NEW data has revealed the sectors driving Spain’s foreign-worker hiring boom, with one industry’s hiring running at more than double its usual seasonal pace.
It comes as non-Spanish workers took more of the country’s new jobs than Spanish nationals for the first time on record this year, as The Olive Press reported this week citing Social Security data.
These jobs have been centred in a few sectors.
Domestic and care work, construction, farm work and retail all grew faster than their recent averages, while hospitality added the most workers in absolute term.
Much of the hiring has coincided with a mass regularisation scheme launched by Pedro Sanchez’s government.
The scheme lets people who have been living in Spain without papers apply for residency and a work permit, once they can show they are settled here and meet a set of requirements, under a route known as arraigo extraordinario.
Social Security’s own sector-by-sector breakdown for the first six months of 2026 shows where that hiring actually took place.
Construction saw the sharpest jump relative to its own history.
Foreign-worker hiring in the sector rose by 41,826 between January and June, a 17.8% increase.
That compares with an average rise of just 17,388 workers over the same six months in each of the previous four years — more than double the sector’s normal seasonal pace.
Hospitality added more workers than any other sector in absolute terms.
Hiring in bars, restaurants and hotels rose by 137,615 in the first half of 2026, a 34.2% increase on the past four years’ average — in line with the sector’s average growth rate of 34.9% over the previous four years.
Hospitality’s foreign workforce has grown every year since 2022, so the same percentage increase now produces a larger headcount than it once did.
Domestic and care work tells a different story.
This is work cleaning homes, minding children or looking after the elderly, employed directly by families rather than through an agency.
Foreign hiring in this sector had actually been falling for two years, down 3,818 in 2024 and 6,526 in 2025 over the same January-to-June window.
This year it reversed sharply, rising by 20,961, or 14.6%.
Farm work also picked up, though more modestly.
Social Security splits this between salaried labourers and small-scale self-employed growers registered under a separate agricultural scheme.
Salaried farm hiring of foreigners rose by 5,239, or 22.8%, against a typical increase of around 3,040.
The self-employed agricultural register grew by 32,580, continuing a rise that was already under way before this year.
Retail hiring grew too, by 29,295, or 9.3% – a reminder the surge reaches well beyond the building sites and farms the debate around this story tends to focus on.
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For the tens of thousands of Britons and other expats who run bars, restaurants, cleaning firms and building businesses along the coast, these sectors are not abstract. They are where many source their staff.
Across all standard salaried employment, foreign hiring rose by 323,191 in the first half of 2026, a 15% increase compared to the same periods in the previous four years.
That compares with average first-half growth of about 216,000, or under 11% — an excess of roughly 107,000 hires beyond the recent trend.
By June 30, 159,097 people had registered for legal status under the regularisation scheme, according to Spain’s Migration Ministry.
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Of those, 83.4% — around 132,687 people — went into standard salaried jobs rather than self-employment, and 77.3% were given permanent contracts.
That permanent-contract rate is slightly below the 86.1% recorded among Spain’s wider non-EU foreign workforce, but it is still a majority.
The 132,687 figure sits in the same broad range as, though somewhat above, the roughly 107,000-hire excess calculated across standard salaried employment as a whole.
That 159,097 figure is itself only a floor.
Spain’s Migration Ministry confirmed on July 2 that just over half of the 1.17 million applications submitted under the scheme had been processed by that point.
The true number of newly regularised workers already in the system is almost certainly higher by now, though no updated national figure has yet been published.
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Whether this hiring is filling roles Spaniards are unwilling to take, or is in fact displacing Spanish workers from jobs they would otherwise have got, is something Social Security’s own figures are unable to settle.
The department tracks who is newly registered to work, and in which sector.
It does not break down, sector by sector, how many of the same new jobs went to Spanish nationals over the same period.
The clearest national comparison available, INE’s quarterly labour force survey, found employment grew by 486,000 in the second quarter of 2026, almost evenly split between 246,000 Spanish nationals and 240,000 foreign nationals.
That survey uses a different method, a different time window and different sector categories to the Social Security figures above, and the two cannot be read directly onto each other.
Until a single dataset breaks down new hiring by both nationality and sector over the same period, the answer to whether these are jobs Spaniards remains unclear.
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