Autónomo vs Contrato Indefinido: Which Pays More, and When

At the same annual figure (autónomo net income vs employee gross salary), a contrato indefinido employee nets slightly more at every level we modeled, €20,885 vs €19,895 at €30,000, €32,549 vs €31,908 at €50,000, narrowing to nearly identical at €80,000 (€49,120 vs €49,090) once the Social Security contribution ceiling caps the employee's contribution and the autónomo cuota tops out at its highest tramo. The gap is real but modest, it's not the dramatic difference either side of the debate sometimes claims.

Because the two income figures aren't really equivalent. An autónomo's net income is revenue minus deductible business expenses, already the number left after running the business; an employee's gross salary is what their employer commits to paying before anything is deducted, and the employer separately pays a substantial employer Social Security contribution (roughly 30% of gross) that never appears on the employee's payslip. An autónomo who wants a true apples-to-apples comparison should think about their gross invoiced revenue before expenses as roughly comparable to an employee's full employment cost, not their net income to gross salary.

The RETA cuota (Social Security contribution) is the same idea as an employee's contribution, but the autónomo pays 100% of it themselves rather than splitting the burden with an employer, and it's a fixed amount by income tramo rather than a percentage. An autónomo also pays quarterly estimated IRPF (Modelo 130) and settles the real annual liability the following year (Modelo 100), files their own VAT (IVA) where applicable, and carries the administrative overhead of invoicing, bookkeeping, and business expense tracking, work an employer's payroll department handles for a salaried employee.

Control over pricing and clients, the ability to deduct genuine business expenses against income before tax (an employee generally can't), and often materially higher earning potential if you can command a strong day rate or juggle multiple clients. The tarifa plana (€80/month flat cuota for the first 12 months, extendable to 24) also softens the early cost of going independent. What it doesn't offer is the employment protections a contrato indefinido carries, redundancy entitlements, paid holiday guaranteed by law, sick pay structured through the employer, and unemployment benefit (paro) built from years of Social Security contributions the same way an employee's would be.

In steps, not smoothly. At €30,000 net income (€2,500/month), you land in Tramo 10 at €349.98/month. At €50,000 (€4,167/month), you're in Tramo 14 at €514.61/month. At €80,000 (€6,667/month), you hit the top Tramo 15 at €607.31/month, the ceiling: no matter how much higher your income climbs above €6,000/month, the cuota doesn't rise further. That flattening at the top is exactly why the autónomo-vs-employee gap narrows at higher incomes: the employee's Social Security also caps out (at the €61,214.40/year contribution ceiling), so both sides stop scaling their Social Security cost with income at similar territory.

It significantly softens the early cost. Paying a flat €80/month instead of a tramo-based cuota (which could be €300+/month even at modest income) matters a lot when you're building a client base and income is uncertain. But it's temporary, 12 months, extendable to 24 if your net income stays below the SMI, so the comparison in this article (which uses standard ongoing cuotas) is the one that matters for evaluating whether autónomo status makes sense once you're past that runway.