TL;DR

  • Remote Work Europe is running the State of Freelancing in Spain 2026 survey, and it closes at 23:59 on Sunday 20 September. It is fully bilingual, in Spanish and English.
  • It is market research, not lead generation. Xolo sponsor the prize and get the aggregate findings. They never receive your name, your email, or anything that identifies you.
  • I spent 17 years running a market research fieldwork agency before this, and wrote a book about how research participants should be treated. That is the standard I am holding this to.
  • Nobody writes a forum post to say the autónomo system is basically fine. That is exactly the problem this is trying to fix.

Nobody has ever gone on Reddit to say that being autónoma in Spain is fine.

You know this is the reality. Every public account you have read of the Spanish freelance system is written by somebody at one extreme or the other – either it destroyed their soul, or they cannot believe how straightforward it was. The middle never posts, because “I paid my cuota, my gestor filed it, it was OK” is not a story anybody feels moved to tell on social media.

I have been autónoma for more than a decade, and I recognise almost nothing of my own experience in most of what I read about it.

What I actually think about the autónomo system

Here is the honest version, and it is not a satisfying one.

The Spanish public health service saved my daughter’s life. She needed emergency surgery, she got it, and the care was extraordinary. I have never had to think about what that would have cost. When people describe their cuota as money thrown into a hole, I think about that, and I cannot make the arithmetic come out the way they do. It was three major surgeries in the end, and there is no way I am an unbiased typical contributor in that sense. Even after all these years, I am clearly a net beneficiary.

I also have genuine frustrations with the system. There are things about being autónoma in Spain that I find genuinely difficult, and I am not going to pretend otherwise in a piece that is asking other people to be honest with me. The sense of being continually untrusted, of having to prove every point, justify every cent, live with constant anxiety that the system is out to get you… I don’t think that’s just me.

Both of those things are true at once, and that is the point. My experience is not evidence of anything. It is one person’s view, in one region, in one profession, with one set of circumstances. If I generalised from it I would be doing exactly what the loudest voices online already do, which is the opposite of the quality of dialogue I want Remote Work Europe to be about.

Why the loudest accounts make the system impossible to evaluate

The trouble with extreme examples is not that they are false. They are usually completely true for the person telling them.

The trouble is that you cannot work out what they mean for you. When somebody says the system is unaffordable, that statement is doing an enormous amount of hidden work, and bundling in a great many assumptions. Unaffordable at what income? In which region? With how many dependants? In year one, when the flat rate applies, or in year four when it does not? Working for Spanish clients, or invoicing clients in another country and another currency?

These details are what make the example relevant to you or completely meaningless. And they are precisely what gets stripped out when an experience is compressed into a comment.

So somebody weighing up whether to register as autónomo reads twenty accounts, half of them catastrophic and half of them breezy, and ends up knowing less than when they started. So they go online and ask for people’s thoughts about the autónomo system and the first to reply are those who’ve had a terrible experience, followed by a backlash of those defending it, and all, again, absent of any useful context whatsoever.

Remote Work Europe exists to answer questions like this properly for people working across Europe, and this is the first time we have gone out and collected the data ourselves rather than working with other people’s statements.

Why the survey asks about your dependants and your income

Some of the questions might feel intrusive, so I want to explain why they are there. Because “we would like to know” is not a good enough reason to ask anybody anything.

Demographic questions are what turn anecdote into analysis. Take the one about dependientes, for example: if I can separate the responses of people supporting dependants from those of people supporting only themselves, I can tell you something useful about what the cuota does to a family budget rather than an individual one. If I cannot, I can only tell you an average – and an average across two groups with completely different realities describes nobody at all.

The same is true for how long somebody has been registered, what they earn, which region they are in, and whether they came here from another country or grew up here. Every one of those cuts the data in a way that makes the answer more specific to the person reading it. And the more people who answer those questions, the more meaningful the outcomes will be (being able to say whether low earners with no dependants still have a workable income, for example).

That is the trade I am asking you to make: a few uncomfortable questions in exchange for findings that are actually about people like you, rather than about a fictional average freelancer who does not exist.

And do not worry – every one of those questions can be skipped. If a question feels like too much, leave it. A partial response is still useful, and can still enter the prize draw. A response somebody felt coerced into is not what anybody would want.

Who can take part, and who the findings will speak to

Anyone registered as autónom@ in Spain can take this survey. There is no filter on profession, on nationality, or on how long you have been registered. If you pay the cuota, your experience counts.

I have no illusions that our survey results will represent the whole Spanish freelancing population equally. Our own community is mostly knowledge-work freelancers – people whose work happens on a laptop rather than in a workshop or a van – because the clue is in the name: Remote Work Europe. Also, while the survey is available fully bilingual, most of our content is in English and results will inevitably skew towards people who moved to Spain from somewhere else. That is who we can realistically reach, so that is where most responses will come from, and that is who the findings will speak to most directly.

I would rather state that plainly at the start than discover it in the analysis and generalise anyway. A sample you have described honestly is worth more than one you have flattered.

It was important to me that the survey runs fully in Spanish as well as English however – two equivalent versions rather than an afterthought translation. Being available in English only would have guaranteed the narrowest possible sample, and anyone who grew up here should be able to take part without doing it in their second language.

Realistically, I do not expect a large number of Spanish-born respondents. If that is how it turns out, the report will say so and will describe the sample for what it was, rather than presenting it as more balanced than it managed to be. Reporting who you did not reach is part of the job.

What my background has to do with any of this

This is the part that does not appear on my Remote Work Europe biography, and it is relevant here in a way it usually is not.

Before I built Remote Work Europe, I spent 17 years running a market research fieldwork agency in the UK. Fieldwork is the unglamorous end of the industry – actually finding the right people, actually asking them, actually making sure the data means what it claims to mean. I was a certified member of the Market Research Society, of ESOMAR and of the QRCA, and I contributed papers at global industry conferences. Those memberships have lapsed – I left that industry – but the training did not.

My first book was called The Participant Principle, and it was about the appropriate way to treat research participants. Which makes it fairly awkward for me to run a survey badly. Even though my professional background was all about qualitative rather than quantitative research, the recruitment fieldwork phase is very survey-driven.

I mention all of this for one reason. When I say this is real market research rather than a marketing exercise wearing a lanyard, I am telling you I know the difference, professionally and specifically, and that I know what the corners look like when they get cut.

What Xolo get out of this, and what they do not

Now the part you should be sceptical about, so let me get in front of it properly.

Xolo are sponsoring this survey. They are also a company I have a paid relationship with. I am Xolo Spain’s ambassador, I have used Xolo Leap for my own Estonian company for eight years, and they pay me for that.

International freelancers in Spain are their target market, and they are naturally interested in learning what that market thinks about things. That’s why I approached them when I considered doing this exercise, to see if they would help me make it interesting: for freelancers, time is money, and therefore the chance to win a really nice prize for around 10 minutes of participation is something Xolo were glad to support.

So Xolo are providing the prize – a pair of AirPods Max, drawn from everyone who completes the survey and chooses to enter. That is what a sponsor does: they make the incentive possible, so that people’s time is worth something.

Here is what they receive:

  • The aggregate findings. The report, the analysis, the charts. The same thing everybody else will see.
  • The full set of answers, with every contact detail stripped out. They are supporting research, so they get the research. What they cannot do is tell who gave which answer.
  • A joint article with their PR agency once the report is out.

Here is what they do not receive – and this is the part that matters:

  • No contact details. Not your name, not your email, not your phone number. Ever.
  • No link between you and your answers. Your email address is held separately and is never joined to your response.
  • No ability to identify any respondent, individually or by combining fields.

This is not a lead generation exercise. Nobody is going to be sold to on the basis of having answered. If it were a lead generation exercise dressed up as research, the honest thing would be to say so, and the questions would look completely different – they would be about your current provider and your renewal date, not about your dependants.

There is also a newsletter opt-in at the end. It is optional, it is not a condition of entering the draw, and skipping it does not affect your response in any way. It is there because some people want to see the results, and that is the mechanism by which we send them. The only way to do that is to join our mailing list, though of course anybody can opt out at any time.

What happens to your answers

A distinction I want to make precisely, because a lot of surveys are sloppy about it.

Your answers are anonymous. Nothing in the response file identifies you. If you enter the prize draw we also hold an email address – we have to, or we could not tell you that you had won – and it sits separately, in our mailing platform, never joined to your answers. That separation is the whole design, and it is deliberate: it is what lets me promise both things at once.

What we deliberately do not collect: no IP addresses, and timestamps rounded to the minute rather than the second, so responses cannot be reconstructed into an order and matched against anything else.

The field closes at 23:59 CEST on Sunday 20 September. The prize draw runs within five working days of that, and the findings are published at the end of September.

What I hope comes out of it

Something boring, ideally.

I would like to be able to say that for a knowledge-work freelancer at a certain income, in a certain region, with a certain family situation, the Spanish system costs roughly this and delivers roughly that – and here is how that changes if any one of those variables changes. Not “Spain is terrible for freelancers.” Not “Spain is wonderful for freelancers.” Something a person could actually use to make a decision.

Of course the reason for any investigative exercise is to generate insight, as well as answering known questions, and I don’t know exactly what we’re going to learn from this. We will publish the conclusions as widely as we can and will try to distribute our findings wherever we can. So many of us, as freelancers, operate without the collective voices of employers, organisations, or unions and I want this to be a channel where people can say what they think and raise their voices together.

But that won’t happen unless we make enough noise through the numbers, which is the only thing I am really asking for here.

The State of Freelancing in Spain 2026

Around 10 minutes, fully bilingual, open to anyone registered as autónom@ in Spain. Closes 23:59 on Sunday 20 September.

→ Take the survey

If you have questions I have not answered here, ask me. Genuinely – a question about methodology from a suspicious respondent is a better use of my afternoon than most things on my list, and if the answer is embarrassing then I should not be running the survey.

Frequently asked questions

Is this survey anonymous? Your answers are, yes – nothing in the response file identifies you. We do not collect IP addresses, and timestamps are rounded to the minute rather than the second. If you enter the prize draw or opt into the newsletter, we hold your email address, stored separately in our mailing platform and never joined to your answers. We do not share your contact information with anybody. If you do neither, we hold no contact details for you at all.

Will Xolo see my answers? Xolo receive the published findings and the full set of answers with every contact detail removed. They never receive your name, your email or anything that could identify you, and your email address is never joined to your answers.

Do I have to be a Xolo customer to take part? No, and it makes no difference to your response or your entry in the draw. The survey is open to anyone registered as autónom@ in Spain, whoever handles your paperwork, including people who handle it themselves.

Do I have to answer the personal questions? No. Every question can be skipped, including all the demographic ones. A partial response is still useful.

Can I take the survey in Spanish? Yes. It runs fully in both Spanish and English, and both versions are equivalent – neither is a reduced translation of the other.

When will the results be published? At the end of September 2026. Opting into the newsletter at the end of the survey is the way to be told when they are out, and it is entirely optional.

Sources