Is Spain becoming the eurozone's best performing economy?

What if the eurozone's best-performing economy has been hiding in plain sight the whole time?

Spain grew at 3.2% in 2024 and 2.8% in 2025 while the eurozone averaged around 1%. That gap isn't luck and it didn't happen overnight.

In 2013, unemployment stood at 26.9%. One in four people looking for work couldn't find it. The economy had spent years contracting, propped up by three things: tourism, construction, and debt.

13 years later, the picture is almost unrecognisable but most international commentary has failed to notice.

What actually happened was structural repair meeting cyclical tailwinds. The ECB's intervention ended the sovereign debt crisis. Internal devaluation restored competitiveness as wages fell in real terms.

A labour reform began creating jobs at lower rates of GDP growth than any previous cycle, arriving alongside an oil price collapse and a tourism boom.

The 2021 reform then cut temporary contracts, contratos de basura, so called because workers could be kept on rolling six-month contracts legally renewable for up to two years, locking entire generations into permanent precarity with no security and no route to progression, from 25.4% to around 16% of employment.

That's a structural change, not a cyclical one. The result: unemployment fell from 26.9% to 10.5% between 2013 and late 2025.

Employment rates among women and younger workers are at historic highs. Fitch, Moody's and S&P all upgraded Spain's credit rating in 2025.

Public debt fell from a pandemic peak of around 120% of GDP to 101.8% by end-2024.

Spain's growth is no longer tourism-dependent either. Non-tourism services now exceed tourism in export value.

The technology sector employs over 760,000 people and is growing at more than twice the rate of the overall economy.

Construction's share of GDP has fallen from 16% at the boom's peak to 6%, while professional and technology services have risen from 4% to 12%.

This is a different Spain than the one that collapsed in 2009.

Understanding precisely how it differs, and where the structural limits remain, is what this series is for.

++ I'm Rolf. I write about business compliance, Spanish market entry, and accounting for companies operating across borders. Follow me if that's relevant to what you do.