Madrid unlocks 1,000 frozen retirements with a single decree

Spain’s cabinet will ram through a royal decree this month that frees more than 1,000 public servants who have been trapped in legal limbo since April 2025, when a pension reform quietly axed their right to partial retirement.

The loophole sounds technical, but the human toll is visible in every ministry: teachers, nurses and clerks who had already cut their hours and trained their replacements woke up one morning to discover they could neither retire nor return to full-time work. The reform forced their successors to be given permanent, full-time contracts—impossible inside a civil-service system that still runs on nineteenth-century competitive exams.

The fix: temporary contracts dressed up as permanent

Under the draft decree seen by TecCurrent, the government will allow agencies to hire interim workers on full-time temporary contracts the moment an eligible employee requests partial retirement. When the official oppositions finally produce a permanent replacement, the interim contract dies. If the permanent hire quits within two years, another temp can be drafted. The chain keeps moving so the retiree never has to give back the keys.

The cost will be measured in precarity: a revolving door of short-term civil servants whose only guarantee is that they will be fired once the bureaucracy coughs up a “funcionario” with lifetime tenure. Unions call it gig-ification of the state; the Treasury calls it workforce planning.

The decree still needs a simple majority in Congress within 30 days, but opposition spokesmen have already signalled they will not block a measure that mainly affects their own staff. The decree is bundled with the broader 35-hour week negotiations, giving the coalition a double win before regional elections this spring.

Translation: 1,064 people—mostly women in their early 60s—will finally collect a pension and a salary at the same time, while an unknown number of twenty-somethings will discover that their first “stable” public job comes with an expiry date printed on the contract.