The cuota comes first, and it does not care whether you invoiced
If you arrived from a payroll job, this is the part that stings. An employee’s contributions are a slice of what they were actually paid. The autónomo cuota is due for every month you stay registered in RETA. A month with no clients is still a month you pay.
It is not a percentage of turnover either. Seguridad Social sorts you into a tramo by your forecast monthly net earnings; each tramo carries a minimum and a maximum contribution base, and the rates land on that base: 28.3% for common contingencies, plus professional contingencies, cese de actividad, vocational training and the MEI.
Together they come to 31.5% of the base, which has a floor of €7,843 a year and a ceiling of €61,214. A terrible year still costs you the minimum. A spectacular one stops adding cuota at the top.
The forecast is provisional. Next year Seguridad Social checks it against the earnings the tax office actually saw, and you either top up or get a refund. The model assumes you take the lowest base your tramo allows, which is what most people choose; a higher base buys a bigger pension — and a bigger bill. The tramo is not read off your IRPF profit either. The cuotas are added back first, then a flat 7% comes off for generic expenses.
The cuota is at least deductible. It is a business expense, and it shrinks the profit that IRPF then taxes.
The first-year cuota is a figure nobody has passed into law
A new autónomo pays a flat €80 a month instead of the percentage, for the first 12 months, with the MEI on top. It is not automatic. Ask for it when you register.
Then read the provisional notice above before you build a budget on it. That amount had a statutory basis only until the end of the previous cycle. From this year it has to be set by the annual Budget Law, and no Budget has been passed. What we show is the figure Seguridad Social publishes and charges today — administrative practice, not an enacted norm. If a Budget eventually fixes a different amount, that amount governs the whole year, not only the months after it lands.
Your profit is taxed exactly like a salary
Start from turnover. Take off the deductible expenses, then the cuotas you paid, then the gastos de difícil justificación allowance: 5% of net income, capped at €2,000 a year. What survives joins the general taxable base and meets the same progressive scale as an employee’s salary, a state half running from 9.5% to 24.5%, with your autonomous community stacking its own scale on top.
That is why the region selector moves the number, and why the salary calculator runs on the same scale as this one. You pay in quarterly instalments and settle in the annual return. The calculator assumes simplified direct estimation, the regime you stay in while prior-year turnover is under €600,000.
Three things the model cannot see
IVA is not in it at all. IVA is not income tax, and most of it flows through you rather than out of you, but it governs your quarterly cash flow, and whether you charge it depends on your clients and your activity.
Your expenses are whatever you type. The model deducts the number you give it, so an optimistic number buys an optimistic answer and nothing else.
Your start date is where the model quietly understates the bill. The reduced cuota runs from the day you register, not from January, and we assume a full calendar year on it. Start in July and this page looks cheaper than your bank account will. The extension for low earnings is not modelled, and neither are the disability and gender-violence variants.
If most of the profit stays in the business instead of in your pocket, the company route is priced end to end on the Spanish founder page. And if the country itself is still open, Portugal charges self-employed contributions on entirely different logic; the Portuguese version of this page works through it.