They grow 44%… and there are already nine out of ten
More and more individuals find in the creditors competitions an escape route in situations of insolvency. According to data published Monday by the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ), Between January and March of this year, 15,833 natural persons presented creditors without being entrepreneurs44% that in the same period last year. They can take advantage of this type of procedures who demonstrate that they cannot face the payment of their debts, after having exhausted the route of private agreements with the creditors to try to resolve the situation.
The volume of individuals procedures recorded in the first quarter marks a new quarterly record, the result of the upward trend that this type of file has been dragging for years, which allow protection against embargoes, as well as negotiating the restructuring or partial remove of debt. The volume of competitions with which 2025 exceeds almost 5,000 to 10,992 procedures by individuals presented between January and March 2024. The rise is more moderate compared to the last quarter of last year, when 14,153 files have already been recorded. Most of the competitions were recorded in Catalonia, with 3,656 files (23.1% of the total), followed by Madrid (2,839), Andalusia (2,338) and the Valencian Community (1,866).
When comparing the figures of the first three months of each year, it is observed how the growth of the creditors’ competition Year, only 393 contests of non -entrepreneurs natural persons were presented. In the subsequent nine years the figure has multiplied by 40exceeding for the first time the thousand quarterly files at the beginning of the year in 2019 and 10,000, in 2024.
This pull of non -business files is behind the rise in creditors competitions, since they represent 87.9% of the total. In the first quarter of 2025 there were a total of 18,017, 37% more than in the first three months of 2024. Faced with the strong growth of individual procedures, individual procedures, Business competitions barely increased 4.4% and those of natural persons – companies – remained stable, with a very slight decrease of 0.2% with respect to the first three months of 2024. These two modalities respectively represented 4% and 8.1% of the total, with 729 and 1,455 files.
The creditors competitions presented by legal persons have remained relatively stable since 2021 around 1,400 quarterly procedures at the start of each year, although its weight has been retreated by the growth of those presented by individuals. In 2021 they represented 31.7% of the total, the quadruple that currently in relative terms. In the case of creditors competitions presented by entrepreneurs, a slight decrease has occurred over the last four years, since in the first 2022 quarter they came to account 1,080.
A quarter of the creditors competitions presented in the first three months of 2025 was concentrated in Catalonia, where 4,493 files of this type were recorded. Madrid, Andalusia and Community Valenciana completed the ranking of the territories with more procedures (316, 2,549 and 2,129 respectively), being also the most populated regions. The rest of autonomies did not reach a thousand, although Murcia is the only one, together with Catalonia, who exceeds the ratio of more than 50 competitions for every 100,000 inhabitants.
Beyond those presented, the Commercial Courts declared between January and March 14,849 creditors competitions, 46.3% more than in the same period of 2024. It is a significant increase, although it involves a slowdown with respect to the year -on -year increase of 80.5% registered in the first quarter of last year. Also, CGPJ statistics indicate that between January and March The agreement phase began in 54 files, thus providing the opportunity to reach an agreement between debtors and creditors, while in 823 the liquidation phase began.
This evolution of creditors competitions is produced in a context in which the financial accounts of the Spanish economy of the Bank of Spain reflect an increase in household and businesses debt, from 690,000 million euros in 2023 to 695,000 million in 2024 and from 989.5 billion to 1,01 billion respectively. However, in relative terms, its weight on GDP has been reduced, standing at 43.7% and 63.5% respectively. If interempressarial debt is included, the indebtedness ratio amounts to 83.2% of GDP.
