Spain's State Legal Service opens its general merit competition: 54 posts and a 15-working-day application window

The Spanish Official Gazette of Saturday 24 October 2026 (issue 264) publishes the Resolution of 19 October of the Abogacía General del Estado, the State Legal Service, calling its general merit competition to fill permanent posts. The annex lists 54 positions, most of them in Madrid, across the corps' own bodies and grades, with profiles such as section heads and service heads.

This is the ordinary mobility and internal promotion instrument for state lawyers, a recurring process that shapes the distribution of postings across ministries and territorial delegations. For the profession at large it is relevant news: each call moves dozens of postings and anticipates chained vacancies in the territorial services.

What is being called and who can apply

The competition follows the usual participation rules of the State Legal Service, under Article 20 of Royal Decree 1373/2013, which approves the corps' statute. Career civil servants of the corps may apply if they meet the administrative situations and minimum tenure requirements set out in the rules, including that at least two years have elapsed since certain posting situations began.

Assessment is by a merits scale: candidates prove their track record through certificates issued by the competent personnel body (Annex IV) and, where applicable, specific merit certificates signed by the head of the unit where they served (Annex V).

Deadlines and how to apply

The key operational fact: applications must be filed within fifteen working days from the day after publication in the BOE. Published on Saturday 24 October, the clock starts on Monday 26 October. Applications follow the Annex III template and are addressed to the State Attorney General at the Ministry of the Presidency, Justice and Relations with the Cortes.

The ordinary channel is the Funciona portal (Human Resources, HR services section), and electronic identification is mandatory: an electronic DNI or an FNMT certificate. Only exceptionally, where electronic filing is impossible, may candidates use the registries of Article 16.4 of Law 39/2015, providing evidence of the technical impossibility.

Anyone considering applying should check now that their electronic certificate works: expired certificates in the final week are a classic cause of late applications, and the resolution requires documented proof of technical impossibility to use a paper registry.

Awarded postings: leaving the old post and joining the new one

The rules set strict terms for taking up new posts. Awarded postings cannot be declined except for justified cause, and the departure from the previous post takes effect on taking up the new one, although the under-secretary of the home department may defer the departure for up to twenty working days for duly reasoned service needs. Where the new posting involves a change of residence, the host department's under-secretary may grant a further joining extension of up to twenty working days at the person's request.

These deadlines matter to the services themselves: temporary cover of the posts left vacant follows the same logic, so a single award typically triggers two or three successive moves in territorial units.

A process worth tracking

For serving state lawyers, the general merit competition is the usual route to promotion and relocation, and its calendar shapes career planning inside the corps. For the rest of the profession, these calls offer a useful map of where the State Legal Service is reinforcing. Entry into the public legal function follows other routes, such as the 700-post expansion of the judicial and prosecution service or the Supreme Court jurists' call for lawyers with fifteen years of practice, while the first step into the profession remains the bar access examination and its format.

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