How Much Does the Spanish Second Chance Law Cost: Court Fees, Procurador, Lawyer and Insolvency Practitioner

The Ley de Segunda Oportunidad (Spain's Second Chance Law for personal insolvency) does not have a single official price, because almost everything it costs goes to professionals rather than official fees. What the State provides is free: natural persons do not pay a court tasa, and the notice announcing the insolvency is published free of charge in the Boletín Oficial del Estado (BOE, Spain's Official State Gazette) and in the Public Insolvency Register. What you must pay for is the lawyer and the procurador, both required by law to file for insolvency and apply for debt discharge.

Added to that, in certain cases only, are third-party costs: the insolvency practitioner when there are assets to sell, or the valuation of a mortgaged home that you wish to keep under a payment plan. And there is one item that is often confused with the cost of the procedure when it is not: the payment plan instalment, which is money that goes to your creditors, not to the proceedings.

The most common situation is also the simplest. Assetless insolvency (concurso sin masa), for those who have no assets with which to pay, accounted for 85.4% of all insolvencies declared in the first quarter of 2026 and 83% in the second, according to the Association of Registrars. In this procedure there is nothing to sell and, as a general rule, no insolvency practitioner is appointed.

That is why the figure that truly matters is what you are charged to handle the matter and what it includes. At Managora, the complete service, with lawyer and procurador, has a published fixed price: you can see the updated amount on our Ley de Segunda Oportunidad service page.

No. The court tasa is €0 for two combined reasons. First, natural persons are exempt from the tasa in all cases. Second, a voluntary insolvency petition, filed by the debtor themselves, is not even an act subject to the tasa and is also exempt in its own right. Nor does a natural person pay a tasa in any ancillary disputes that may arise within the insolvency.

Publication costs nothing either. The court order declaring insolvency is announced by notice in the Boletín Oficial del Estado and in the Public Insolvency Register, and the law expressly states that this publication is free of charge. Registration in the Registro Civil (Spain's civil registry for births, marriages and legal status) is initiated ex officio by the court office, without your having to request it.

Since the insolvency reform that came into force on 26 September 2022, it is no longer necessary to attempt a prior out-of-court agreement with creditors, so that upfront cost has disappeared. And the mandatory pre-action dispute resolution mechanisms required since April 2025 under Ley Orgánica 1/2025 (Spain's Judicial Efficiency Act) before other lawsuits do not apply to insolvency matters: there is no prior negotiation to pay for either.

The procurador is mandatory: the insolvency petition is filed by a procurador, bearing their signature and the lawyer's, and once insolvency is declared the debtor always acts through both of them, including when applying for debt discharge. It is not an expense you can avoid by doing it on your own.

Their fees are governed by the fee scale in Real Decreto 434/2024 (the statutory fee regulation for procuradores), in force since 2 May 2024, which replaced the 2003 scale. The fee scale sets maximum amounts, prohibits minimums and allows lower fees to be agreed. What a procurador charges for a single matter cannot exceed €75,000.

In insolvency proceedings, the calculation base is 60% of the liabilities resulting from the final list of creditors, or 70% if there are more than 300 creditors. The scale in the table is applied to that base: with liabilities of €50,000, the base is €30,000 and the maximum fee is €624.73. Half of those fees correspond to the first section of the insolvency, covering its declaration.

There are two other useful figures. If an ancillary dispute of undetermined value arises, such as a challenge to the list of creditors or the inventory, the maximum is €351. And if the judge rules the petition inadmissible, the procurador may charge at most 25% of the scale.

One nuance worth knowing: in an assetless insolvency there is normally no insolvency practitioner and, therefore, no final list of creditors drawn up by them, so the fee scale base does not quite fit and in practice the amount is agreed. The scale serves as a reference ceiling, not as a fixed price. At Managora, the procurador is included in the price on the service page: you do not receive a separate invoice from the procurador.

A lawyer is also mandatory, both in personal insolvency and in the special procedure for micro-enterprises that applies to active autónomos (self-employed workers in Spain). The lawyer prepares what truly decides the outcome: the statement setting out your financial history and the causes of insolvency, the inventory of assets, the full list of creditors and, afterwards, the discharge application together with your IRPF (Spanish personal income tax) returns for the last 3 years.

Lawyers' fees are freely set. There is no official tariff, and Bar Associations are not allowed to publish indicative fee scales: they may only establish criteria for assessing legal costs and fee-recovery proceedings. Any figure you see presented as an official Second Chance tariff is, in reality, one law firm's price.

That makes comparing by the headline figure alone misleading. Two identical quotes can cover very different things: one covering only the insolvency petition and the other also covering the debt discharge; one with the procurador included and the other billing the procurador separately. What matters is which stages are included and what happens if the case becomes complicated.

A detail that is far from minor: debt discharge only covers the debts that were listed and are identified in the court order, as the Supreme Court ruled in February 2026. An incomplete list of creditors works out more expensive than any legal fee, because an omitted debt remains alive. That is why at Managora we review every single debt with you, including those owed to Hacienda (the Spanish Tax Agency), the Seguridad Social (Spain's social security system) and the local council, before filing anything.

In an assetless insolvency, normally not. The judge declares insolvency without appointing a practitioner and publishes a call to creditors. Only if creditors representing at least 5% of the liabilities request it within the 15 days following publication of the notice is a practitioner appointed, who then has 1 month from accepting the role to issue their report.

And even then, you do not pay them. The judge sets the practitioner's remuneration in the very order appointing them, and payment falls to the creditor or creditors who requested the appointment. If nobody requests it, you apply for debt discharge within the following 10 days, without a practitioner and without that cost. Even if no one objects, the judge verifies ex officio that the legal requirements are met.

When there are assets with which to pay, the insolvency proceeds with an insolvency practitioner and the law states that their remuneration is paid out of the insolvency estate: it is paid from the assets and rights forming part of the insolvency, not via a separate invoice to you. The more that administration costs, the less remains to be distributed among the creditors.

If you are an active autónomo and fall under the special procedure for micro-enterprises, the regime governing the practitioner has its own rules; we explain them in our guide to the Second Chance Law for autónomos.

Granting power of attorney to the procurador is free. It must be a special power of attorney to file for insolvency, and you grant it in person before the Court Clerk (Letrado de la Administración de Justicia) at any court office, which does not have to be the one handling the insolvency. You do not need a digital certificate or Cl@ve (Spain's public electronic identification system). With an electronic DNI (Spanish national ID card) or digital certificate it can also be done online via the Electronic Judicial Portal (Sede Judicial Electrónica), but for this special power of attorney we will guide you through appearing in person, which is the safe route.

Most of the documents can be obtained without a digital certificate. You can request the CIRBE credit risk report from the Bank of Spain free of charge, by post or in person by prior appointment, using form FDU-031 signed by hand and a copy of your DNI or NIE (Foreigner Identity Number in Spain). You can request your employment history report (vida laboral) to be posted to your home address. Your IRPF returns for the last 3 years are always required when applying for debt discharge, and under a payment plan those of your family unit are required as well.

One third-party cost that may arise is a home valuation. If you wish to keep a mortgaged home under a payment plan, the value of the security is 90% of its fair value, which comes from a valuation carried out by an appraisal company approved by the Bank of Spain, unless one already exists from the 6 months prior to the insolvency. That valuation is charged by the appraisal company and is not included in our price; we will tell you at the outset whether your case requires one.

That value matters because it determines what you continue paying on the mortgage: instalments are recalculated on the portion of the debt that does not exceed the value of the security, the portion exceeding it is treated according to its class in the plan, and whatever part of that excess is not paid is discharged at the end.

It is not a cost of the procedure, but rather what you pay your creditors to obtain debt discharge without your assets being sold. The plan lasts 3 years as a general rule, and 5 years if your primary residence is not sold or if the payments depend mainly on your future income. Upon approval you obtain a provisional discharge and, once the term ends without revocation, final discharge.

The law does not set a minimum instalment or a fixed percentage. The rule is that the plan must allocate to dischargeable debt everything you can pay above the unseizable minimum income, your reasonable new obligations and the instalments falling due on non-dischargeable debt. If it does not do so, a creditor can successfully challenge it. That is why the instalment is calculated case by case, based on your actual income.

There are debts that remain in place even if everything goes well, and it is wise to count them as part of the real cost: maintenance payments (pensiones de alimentos), criminal fines, very serious administrative penalties, or the portion of the mortgage covered by the value of the home. With Hacienda, the Seguridad Social and other public creditors there is a cap, which applies to each one separately: the first €5,000 are discharged in full and, above that, half is discharged, up to a maximum of €10,000 discharged per public creditor. According to the Supreme Court, surcharges, interest and penalties classified as subordinated debt are discharged in full, except for very serious penalties.

Whatever must continue to be paid to those creditors does not disappear with the court order. Before filing, we tell you how much would remain active, so you know in advance what it will truly cost you to put the situation behind you.

The law does not regulate how professional fees are paid, so paying in instalments is a commercial decision for each firm. It is worth knowing, however, that the law itself excludes from discharge the legal costs and judicial expenses arising from processing the discharge application: do not count on the court order wiping out anything left unpaid under that heading.

Before hiring, ask for written answers to these questions: whether the price is fixed or depends on hours, stages or results; whether it includes the procurador or their fee scale is billed separately, and on what base it is calculated; whether it covers the discharge application and not just the declaration of insolvency; whether it includes a creditor's objection, an ancillary dispute or a request for an insolvency practitioner by 5% creditors; whether it includes the payment plan, its possible modification and conversion into liquidation; what happens with credit blacklists and the CIRBE after the court order; and whether VAT (IVA) is included in the price.

At Managora the answer is on the service page before you pay: fixed price, lawyer and procurador included, a single payment, and you do not file anything before the court yourself. Removal from ASNEF, Experian and the CIRBE is also included, though it comes at the end: it only applies once you have the court order granting discharge following liquidation or final discharge after completing the payment plan, because provisional discharge does not include an order to creditors.

What nobody can sell you is a guaranteed outcome: discharge is granted by the judge, who reviews good faith ex officio even if no creditor objects. What we do make clear from the very beginning is the price and what it includes.