Your bank keeps a 3-euro-a-month account and never offers it

Look on your latest statement for the line that says "account maintenance fee". If it is there, you are paying between 60 and 240 euros a year depending on the bank and on whether they have cut you a deal for having your salary paid in or for taking out an insurance policy. Your bank is obliged by law to have another account on sale that costs 3 euros a month at most, and it is not going to bring it up at the counter.

1. What it is called and who is obliged. It is the basic payment account, created by Royal Decree-Law 19/2017 of 24 November, which brought a 2014 European directive into Spanish law. It obliges every credit institution that offers payment accounts to private customers. That decree did not set the price: Order ECE/228/2019 did, and it is 3 euros a month for the whole bundle. Thirty-six euros a year. If you are at the top of the range above, you go from 240 to 36.

2. What is included and what is not. Opening, using and closing the account; paying money in; withdrawing cash at the counter and at cash machines across the European Union; setting up direct debits; paying by debit card; and making transfers, including standing orders. Those 3 euros cover up to 120 payment operations a year, and beyond that the bank may charge you what they cost it. It does not include an overdraft, so this account will not go into the red, and for a great many people that is an advantage.

3. Entirely free if you meet the thresholds. Royal Decree 164/2019 of 22 March brings the account down to zero euros for anyone in a situation of vulnerability or at risk of financial exclusion. The limits go by household income measured in IPREM, the Spanish public reference indicator, which in 2025 comes to 8,400 euros a year over fourteen instalments: three times if you live alone (about 25,200 euros), three and a half times if there are fewer than four of you, four times if there are four or more, and no property other than your main home. It is granted for two years and renewed.

4. What they can answer, and how fast. Refusal is only possible on specific grounds: money-laundering rules, reasons of national security or public order, or your already holding another payment account in Spain with those same services. And they have to answer you, opening the account or refusing with their reason, within ten working days of your handing in the complete application.

5. If they tell you it does not exist. Put it in writing to the bank's customer service department, which for payment services has fifteen working days to reply. If it does not reply, or replies no, the complaint goes on to the Conduct of Entities Department at the Bank of Spain. It is free and it is filed online.

Ask for it in writing today, through whatever channel you have —branch, app or email— naming Royal Decree-Law 19/2017, and keep the date you sent it: that is when the ten working days start running.