Spain’s customer-service law exists, but its most visible duties are still phasing in. Law 10/2025 of 26 December, regulating customer support, took effect on 28 December 2025. Firms have twelve months from then to adapt. The right to a person and the three-minute average wait limit therefore become fully claimable only at the end of December 2026. Until then, the statute is real, though not every promise can be enforced.
- Who: basic services of general interest in Spain, plus large consumer-facing sellers above staff or financial thresholds.
- People: bots cannot be the only channel; a transfer to a human must be offered from the main menu and at any point.
- Clocks: 95% of personalised requests answered in under three minutes on average; 15 working days for complaints, five for billing, two hours for outages.
- Lag: full enforcement arrives on 28 December 2026; telecoms and finance keep sector-specific precedence.
Scope and exceptions
Group one covers providers of basic services of general interest in Spain, wherever established: water, gas and electricity; air, rail, sea and bus transport; postal services; electronic communications; financial services. The General State Administration and its agencies and dependent companies are included.
Group two captures large firms selling any other good or service to consumers: at least 250 employees in the previous year, more than €50 million turnover, or a balance sheet above €43 million.
Telecoms and finance are subsidiary, so sectoral rules prevail. For phone operators, Law 10/2025 rewrites article 65 of the General Telecommunications Law: automatic answering is permitted, but
«en última instancia, deberá garantizar una atención personalizada, sin que ello implique el derecho a acceder a una persona física supervisora»
. A telecom customer thus gets a person, not necessarily a supervisor.
Electricity, gas and telephony marketers below 5% market share that are not large firms escape 24-hour incident support and the service/sales split until they reach it. Non-profits delivering basic services await regulation.
Human access and the stopwatch
Article 8 bans automatic attendants or conversational bots as the sole means of attention. People who call or write must be offered the route to a person from the main menu and at any moment, and that person identifies themselves first. The benchmark: 95% of personalised requests handled on average within three minutes, with the same figure for calls generally. A call is not attended if the customer cannot explain the reason and ask for an agent.
If unsatisfied, the customer can request a supervisor or quality department. If that cannot happen within three minutes, a callback later the same working day is allowed. Long waits cannot lead to disconnection. Calls cannot cost more than a standard geographic landline or mobile, and moving a caller from a free line to a paid one is banned.
Support and sales must be separate. An April 2026 resolution confines service to operators’ short numbers, 800 and 900 numbers treated as free, and geographic numbers at standard rates. Commercial calls received the 400 prefix under a resolution approved that month, per the Comunidad de Madrid guide.
Complaints, adaptation and the fine print
Complaints take 15 working days generally, unless sectoral norms differ; the government called this half the former 30-day period. Billing or improper-charge claims take five days. Queries about cuts in continuous basic services take two hours, with the cause and estimated repair time.
Firms must issue a tracking key and, on request, a receipt with content, date and time. Consented phone complaints are recorded, with instructions on accessing the audio, consistent with GDPR access rights. Replies must be reasoned, cover every point, avoid boilerplate, and no satisfaction survey may precede resolution. For continuous services such as power, supply cannot be cut while a related complaint is open, barring safety or sectoral exceptions.
As of October 2026, these standards remain in adaptation until 28 December 2026, as the regional guide recalls. Consumer-law changes have no grace period: final prices include management fees, automatic renewals need 15 days’ notice, and nullity rules apply.
The phrase to watch is “on average”, which allows harsh peak-hour queues if the rest of the day flows. The law’s annual audit will show whether the target is met or dressed up. Until late December 2026, keep records — written complaints, reference keys, logged waits — so evidence is ready when the deadlines bite.