Spain's Top Court Tells Employers: Care Leave Is Five Days Per Emergency, Not Five Days a Year

Spain's highest court has closed off a widely used employer tactic for shrinking a statutory care entitlement, ruling that workers may take five paid days off each time a qualifying family emergency arises — with no annual cap.

The Tribunal Supremo's judgment of 25 September 2026 rejected the argument, advanced by employers, that the leave should be pooled into a single five-day allowance per calendar year. The case reached the court through a dispute involving Grupo RACE, the motoring organisation whose workforce numbers more than 500, and the unions UGT, CCOO and CSIF.

What the dispute was really about

Grupo RACE had maintained that the entitlement topped out at five working days in any calendar year and, on top of that, should apply only where a relative had been hospitalised or undergone surgery. The unions challenged both propositions.

They won at the Audiencia Nacional in March 2025. The Supreme Court's September ruling now confirms that decision at final instance, holding that every qualifying situation generates a fresh right to up to five days of paid special leave. The outcome follows a similar judicial decision handed down in February.

The statutory basis

Article 37 — specifically 37.3 — of the Spanish Workers' Statute (Estatuto de los Trabajadores) underpins the entitlement. It grants employees up to five days' leave in cases of accident, serious illness, hospitalisation or surgery that requires care and rest at home. Spouses, registered partners and relatives up to the second degree of kinship all fall within its scope.

Two practical points emerge from the Supreme Court's clarification. The right does not lapse automatically when a patient is discharged, provided home care is still needed. And staff must be able to take the leave flexibly; it need not be tied to rigid calendar days counted from the triggering event.

Unions welcome the ruling

CSIF, one of the three unions behind the case, welcomed the confirmation. According to media reports, it described the court's reading of the law as sociological, sensible and guarantee-oriented.

Removing the fixed annual ceiling means that a worker facing several unrelated illnesses or emergencies within the same family over the course of a year can claim the statutory days afresh each time. Employers, correspondingly, may neither collapse the entitlement into a single yearly quota nor cut it short while medically justified care at home continues.