“The data show that, since the labor reform, contracts last longer: real stability has improved, not just contractual stability.” This is the main conclusion of an analysis prepared by and published this Tuesday, which enters squarely into one of the great labor discussions of recent years, condensed in the title of the report: Labor reform 2021: more permanent contracts or real stability? According to the analysis by Iseak, a research center specialized in and, since the approval of the reform “contracts started in Spain have a lower probability of being completed”, a change in scenario that specialists also relate to the positive economic cycle, without determining the weight of each element. The improvement, they report, has more intensely favored young people, women and foreigners.
The labor reform, agreed upon by the Government, unions and employers, eliminated the work and service contract and limited the cases in which temporary relationships can be used. This regulatory change has changed the structure of Spanish contracts. Before the reform, 25% of employees had a temporary contract, compared to 15% in 2025. “This precariousness has social costs,” says the Iseak study, among which it mentions working poverty, as well as social exclusion and discouragement in investing in employee training.
“The 2021 labor reform was the most ambitious response to this problem in decades: it restricted temporary contracts, expanded the figure of the discontinuous permanent contract [del 2,1% de los asalariados al 3,6%] and encouraged permanent hiring [del 72,7% al 81,1%]”Adds Iseak. Looking at the contracts signed, the report details that temporary contracts “went from concentrating 88% of new hires to 49%.” “In the last quarter of 2025, permanent discontinuous contracts represent 31% of employment episodes and permanent contracts 19%, unprecedented in the Spanish labor market,” adds Iseak.
Once the scenario has been set out, Iseak gets into the heart of the matter: “However, did the real stability of employment in Spain change or just the name of the type of contract?” The authors, Lucía Gorjón, Imanol Lizarraga and Gonzalo Romero, mention a previous study that asked the same question, led by . “They document, with data up to 2023, that the reform led to a reduction in formal temporality, but not necessarily in effective temporality,” explain the authors, who reach a different conclusion with data up to 2025.
Iseak’s study is based on Social Security administrative records from 2018 to 2025 (excluding 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic) and performs a “survival analysis” of the contracts. It does so through the , “an ideal statistical tool to measure job stability between different periods.” Basically, it measures the probability that a contract will remain active after a certain period, up to a maximum of 270 days.
“The analysis clearly shows that contracts signed in years after the reform have a greater probability of remaining active,” says Iseak. After one month of contract duration, the average survival in 2019 is 49.1%, compared to 56.3% in 2022. “At six months, the gain is of similar magnitude: the probability of survival increased from 44% in 2019 to 50.6% in 2022,” says the study, which extends the phenomenon to subsequent years: “The 2022 and 2023 cohorts show an appreciable improvement, which is consolidated in 2024 and 2025″. Among the Iseak entities is the main promoter of the labor reform, the Ministry of Labor, as well as regional governments of different political groups, such as Andalusia, Navarra, Euskadi or Castilla y León.
Differences by type of contract
The previous analysis corresponds to the average of the contracts, but Iseak also disaggregates by type of employment relationship. They observe that permanent contracts last less than before the reform: after one month, the survival of permanent contracts was 91.5% in 2019 and 87.8% in 2022; at six months, 86.4% in 2019 compared to 80.4% in 2022.
Gorjón, Lizarraga and Romero believe that this drop could be explained by “a change in the composition of people who access permanent employment.” They believe that “before the reform, mainly workers with more consolidated employment ties signed a permanent contract,” while afterward “people who previously would have signed a temporary contract now sign a permanent contract.” “Therefore, the group of workers with an indefinite contract has become more heterogeneous, reducing the probability of survival without individual ties necessarily being less stable,” the authors add.
At the same time, they see a “descending” survival after the reform in discontinuous fixed contracts, which is explained, as Conde-Ruiz already stated, in that part of the precariousness related to temporary contracts has been displaced to this other figure. “The poor stability of temporary contracts has barely changed after the reform,” they add.
The authors have also delved into differences by sex, age and nationality. And they come to the conclusion that the groups that most improve their position compared to the period prior to the reform are those that suffered the most temporary employment both then and now: women, those over 30 years old and foreigners.
Regarding female employment, Iseak explains that in 2019 the survival of contracts initiated by women was 47.8%, compared to 50.3% for men. In 2022, survival increases by 7.6 points for women and 6.9 for men. “Despite the fact that women improve more, the gender gap in job stability persists.” By sectors, with the same logic, the survival of contracts improves more in activities such as hospitality.
Labor reform and expansion cycle
“The survival curves are unequivocal: in the years in which the labor reform has been in force, contracts initiated in Spain have a lower probability of being terminated. This improvement is generalized—it is observed in all groups and most of the sectors analyzed—and is sustained,” conclude the authors, who point to two reasons behind these changes: the labor reform and the positive economic cycle. “The contracts may last longer due to the reform, but also because Spain is going through an expansionary cycle with historically high employment levels, among other reasons. Both factors operate simultaneously and it is not possible to separate them without a counterfactual impact evaluation design that exceeds the objective of this analysis,” the authors add.
The authors end their study with recommendations, among which is the avoidance of part-time abuse, one of the problems that unions have been highlighting most recently. “A reform would be necessary that establishes full-time employment as an ordinary form of contracting, limiting the use of part-time employment to those companies that, due to specific circumstances, justify the need to establish a contract for less than full-time employment,” say Gorjón, Lizarraga and Romero.
They also demand that active employment policies prioritize companies and sectors with higher contract survival rates and that there is still too much temporary employment in some sectors and population groups. “Despite the progress, a relevant part of the contracts is still not extended beyond the first months. Consolidating and extending stable employment to currently less covered segments is a task that remains ahead,” adds the study.
