The General Index of Construction Production (IPCO) recorded in August a year-on-year decrease of 4.2%, which means softening the drop noted in July (-10.6%) by more than six points, according to data released this Wednesday by the National Institute of Statistics (INE).
With this new setback, the activity of the construction sector has already accumulated eight consecutive months of declines compared to the same period of the previous year.
The contraction of production in the eighth month of the year is mainly explained by the sharp collapse of building construction, whose activity decreased by 22.5% year-on-year, and by the 4.2% drop in the civil engineering branch.
In contrast, specialized construction activities managed to increase their production, albeit in a contained manner, with a year-on-year advance of 2.1%.
This new statistic, called IPCO, comes to replace the Survey of Production Indices of the Construction Industry (EIPIC), which was prepared by the Ministry of Transport and Sustainable Mobility until December 2025. The variations of the IPCO corresponding to 2025 and 2026 are calculated based on estimates that combine information from both statistical operations.
If the series corrected for seasonal and calendar effects is observed, the production of the construction sector fell by 7% in August compared to the same month in 2025, which means moderating the decline of 12.6% recorded in July.
The sector rebounds by 0.8% on a monthly basis
In monthly comparison (August over July) and once seasonal and calendar effects are eliminated, construction production increased by 0.8%, after chaining three consecutive months of declines.
Of the three divisions analyzed, only building construction showed a positive monthly rate of 1.4%. In contrast, the largest monthly adjustment occurred in civil engineering, with a drop of 16.8%.
The IPCO indicator aims to track the monthly evolution of the activity of companies in the construction sector in Spain, taking its added value as a reference.
In addition, the IPCO complies with the requirements of European regulations, making it a harmonized indicator comparable to that of other EU countries.
Statistics detail that the turnover of a company is composed of two factors: production and the unit price or cost of that production. Therefore, it considers that the most appropriate way to measure production is to filter the effect of prices on turnover, through its deflation.
To minimize the information burden that companies bear, the IPCO only requests data on their turnover, instead of requiring the detail of sales and other components necessary to reconstruct it. In this way, a similar approach is applied to that used to measure production in the services sector.