SPAIN’S biggest supermarket chain, Mercadona, will give its staff an extra seven days of annual leave from next year, plus a one-month bonus salary.
The retailer employs 110,000 people and said the measures aim to continue ‘to consolidate a pioneering model in its sector for work-life balance, with stable and quality jobs’.
The additional vacation week will cost €100 million and the extra payment will add up to €280 million.
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The pay bonus will be handed out in March.
A Mercadona statement said that it recognises the efforts of ‘its extraordinary team, a fundamental pillar to achieve magnificent results in productivity, efficiency and management year-after-year’.
The supermarket had a Spanish market share of 27.1% in the last Worldpanel survey announced in September.
In March it announced record net profits for 2024- totalling €1.3 billion.
That was a rise of 37% on 2023 and an all-time high in its almost 50-year history of trading.
Sales continued to grow reaching €38.8 billion- an annual increase of 9%.
Worldpanel’s retail customer director, Bernardo Rodilla, said that the Valencian-based chain was ‘capitalizing on the large baskets’ of Spanish consumers, with four out of every ten ‘large shops’ coming in Mercadona outlets.
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