The Government plans to extend mortgage relief measures despite low demand

The Government intends to extend mortgage relief measures for at least one more year. He Ministry of Economy, Commerce and Business has reached an agreement with the banking sector so that the aid also applies to the next year after several days of conversations. As announced by the head of the department, Carlos Body, The measures will be extended voluntarily once the Code of Good Practices promoted in 2022 has declined.

The Corps itself has admitted that said extension is being carried out although the macroeconomic context differs from what it was three years ago, when the European Central Bank (ECB) ended the era of interest rates ‘ultra-low’ and the rise of the money reference rate began. In fact, the Frankfurt-based organization has already completed the process of going down to the less in the short term, standing at 2%.

“We are going to promote together with the sector this voluntary extension of one more year, for If there are families who still need it in this year 2026“, argued Corps last week on the occasion of the announcement of the brigade together with the Ministry of Digital Transformation and Public Function to fight against financial fraud. It is true that the number of households who have taken advantage of the relief measures has been declining.

Since its launch at the end of 2022, more than 63,000 homes have applied for the code, of which 7,747 were finally acceptedmost of them between 2023 and 2024. Over the last twelve months, only 733 have been counted, according to data provided by the Ministry of Economy. The rest were denied for not meeting the requirements or for not providing the necessary documentation. The figures are far from the more than one million homes that the Government estimated could benefit from this protection at the time of its deployment.

Among the requirements to qualify, an annual income threshold was established maximum of 38,000 euros, but the mortgage must also be subscribed for a first home and its purchase value must not exceed 300,000 euros. Likewise, the monthly amount used to pay the loan must be greater than 30% of the family income and it must be demonstrated that the amount has multiplied by at least 1.2 times in the last four years.

This design was made taking into account the vertical climb that the Euribor – the reference in the mortgage market – experienced at that time. The highest peak of the current monetary cycle was reached during the summer of 2023, when it stood at 4.14%. Since then, its climb has been downward and it is currently moving above 2.29% after beginning to resume the upward path last August, thus breaking the six-month streak of increases.

All those who comply with this measure can benefit free of charge from the conversion of variable rate mortgage to fixed ratea box that also includes the mixed modality, which is increasingly in demand. The lower volume of requests to reduce the mortgage burden is reflected in the favorable evolution of the economy Spanish and the boost of the labor market, marked by the record number of Social Security affiliates last November, which already exceeds 21.8 million people. All of this has pushed the default rate to its lowest levels since the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in September 2008.

The latest data published by the Bank of Spain (BdE) show that last October closed at 2.87%, with a volume of ‘stock’ in loans doubtful amounts of 34,697 million. The highest peak in the entire historical series was recorded in August 2014, when delinquencies exceeded 14.2%. Since then, the reduction has been gradual and after a brief ‘impasse’ at the beginning of 2024 in which it experienced an upward reversal, the trend has been disinflationary as the ECB began lowering interest rates.