro, an entrepreneur in Spain has already spent more than 1,000 euros registering a trademark with the EU, several hundred setting up an SL (a Spanish limited company), and a monthly RETA (the self-employed social security scheme) fee that does not stop even in months with no income. The question is an uncomfortable one: how many projects die before they are born because of this upfront toll?

The cost of opening your doors: an outlay that does not wait for revenue

Registering an EU trademark costs around 1,000 euros. Software licences, whatever each one costs. Setting up an SL, several hundred euros and a few headaches. And corporate RETA, several hundred euros a month that you pay whether the business earns or not. It is the reality described by an entrepreneur facing Spanish bureaucracy: before you even open your doors, you are already in the red.

Some argue this is normal for any serious business. Investment in premises, tools, inventory, staff, licences and product development are necessary expenses before you start. That happens in Spain, in the United States, in China or in Mozambique. The difference lies in the amounts and in the rigidity of the Spanish system, where the fixed cost does not adapt to the reality of the project.

Sole trader, SL or LLC: the three routes and their pitfalls

The most common alternative is to register as a self-employed worker (autónomo). But that means exposing your full name, ID number and address on the web, something many are unwilling to do for privacy and security reasons. Moreover, the self-employed fee is around 60 euros for the first few months, but then it goes up. The other option is to set up a limited company, which many law firms sell ready-made, but corporate RETA is a monthly millstone.

Some entrepreneurs look to the United States and register an LLC. The advantage is that you do not need to register as self-employed in Spain if your business is mostly online. But the Spanish tax authority (Hacienda) does not look kindly on it if you live in Spain and operate from here. The threat of an inspection is real and the risk of being treated as a tax evader is high. Others suggest Estonia, but moving there is not an option for everyone, and if Hacienda finds out you are running an Estonian company from Spain, the problem is serious.

A Spanish problem or a universal one?

There is a school of thought that argues this is a deliberate deterrent. The idea is that only people who already have money should be able to make more money. If you have a great idea, it can be bought from you at whatever price they want, or simply copied. They can also hire you for 1,300 euros to develop it while the company gets fat on your effort. In this context, starting a business becomes an act of faith.

But others point out that in China the approach is different. China's equivalent of the European authorities also wants to collect revenue, but it plays the long game: it does not bother squeezing money out of small businesses with no employees, or just three or four. It lets them grow and generate revenue, and then collects a lot through low taxes. Here you are charged before you invoice your first euro; there the money is collected afterwards, when businesses already have employees and are invoicing millions of yuan.

The context: record numbers of self-employed, but what kind?

Official figures show that RETA membership is growing steadily. By mid-2026, the number of members climbs to 3,490,000, with almost 70,000 net new registrations since January. It is a historic record. But the critical reading is that many of these self-employed workers are false: platform delivery riders, app drivers, workers at companies that outsource to save costs. The riders law tries to curb this, but the reality is that the system continues to push many people into disguised precarity.

Meanwhile, public employment is also growing, and not only among civil servants who passed competitive exams. There are hundreds of thousands of people drawing pay from the State without the scrutiny of a traditional public job: state-owned companies, observatories, advisers, ad hoc contracts. The comparison with Denmark, where public services are the real thing, including childcare, leaves Spain exposed.

The question that remains hanging is whether Spanish bureaucracy is designed so that only those who already have capital can start a business, or whether it is simply the result of an inefficient system that does not distinguish between a small project and a large corporation. Meanwhile, the entrepreneur who wants to open their doors keeps paying the toll before knowing whether their business will succeed.