Can your employer take remote work away in Spain? Four rulings from 2026 say it depends on what you signed
TL;DR: In Spain, your protection comes from the written remote-work agreement required by Ley 10/2021, not from how long you have been working at home. Spain’s Supreme Court ruled in July 2026 that an employer cannot cut an agreed remote-work percentage without each worker’s written consent. But a Balearic court upheld the dismissal of a lawyer with 26 years’ service over nine unapproved days at home. Remote Work Europe has read all four of 2026’s significant telework judgments, and the line between them is consistent: agreed arrangements hold, tolerated ones do not.
The question arrives in our inbox in roughly the same words every time. My company has told everybody to come back in. Can they actually do that?
In Spain, more often than not, the answer turns on a document rather than a principle. Four rulings handed down between June and August 2026 point the same way, and none of them is about whether remote work is a good idea. They are about what was written down, and what merely happened.
What does Ley 10/2021 actually require?
Spain requires a signed remote-work agreement for anyone working remotely for more than 30% of their hours, measured over a three-month reference period. That agreement has to say where the work is done and how it will be supervised, and it has to exist before the arrangement starts.
That threshold is the hinge of everything below. Above it, you should have a document. Below it, or running informally alongside it, you probably do not, and that is where people get hurt.
Ley 10/2021 also covers expense reimbursement, equipment, and reversibility. It is one of Europe’s more developed remote-work statutes, which is part of why Spanish case law on the subject is now worth reading even if you work somewhere else. Remote Work Europe tracks these judgments as they land, because Spain tends to get to these questions before its neighbours do.
Can your employer cut your remote days without asking?
No, not where the percentage sits in an individual telework agreement. That is the clearest of the four rulings.
In ruling 608/2026 of 1 July 2026, Spain’s Supreme Court blocked the Real Automóvil Club de Cataluña from moving affected employees from 100% remote to 75% without each worker’s express written consent. The court held that these arrangements are governed by Ley 10/2021 and not by article 41 of the Estatuto de los Trabajadores, which is the route employers normally use to vary working conditions for organisational or economic reasons.
That distinction is the whole ruling. Article 41 lets an employer impose certain changes for good business reasons. Ley 10/2021 does not. The court found that neither so-called ETOP causes nor the expiry of a collective agreement allows an employer to reduce an agreed in-person percentage on its own initiative. Changing the balance requires agreement.
The same chamber separately confirmed the nullity of two clauses in Endesa’s 2022 telework agreement for breaching the same law.
📌 What this means in practice: if your remote-work percentage is written into an individual agreement, it is a contractual term. An employer trimming your remote days needs your consent, not merely a reason. Our full write-up is here: Spain’s Supreme Court on remote-work percentages.
What if you need to work from home for caring reasons?
There is a separate route, and it works – but it wins you the arrangement rather than a payout.
Article 34.8 of the Estatuto de los Trabajadores lets you request an adaptation of how, when and where you work in order to reconcile work and family life. The 2023 reforms extended it to cover care for dependent relatives. Two rulings in 2026 show what it can do.
In Navarra, the Tribunal Superior de Justicia recognised a software engineer’s right to work her entire week from home to care for her mother, who has Alzheimer’s disease and a 65% disability rating. Her employer had required two days a week on site at the request of its principal client, and refused her request. The court found two defects in that refusal. First, the employer never opened the genuine negotiation the article requires, which runs up to fifteen days and calls for proposals and counter-proposals rather than a single written no. Second, the company had treated living with the dependent relative as a condition, and the law imposes no such requirement – which matters enormously for anyone supporting a parent in another town.
In Madrid, the Tribunal Superior de Justicia confirmed a worker’s right to 100% teletrabajo on conciliación grounds, upholding a decision of the Juzgado de lo Social nº 31 de Madrid.
The correction worth making about the Madrid case
The version of the Madrid ruling circulating in professional newsletters says the worker won compensation. She did not.
She claimed €20,000 for vulneración de derechos fundamentales. Both the first-instance court and the Tribunal Superior de Justicia rejected that claim. The court did not find evidence of discrimination or harassment sufficient to establish a breach of fundamental rights.
The €800 plus IVA that appears in the judgment is costs, awarded against the employer for bringing an appeal that failed. It is not damages, and it is not hers.
We are spelling this out because the useful lesson is in the split. Article 34.8 is a real mechanism and it works. A refusal that arrives as a flat letter, with no meeting and no alternative proposals, is something a Spanish court will overturn. But winning your teletrabajo is a different and much easier argument than establishing that the refusal violated your fundamental rights, and this ruling is a clean example of a worker succeeding on the first and failing on the second.
If you are weighing whether to bring a claim, that distinction is worth understanding before you start rather than after.
When does working from home get you dismissed instead?
When nobody wrote it down. This is the ruling that makes the other three make sense.
On 31 August 2026 the Tribunal Superior de Justicia de les Illes Balears upheld the disciplinary dismissal of an in-house lawyer employed since 1998 over nine days worked from home in August 2024, when office attendance was required.
Her employer’s internal rules required prior written approval from her line manager for remote days. She had obtained that approval in a previous year and did not seek it on this occasion. The court found “manifest disregard” for the internal rules and declined to apply the principle of gradualism – the idea that a proportionate lesser sanction should come first – despite 26 years of service and an unblemished disciplinary record. Palma’s Juzgado de lo Social nº 2 had already confirmed the dismissal at first instance.
⚠️ Remote working that has been informally tolerated is not the same as remote working that has been agreed, and Spanish courts are now treating the gap between the two as a disciplinary matter rather than a misunderstanding. Long service did not soften it. A clean record did not soften it.
The exposure sits exactly where you would expect: in the informal arrangements below the 30% threshold, or running alongside a written agreement that does not quite describe what actually happens. If your remote days rest on a manager having said yes once, or on nobody objecting, that is a weaker position than it feels. Full detail: the Balearic dismissal ruling.
So what actually protects you?
Reading the four together, the pattern is unambiguous.
| What you have | How strong it is |
|---|---|
| A written telework agreement under Ley 10/2021, with the percentage stated | Strong. Cannot be cut without your written consent |
| An article 34.8 adaptation granted for caring reasons | Strong for the arrangement. Weak as a basis for damages |
| A request under article 34.8 refused without genuine negotiation | Likely overturnable. The fifteen-day process is an obligation |
| A manager’s past approval, or an arrangement nobody has objected to | Weak. The Balearic case is what this looks like when it fails |
- Find out whether you have a written agreement. Not whether you work from home. Whether a document exists and what percentage it states.
- Check what it says about where the work is done. The agreement has to name the location.
- If you are relying on informal permission, get it written down before anybody needs to argue about it.
- If you need an adaptation for caring reasons, request it formally under article 34.8 and expect a negotiation rather than a yes or no.
If the honest answer turns out to be that your arrangement was never written down, it is worth knowing what else is available while you sort that out. Our members’ job club, Connected, carries remote roles open to people living in Europe, checked by hand every day.
Does any of this apply if you are autónomo?
No, and this is the most common confusion we see.
All four rulings are employment law. They govern people employed in Spain under a contract of employment. If you are autónom@ and invoicing clients, article 34.8 does not reach your client relationships and Ley 10/2021 does not govern where you work. It is not a weaker version of the same protection. It is a different thing entirely.
That matters for a lot of remote workers in Spain, because the route into the country and the route into employment are not the same. If you are working out which side of that line you are on, our guide to being autónomo in Spain sets out what the self-employed relationship actually involves, and the Spain country guide covers the wider picture.
These are also employment-law decisions rather than immigration ones. They are separate from Spain’s Digital Nomad Visa rules, which govern non-EU remote workers rather than domestic employment contracts.
Frequently asked questions
Can my employer in Spain order me back to the office? If your remote work is set out in an individual telework agreement under Ley 10/2021, they cannot reduce the agreed percentage without your express written consent. Spain’s Supreme Court confirmed this in ruling 608/2026 of 1 July 2026. If your remote work rests on informal permission, your position is much weaker.
Does Spanish law require a written remote-work agreement? Yes, for anyone working remotely more than 30% of their hours over a three-month reference period. The agreement must state where the work is performed and how it will be supervised.
Can I be dismissed for working from home without permission in Spain? Yes. In August 2026 the Tribunal Superior de Justicia de les Illes Balears upheld the dismissal of an employee with 26 years’ service over nine unapproved days working from home, finding manifest disregard for the employer’s internal rules.
What is article 34.8 of the Estatuto de los Trabajadores? It allows a worker to request an adaptation of the duration, distribution and location of their working time in order to reconcile work and family life, including full-time remote work. The employer must open a genuine negotiation of up to fifteen days rather than simply refusing.
Do I have to live with the relative I care for to use article 34.8? No. The Tribunal Superior de Justicia de Navarra specifically rejected cohabitation as a condition in its August 2026 ruling.
Does article 34.8 apply to me if I am self-employed? No. It is a provision of employment law and governs the employment relationship. It does not reach the relationship between an autónomo and their clients.
We are not lawyers and this is not legal advice. Case law turns on the facts of each case, and a Tribunal Superior de Justicia ruling binds the parties rather than the whole country. If you are in this situation, speak to a laboralista about your own circumstances.
Sources
- Tribunal Supremo (Sala de lo Social), ruling 608/2026, 1 July 2026 – Consejo General del Poder Judicial
- Tribunal Superior de Justicia de Madrid, Sala de lo Social, Sección Primera, sentencia 605/2026, 19 June 2026, recurso de suplicación 231/2026 · ECLI: ES:TSJM:2026:9075 · ROJ: STSJ M 9075/2026. Full text on CENDOJ, searchable by ECLI. Judgment read in full, not summarised
- Tribunal Superior de Justicia de Navarra, reported 24 August 2026 – El Periódico
- Tribunal Superior de Justicia de les Illes Balears, reported 31 August 2026
- Ley 10/2021, de 9 de julio, de trabajo a distancia
- Real Decreto Legislativo 2/2015 (Estatuto de los Trabajadores), article 34.8
