Supreme Court rules out recalculating the insurance sector pay rise when the statistics office revises GDP months later
The Labour Chamber confirms the 2023 pay review under the insurance agreement was calculated with the initial INE figure and is not redone.
The Supreme Court has confirmed that the 2023 pay rise under the national insurance sector agreement, linked to GDP, is calculated with the figure first published by the INE and is not redone when the institute revises it months later. That is the conclusion of STS 791/2026, of 6 October (ECLI: ES:TS:2026:4205), with Justice Rafael Antonio López Parada as rapporteur, which dismisses appeal 266/2025 and upholds the National High Court's interpretation.
The dispute: two tenths of GDP
Article 44 of the national collective agreement for insurance, reinsurance and collaborating mutual insurance companies links part of the pay rise to GDP growth. The 2023 rise was calculated with the initial figure published by the National Statistics Institute (INE), which put growth at 2.5 percent. In September 2024, the INE revised that figure upwards, to 2.7 percent.
Following that correction, the FESIBAC-CGT federation asked for the 2023 rise to be recalculated with the new figure, which would have meant back pay for the sector's workforce. The National Court dismissed the claim and the case reached the Labour Chamber of the Supreme Court, which has now fully endorsed the lower court's approach.
Own acts and the will of the parties
The Court's reasoning rests on interpreting the agreement itself under article 1282 of the Civil Code, which allows the parties' contemporaneous and subsequent acts to be used to ascertain their real will. The Chamber highlights two facts. First: an official data correction already occurred in 2019 and the negotiating parties did not revise the calculation then. Second: the following agreement reproduced the same review system without any nuance on statistical corrections.
For the Supreme Court, that conduct reveals that the negotiators intended the first calculation, made with the data published at the time, to be final. The agreement's reference to the official indicator means the data available when the clause is applied, not an ideal figure refined afterwards.
What changes for collective bargaining
The ruling does not make provisional data untouchable by operation of law: it gives decisive weight to the parties' own conduct when the text of the agreement is ambiguous. In review clauses, it is therefore advisable to agree expressly what happens if the indicator is corrected later.
Source: Graduado Social Red, case-law summary of STS 791/2026, of 6 October (consulted on 2 November 2026). This is a secondary source: the full text of the ruling could not be consulted.
Related links
Fuentes
- graduadosocialred.es. Accessed 2 November 2026.
The specific data in this article come from the official sources cited.
