Self-employed workers on long-term sick leave will not pay contributions

The Government has already reached an agreement with the main self-employed organisations, ATA and UPTA, and will approve the measure shortly.

This is one of the measures requested, which also includes a reduction in VAT for certain professions such as hairdressers, gyms and veterinarians.

The Government plans to approve shortly one of the measures included in the document that the self-employed organizations, ATA and UPTA, submitted last July to the Minister of Labor, Magdalena Valerio, which also included more than 10 measures, including the reduction of VAT from 21% to 10% for groups such as hairdressers, veterinarians or gyms, as well as penalizing late payment with an automatic surcharge of 5% if the delay on the payment date is less than 30 days, 10% if it is less than 60 days and 20% if it exceeds 60 days. Also combating false self-employed workers and supporting the "second chance".

That is, establishing mechanisms that allow them to start over if they fail and want to restart an activity.

In the document submitted to the Minister, the "serious situation" that occurs when a self-employed person is forced to deregister for a long period of time was denounced, since, not only can he not work, and therefore does not earn any income, but he must continue paying the monthly fee to Social Security.

In this way, self-employed workers who are temporarily incapacitated due to long-term illness will be exempt from paying social security contributions, a measure that in principle would not entail any budgetary modification since the budget for temporary incapacity in the RETA set by the Government in this year's accounts is 934,907.88 million, which would be sufficient to cover the needs of the year, when the cost of the measure (about 300 million euros) is added to what is allocated to paying sick leave to the self-employed.

When a self-employed person takes sick leave due to a common illness or non-work-related accident, he or she receives a benefit of 60% based on contributions between the fourth day and the 20th day, and 75% from the 21st day. However, few self-employed people take sick leave, only nine out of every thousand, although when they do, the average duration exceeds 90 days, which indicates that their absence from work is usually due to a serious illness.