Royal Decree-Law 7/2026, of March 20, has captured public attention primarily through its energy relief measures: direct aid to consumers and businesses affected by the rise in fuel costs stemming from the Middle East crisis. However, the decree contains a second block of provisions — strictly labor and corporate in nature — that have received far less scrutiny and that may have an immediate impact on workforce management at a significant number of companies.
This article analyzes the three main labor measures of Real Decreto-ley 7/2026, de 20 de marzo: the dismissal ban linked to direct aid, the acceleration of sustainable commuting plans, and the exclusion of losses from fiscal years 2020 and 2021 from the calculation of the dissolution trigger under company law.
Context: why labor measures appear in an energy response decree
Real Decreto-ley 7/2026, de 20 de marzo, is issued under Article 86 of the Spanish Constitution, which authorizes the Government to legislate urgently in situations of extraordinary and urgent necessity. The decree’s justification rests on the economic impact of rising fuel prices on Spanish productive activity, particularly in transport, fishing, agriculture, and energy-intensive industries.
The Government has opted for an intervention model already tested during the pandemic: linking emergency economic aid to employment preservation. The logic is coherent — if the State absorbs part of the crisis cost to keep companies afloat, those companies cannot simultaneously use that hardship as grounds for workforce reductions.
Additionally, the decree incorporates two measures of labor and corporate policy with a more structural intent: the acceleration of the implementation calendar for sustainable mobility plans and the extension of the mechanism that neutralizes COVID losses on the balance sheet — a tool previously deployed in decrees from 2021 and 2022.
Dismissal ban: scope, conditions, exceptions, and consequences
Which companies are affected
The dismissal ban established by Real Decreto-ley 7/2026, de 20 de marzo, applies to all companies and entities that access the direct aid program approved under the decree. The condition is automatic: the mere receipt of aid activates the employment safeguard clause.
The ban covers two categories of contract termination:
- Force majeure dismissals related to the fuel price crisis or its direct effects on business operations.
- Dismissals for economic, technical, organizational, or production (ETOP) reasons where those reasons are directly or indirectly linked to the impact of the Middle East crisis on the company’s activity.
The ban does not extend to terminations unrelated to the energy crisis: disciplinary dismissals, failure to pass a probationary period, expiry of fixed-term contracts upon reaching their end date, or voluntary resignations.
The specific case of cooperatives
The decree treats worker-owned cooperatives (sociedades cooperativas de trabajo asociado) separately. For these entities, the prohibition is not framed as a restriction on individual dismissals — a concept that has no legal standing within the cooperative relationship — but as the impossibility of approving workforce reduction agreements during the period in which the aid is in force.
In practice, this means that the general assembly or governing board cannot approve reductions in the membership base linked to causes related to the energy crisis while the cooperative is a beneficiary of aid under Real Decreto-ley 7/2026, de 20 de marzo.
Duration and end date
The employment safeguard clause runs until June 30, 2026. This date is critical: companies that have received aid under the decree must maintain their workforce at least until that date before they can pursue any restructuring decisions linked to energy-related causes.
Consequences of non-compliance
Breach of the dismissal ban triggers the obligation to repay in full all direct aid received under Real Decreto-ley 7/2026, de 20 de marzo. This repayment includes late-payment interest calculated in accordance with public subsidy regulations.
From a labor law perspective, a dismissal executed in breach of the safeguard clause may be challenged before the social jurisdiction. Labor courts have tended, in comparable COVID-era precedents, to classify such terminations as unfair dismissals (despidos improcedentes), entailing a choice between reinstatement or payment of enhanced compensation. In extreme cases involving bad faith, a finding of nullity — which mandates mandatory reinstatement and payment of accrued wages — cannot be excluded.
The interaction between ERTEs and the dismissal ban
One of the most frequently asked questions in the business environment is whether companies subject to the ban may simultaneously make use of a Temporary Employment Regulation Scheme (Expediente de Regulación Temporal de Empleo, ERTE).
The answer is yes. The prohibition in Real Decreto-ley 7/2026, de 20 de marzo, is specific: it prevents the permanent termination of employment contracts linked to the energy crisis. ERTEs, by their suspensive or reduced-hours nature, do not terminate contracts and are fully compatible with the receipt of direct aid.
In fact, the decree implicitly contemplates this route by framing the dismissal ban as a lower-cost alternative to outright closure. Companies that can demonstrate an impact from the energy crisis may process force majeure or ETOP ERTEs through the competent labor authority, keeping the workforce in a suspended state until the situation normalizes.
It is important to note that accessing an ERTE does not exempt a company from compliance with the safeguard clause. A company operating under an ERTE that simultaneously dismisses workers not covered by the suspension for crisis-related reasons could still be found to be in breach of the ban.
Sustainable mobility plans: required content, new deadline, and sanctions
The pre-existing framework and the decree’s acceleration
The obligation to draw up and implement commuting plans for workplaces above a certain employee threshold originates in Ley 7/2021, de 20 de mayo, de cambio climático y transición energética. The implementing regulations set a 24-month deadline from the entry into force of the development decree for covered companies to have their mobility plans operational.
Real Decreto-ley 7/2026, de 20 de marzo, reduces that deadline to 12 months as a general rule. Since the decree entered into force on March 22, 2026, the new maximum deadline for implementation is fixed at March 22, 2027.
Companies subject to the obligation
The obligation to have a sustainable commuting plan in place applies, as a general rule, to:
- Companies and bodies with workplaces of more than 50 employees located in air quality protection zones or in municipalities with more than 50,000 inhabitants.
- Public administrations with workplaces of more than 30 employees in the same zones.
- Newly opened workplaces that exceed these thresholds from the decree’s entry into force.
Minimum plan content
A sustainable commuting plan must include, as a minimum:
- Mobility diagnosis: analysis of the workforce’s habitual commuting patterns (origin, destination, mode of transport used, distances, time slots).
- Reduction targets: quantified objectives for reducing private combustion vehicle use and increasing uptake of public, active, or low-emission transport.
- Incentive measures: transport subsidies, agreements with public transport operators, bicycle parking, electric vehicle charging points, carpooling or company shuttle arrangements.
- Monitoring system: compliance indicators and periodic review (at least annually).
- Consultation with workers’ legal representatives: the plan must be negotiated or consulted with the works council (comité de empresa) or staff delegates (delegados de personal).
Sanctions for non-compliance
Failure to implement the mobility plan within the deadline may result in administrative sanctions under Ley 7/2021 and the Law on Labor Order Infringements and Sanctions (Ley de Infracciones y Sanciones en el Orden Social, LISOS). Infringements relating to mobility plans are classified as serious, carrying fines of between 626 and 6,250 euros depending on the size of the company. For companies with more than 500 employees, sanctions can reach the upper end of that range.
COVID losses exclusion: mechanism and deadlines for restating accounts
The problem it solves
During fiscal years 2020 and 2021, many Spanish companies recorded extraordinary losses stemming from the pandemic. Under Article 363.1.e) of Real Decreto Legislativo 1/2010 (Ley de Sociedades de Capital), a company is subject to a dissolution trigger when accumulated losses reduce net equity to below half of share capital.
Without the measure introduced by Real Decreto-ley 7/2026, de 20 de marzo, many of these companies — operationally recovered from COVID but still carrying those accumulated losses on their balance sheets — would have been forced to dissolve or recapitalize during 2026. The decree prevents that mechanical effect.
How the exclusion works
Real Decreto-ley 7/2026, de 20 de marzo, provides that, during fiscal year 2026, losses from fiscal years 2020 and 2021 are not counted for the purposes of Article 363.1.e) of the Ley de Sociedades de Capital. The dissolution trigger for losses is assessed by reference only to the net equity figure arrived at after excluding those losses.
This mechanism is analogous to the one approved under Real Decreto-ley 16/2020, de 28 de abril, and subsequently extended by Real Decreto-ley 27/2021, de 23 de noviembre, which prolonged the COVID corporate shield through fiscal years 2021 and 2022.
Deadline for restating accounts
Companies that have already prepared their 2025 annual accounts taking COVID losses into account — and that consequently included in their audit report or notes a reference to the dissolution trigger — have one month from the decree’s entry into force (that is, until April 22, 2026) to restate their annual accounts, removing that reference and adjusting the figures accordingly.
The restatement must be approved by the management body and, if the accounts have already been audited, communicated to the auditor so that they can issue a new report or, as appropriate, an addendum to the original report.
Key deadlines table
| Milestone | Deadline |
|---|---|
| Entry into force of Real Decreto-ley 7/2026, de 20 de marzo | March 22, 2026 |
| Dismissal ban linked to energy crisis | Until June 30, 2026 |
| Deadline to restate annual accounts (COVID losses) | April 22, 2026 |
| Maximum deadline to implement sustainable mobility plan | March 22, 2027 |
| Annual review of mobility plan (first revision) | March 22, 2028 (estimated) |
Impact on HR management: 7 questions every HR director must ask
Following the entry into force of Real Decreto-ley 7/2026, de 20 de marzo, any HR leader at a potentially affected company should work through the following questions before making any organizational decisions:
1. Has our company applied for, or does it intend to apply for, any of the direct aid under the decree? If the answer is yes, the employment safeguard clause applies automatically. Any dismissal decision linked to the energy crisis is suspended until June 30, 2026.
2. Do we have any planned contract terminations scheduled before June 30? If restructuring is already planned, it must be analyzed whether the underlying causes are or are not related to energy-crisis impact. Terminations for unrelated reasons (disciplinary, expiry of temporary contracts, etc.) are not affected.
3. Can we process an ERTE while remaining subject to the safeguard clause? Yes. An ERTE is a temporary, suspensive measure compatible with the receipt of aid. The company should assess whether its situation justifies filing a force majeure or ETOP ERTE in parallel with the aid.
4. Do we have more than 50 employees at any single workplace in a municipality with more than 50,000 inhabitants? If so, the company is obliged to implement a sustainable commuting plan before March 22, 2027. This deadline is less than one year away, so action must begin immediately.
5. Have we started the mobility diagnosis and consultation with workers’ representatives? The mobility plan requires participation from employee representatives. If that process has not yet started, it must be launched in the first quarter of 2026 at the latest.
6. Does our balance sheet reflect 2020 or 2021 losses that could trigger the dissolution threshold in the 2025 accounts? If the company’s net equity is compromised by losses from those years, the decree provides an exclusion mechanism. This must be coordinated with the finance team and external auditor before April 22, 2026.
7. Are we a worker-owned cooperative? In that case, the workforce reduction prohibition operates under a specific regime: the governing body cannot approve agreements to reduce the membership base for reasons linked to the energy crisis while the cooperative receives aid under the decree.
Comparison with earlier measures: RDL 8/2020 and the 2021 Labor Reform
Real Decreto-ley 7/2026, de 20 de marzo, is not the first decree to link a dismissal ban to the receipt of public aid. The model has a direct precedent in Real Decreto-ley 8/2020, de 17 de marzo, which introduced the first employment safeguard clause tied to COVID ERTEs: companies accessing social security contribution exemptions were required to maintain employment levels for six months from the resumption of activity.
That clause generated an extensive and at times contradictory body of case law on what “maintaining employment” precisely entailed and which types of terminations violated it. The Supreme Court, in rulings from 2021 and 2022, established that the clause covered the maintenance of the company’s overall employment level, not the continuity of each individual contract.
Real Decreto-ley 7/2026, de 20 de marzo, benefits from that jurisprudential experience and delimits the scope of the prohibition more precisely, restricting it to dismissals for reasons linked to the energy crisis. This reduces uncertainty about its reach but demands a more rigorous causal analysis in each individual case.
For its part, the Labor Reform enacted by Real Decreto-ley 32/2021, de 28 de diciembre, reduced labor market duality by restricting temporary hiring and promoting permanent discontinuous contracts (fijos-discontinuos). In the context of Real Decreto-ley 7/2026, de 20 de marzo, this has practical implications: companies have less room to manage workforce mismatches through the simple non-renewal of temporary contracts, which increases the relative weight of ERTEs and reduced-hours agreements as adjustment tools compatible with the safeguard clause.
On sustainable mobility, the 2026 decree operates as an accelerator of a mandate already established by Ley 7/2021, de 20 de mayo, de cambio climático. It introduces no new substantive obligations but compresses the compliance calendar, imposing more urgent action on companies that had not yet started the process.
Conclusion: three obligations, different timelines, cumulative risk
Real Decreto-ley 7/2026, de 20 de marzo, layers three obligations with different schedules and consequences. The dismissal ban is immediate and short-term (until June 30, 2026), but carries high financial risk if breached — full repayment of all aid received. The restatement of accounts for COVID losses is urgent (before April 22, 2026) but operationally straightforward if acted upon promptly. And the mobility plans have a one-year horizon, but require a diagnosis, negotiation, and implementation process that does not admit delay if the March 22, 2027 deadline is to be met.
Companies facing all three situations simultaneously — recipients of aid, with compromised balance sheets, and subject to mobility plan obligations due to headcount thresholds — face a scenario of concurrent management that demands close coordination between HR, finance, and legal advisory teams.
If your company is affected by any of these situations and needs guidance on the impact of Real Decreto-ley 7/2026, de 20 de marzo, on your labor or corporate management, the BMC team can help you structure a timely and legally compliant response.
