El Gordo doesn't pay out €400,000: the Spanish tax office keeps €72,000

€400,000 is what a décimo — a tenth-share ticket — of el Gordo promises, and that figure, the one families toast to at Christmas and the one the news bulletins repeat while the children of San Ildefonso sing out the numbers, is a figure nobody ever collects. Whoever holds the winning ticket takes home €328,000: the other €72,000 go to the Spanish tax office (Hacienda) before the money so much as grazes the account. The cut works on its own, with a name, a surname and a law behind it, the same for the corner bar as for an investment bank; no accountant can steer you around it, and next year's tax return does not even mention it. It pays to know it before 22 December rather than after, because afterwards the toast has been made, the promises have been made and, in the worst cases, the money has already been collected the wrong way. The whole arithmetic, point by point, fits in a list.

1. The mother rule. Since Ley 16/2012, prizes from Spain's public lotteries — the State draws, the ONCE lottery for the blind, the Cruz Roja — carry a special 20 per cent levy. It was born of the crisis: the law came out in the BOE, Spain's official gazette, on 28 December 2012, started charging with the 2013 draws, and that Christmas's Gordo was the first in history to land in winners' accounts already trimmed. It sits apart from IRPF, Spain's personal income tax, and does not look at what you earn: a tax of its own for prizes, flat, no matter whether the décimo is held by someone out of work or by a notary. It has one doorway: you pay only on the part of the prize above €40,000 per winning décimo, coupon or ticket. That exempt floor has stood since 2020; before that it was €2,500 for the first few years, €10,000 in 2018 and €20,000 in 2019, a shuffle of figures under which two siblings with identical tickets, winning a year apart, collected different amounts without anyone explaining why.

2. The Gordo arithmetic, with every number shown. The first prize of the Christmas draw pays €400,000 per décimo. The first €40,000 are free. The remaining €360,000 are taxed at 20 per cent: exactly €72,000. Result: €328,000 in the account. To get a sense of the size of that pinch, €72,000 is more than four years of Spain's minimum wage: the State collects more from the ticket than many of the winners earn in five years of work.

3. Second and third prizes, same tune. The second prize pays €125,000 per décimo: €40,000 exempt, €85,000 taxed, €17,000 for Hacienda and €108,000 for the pocket. The third pays €50,000: the taxed part comes to €10,000, the tax to €2,000, and €48,000 is collected. And January does not change the record: the first prize of El Niño, the January draw, pays €200,000 per décimo, which after the levy comes down to €168,000. Those amounts are always per décimo; a whole series — the ten décimos of the same number — multiplies both columns by ten, Hacienda's included. The rule is always the same staircase, and it is worth climbing it with the calculator in front of you before promising anyone anything, especially in front of the in-laws.

4. The kindly small print: almost every prize is collected whole. The pedrea — the shower of small prizes — the refunds, the matching final digits, any prize that does not go over €40,000 per décimo: all fully exempt — the €1,000 of the pedrea arrives still being €1,000, and the €20 refund, still twenty. There Hacienda touches nothing. And one more mercy: the cut taken from the big prizes requires no paperwork whatsoever, because whoever pays out the prize — SELAE, the State lottery company, or the bank — withholds the tax on the spot and pays it in for you. The money arrives clean, already trimmed. Nobody has to keep an envelope aside for Hacienda or remember anything in April: come April, that prize does not even go on the tax return.

5. The point that spares families a falling-out: the shared ticket. This is where every December manufactures the frights of the following March. The €40,000 exemption is glued to the décimo and is split in proportion to each person's share. If a Gordo décimo belongs to two siblings half and half, each has €20,000 exempt and €180,000 taxed; each loses €36,000 and collects €164,000. So far, no problem. The problem is born when one of them goes to the bank alone, collects the €400,000 with the whole ticket in their name, and then 'shares it out' by transfer among cousins and in-laws. The same goes for the participation slips sold by the club or the bar: the exemption is divided according to the slice of the ticket each slip represents, and whoever's name is on the payout answers for whatever is paid afterwards. To Hacienda, what leaves the collector's account towards everyone else's accounts is a textbook gift, and gift tax is paid by the person who receives, at the rates of their region — and in some regions those rates genuinely hurt. The clean way exists and it is simple: everyone goes to the bank together on collection day, each person identifies as the holder of their share, and the bank pays and withholds for each one separately, with their name on the receipt.

6. Three housekeeping details almost nobody checks. First: any prize above €2,000 is collected at an authorised bank; the lottery shop pays out only the small ones in cash, and the bank has to pay it without charging any commission for the transaction. Second: the prize expires. There are three months from the day of the draw to come forward and collect; past that deadline, the luckiest ticket of the year is worth the same as its wrapping paper, and every year unclaimed prizes are left sleeping in drawers and the pockets of winter coats. Third: whatever the prize produces afterwards — the interest on the deposit, the dividends of the fund where it ends up — is taxed like any other savings, in its usual box.

The final instruction, in case this is the ticket: before touching a single euro, sit down everyone who is playing and put the names in writing — who holds which part of which décimo, even if it is a signed, dated piece of paper or a group-chat message kept safe — and on collection day turn up at the bank together and have each person collect their share with their ID on the counter. There is no legal way around Hacienda's €72,000; the second fright, the gift-tax one, is dodged entirely with that list of names made before anything gets uncorked. It costs a pen, a photo of the paper in the group chat and ten minutes at the counter on collection day.