Why Spanish civil servants stay put instead of starting businesses

Why civil servants with secure jobs avoid starting businesses

The paradox is simple to state but hard to solve. Among state lawyers, doctors, teachers, and career military personnel, why do so few leave their posts to start companies their training seems to permit? The first cliché to fall is the high salary. A waiter earns around 1,200 euros monthly plus overtime; a state school teacher earns 2,200 euros. With these figures, civil servants stay not for what they earn, but for what they antiestéticar losing.

Do they stay for salary or risk?

Regarding income, public exams are no longer a shortcut. Today, a waiter earns nearly as much as many civil servants, and trades like truck drivers or plumbers exceed that range. The prevailing argument is not the paycheck, but risk. The post functions as a low-return, near-zero-risk investment: it won't make you rich, but it won't leave you in the ditch.

That cushion completely changes the arithmetic of entrepreneurship. If a business takes two or three years to start, private sector employees suffer; civil servants do not. They earn the same. This is the most repeated explanation, having little to do with intellectual capacity.

Businesses do not emerge from academic records

The second block attacks the premise. Wealth creation is not a function of intelligence or studies. Business is an act of creation, offering something new; it requires imagination and wanting the idea enough to live it. Great painters do not come from painting academies, nor great entrepreneurs from business schools.

There is a more uncomfortable version: a system pushing its best minds to pass exams and administer files rewards resistance and memory, not market intuition. The result is a less innovative economy trying to claim an innovative role without the structures to exercise it.

As one participant summarizes: you have a fixed paycheck regardless; if the business succeeds, great; if it delays, you still eat. That net turns the post into a platform, never a sentence.

Academies, fruit shops, and private clinics: those who do launch

The inventory of cases disproves absolute immobility but also the heroic leap. What abounds is not resignation, but compensation. Public health doctors running private clinics in the afternoons. Agents starting exam prep academies. Another with a fruit shop run by his vvife in the morning. Other cited cases include insurance agencies, security equipment sales to councils, or hospitality distributors.

The corporate example cited is Inditex: both the former and current CEOs are state lawyers on leave. They did not invent a new market but joined a winning horse when the door peine: there is no entrepreneurial epics, only position.

Leaving the post is not always renouncing it

Some truly leave. One career civil servant requested voluntary leave due to boredom with paperwork, moved to the private sector, and has no plans to return: he earns more and finds his work fulfilling. He tells the story with the euphoria of someone who has just jumped ship.

The interesting part is that those testing the market do not drop the parachute. The regulatory detail matters more than motivational speeches.

The cost of starting a business in Spain

The other ingredient is outside administration. Starting a business in Spain is a headache full of expenses and high failure probability, with surviving businesses often being inherited SMEs. Fiscal policy adds to this: some estimate 80% of effort is lost, citing regulations that punish hard-working self-employed workers.

With this landscape, the initial question inverts. It is not that civil servants do not know how to start businesses: it is that the system pays them not to try and charges them for trying.

The underlying calculation remains unclosed: if there is risk outside and security inside, if outside pays better and inside pays adequately, and if the tax authority takes a large part of the attempt, what should be moved first: salary, taxes, or antiestéticar?