The Ministry of Finance has gotten to work to begin holding bilateral meetings with the autonomous communities (and cities) to address the reform of regional financing. The department has reported that this Monday it sent letters to the ministries of the common regime communities, as well as Ceuta and Melilla, with the aim of arranging dates.
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Ministerial sources assure that the department led by Arcadi España “maintains the commitment to convene a meeting of the Fiscal and Financial Policy Council in the coming days, which would be the prior step to the approval by the Council of Ministers of the reform of the regional financing system and the start of the parliamentary process with the aim of having it approved before the end of the year.” In this way, the new financing model would come into effect on January 1, 2027.
The commitment to hold these bilateral meetings, which will be led by the Secretary of State for Finance, Jesús Gascón, was made at the last Fiscal and Financial Policy Council. There, the Ministry of Finance presented its system reform, whose approval would allow increasing the resources of the autonomous communities by 20.975 billion euros.
The total homogeneous resources that the model would distribute in 2027 are estimated at 224.507 billion. Finance recalls that, in the last settled year, 2023, the autonomous communities received 152.484 billion from the financing system.
The new financing model will incorporate new distribution criteria
The Government aims for the new regional financing model to incorporate new distribution criteria, methodological improvements, and be confined to priority principles for the Executive. Among them, it includes a new adjusted population proposal “that considers new variables and incorporates a more precise stratification of population groups.” Additionally, it seeks to increase tax capacity, which will raise autonomy and fiscal co-responsibility and reinforce the principle of sufficiency, while expanding and guaranteeing interterritorial solidarity “through an equitable, objective, and transparent horizontal equalization mechanism.”
The Executive also intends for vertical equalization to be guaranteed with an additional contribution from the central Administration, to strengthen financing in public health and education, as well as in social policies. Additionally, greater autonomy is also reflected in the possibility that communities receive the VAT collection generated by SMEs in their territories.
Likewise, the model will include a guarantee of statu quo, “by which no community receives less than with the previous model,” and a mechanism will be created, outside the new system, aimed at autonomies that are below the average in per capita resources.
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It will include “guarantee of statu quo, so that no autonomy receives less”
Last November, the then Minister of Finance, María Jesús Montero, committed to presenting a reform model of regional financing that, among other factors, would combine multilateralism, understood as the financing of homogeneous competences in all common regime territories, and bilateralism, understood as the own competences that some autonomies have. In this way, the central Government would meet the demands of Catalonia, whose Finance Minister, Alicia Romero, stated she felt “comfortable” with the proposal, as well as with the investiture pact sealed between PSC and ERC.
Thus, Finance will assume in its proposal that some territories have some competences that require greater financing, although it adds that this is not compatible with an improvement in the financing of all autonomous communities. In the case of Catalonia, security or prisons are two examples of own competences that would require more resources.
On the other hand, last December, the State Tax Administration Agency (AEAT) and the Catalonia Tax Agency (ATC) signed the agreement for the shared management of the Special Tax on Certain Means of Transport (IEDMT), known as the registration tax, as agreed in the Joint Commission on Economic and Fiscal Affairs (CMAEF) State-Generalitat of Catalonia held in February 2025. The signing of this agreement allows progress in the management from Catalonia of all taxes, with the aim of assuming the IRPF in 2028, as indicated in the investiture pact of President Salvador Illa with ERC on regional financing.
Junts opposes the agreement reached between the Government and Esquerra Republicana
However, last January, Junts announced the preparation of a total amendment with alternative text to the legal changes required by this new financing model, agreed between the Government of Pedro Sánchez and Esquerra Republicana.
For its entry into force, this model should pass a first cut in the aforementioned Fiscal and Financial Policy Council, which is expected to go ahead despite the reluctance of the Popular Party governments. In any case, it would then be necessary to modify the Organic Law on the Financing of the Autonomous Communities (Lofca) and other regulations in Congress. For that second step, an absolute majority voting in favor is required, since it is an organic law. And that majority is unfeasible without the vote of JxCat with the current balance of power.
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