The first vice president and minister of Economy, Trade and Enterprise, Carlos Cuerpo, trusts that the European Commission will give the green light in May to the sixth tranche of the 'Next Generation EU' recovery funds, so that the Council of the EU can definitively approve it between June and July and the money arrives in Spain around the summer.
The government's economic chief detailed this calendar during his appearance this Thursday before the Joint Committee for the European Union, where he went at his own request to report on the degree of execution of the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan.
"We are now facing the final stretch of this Recovery Plan, the fulfillment of whose milestones and objectives we must finalize before the end of August 2026," the minister pointed out.
Within this framework, the Executive processed in March the formal request for the sixth disbursement of funds linked to the Recovery Plan, for a net volume close to 6.5 billion euros, of which approximately 5.5 billion correspond to transfers and close to 1 billion to loans.
Spain will be able to access these resources once the 78 milestones and objectives agreed with Brussels have been verified —69 associated with non-reimbursable transfers and 9 linked to loan financing—.
"Spain, which leads in terms of transfers received with 55,000 million, we now have pending to evaluate that sixth disbursement by the European Commission whose positive evaluation would mean that we would have acquired more than 60,000 million in disbursements," he highlighted.
In parallel, Cuerpo has underlined that the Executive branch maintains an intense negotiation with the Commission to close the compliance of the milestones and goals of the remaining tranches: the seventh disbursement in transfers and the fourth in loans.
"The work consists of closing the compliance before August of the milestones and objectives of the last disbursement to proceed to the positive evaluation first and its reception of all resources before the end of the year 2026. This is the ambitious but we hope achievable roadmap from here to the end of this year 2026," he remarked.
At the same time, the minister has insisted on the need to look beyond the closure of disbursements in 2026, which led the Government to launch the 'España Crece' fund, fed with a contribution of 13.3 billion from the Recovery Plan.
Spain is among the largest beneficiaries of the 'Next Generation EU' funds. Of an initial allocation of 160 billion euros between grants and loans, the Government has only used a quarter of the repayable financing, so the effective allocation stands at 103 billion.
67 billion already executed
According to Cuerpo, the resolved calls amount to 67 billion euros to date. Of that amount, around 40 billion correspond to the General State Administration, more than 17 billion to the autonomous communities —with differences between territories— and about 9.3 billion to local entities.
"It is a true country plan and we can also see that the resolution rate of these funds for the three levels of administration is around 70-71%," he highlighted.
In addition, the minister has indicated that there are 1,460,000 beneficiaries, of which 70% are micro and small businesses, although they concentrate 43% of the total volume awarded.