canary islands self employed retirement crisis

Canary Islands faces loss of 20% of self-employed workers

Compiled with the help of artificial intelligence, based on Spanish-language information. Source below the article.

Canary Islands faces loss of a fifth of its self-employed workforce

The Canary Islands is on the brink of losing 20% of its self-employed workers. It will happen over the next five years. The figure does not merely mean that some 25,000 self-employed people will retire – it also means that the experience, knowledge and many of the businesses built up over years of work will be left without a successor. This is one of the main concerns of the Union of Professionals and Self-Employed Workers (UPTA), which is calling for measures to guarantee the continuity of these activities. Its president, Eduardo Abad, sums it up thus: “Generational succession is not about some self-employed people leaving and new ones coming in, but about not losing businesses that are up and running.”

New affiliations on the rise

If there is one positive note for self-employment in the Canary Islands, it is that the region records one of the largest increases in new affiliations at national level. In just one year these grew by 2,640 – counting company members – compared with the month of September, a rise of 2.2%, according to the latest data from the Canary Islands Statistics Institute (Istac). Indeed, it stands out that there are more self-employed people than unemployed people in the Islands. The vice-president of the Canary Islands Government and regional minister for the economy, Manuel Domínguez, attributes this increase to the diversification of the economy and to support measures for the sector, such as the zero quota for those starting an activity. “The economy is beginning to diversify somewhat, which generates new business opportunities,” he says.

A question of foresight

But the associations’ concern is not about natural replacement. In fact, UPTA insists in one of its reports that the problem lies not so much in the rise in retirements – an obvious consequence of an ageing population – as in the lack of forward planning to deal with their impact on the productive fabric. In this sense, “in the medium and long term we are going to have a problem of very significant magnitude,” Abad warns.

The precision of a carpenter who has spent a lifetime carving wood is not learned overnight. Nor is the trust that turns a bar into a neighbourhood meeting point built in an instant. When its owners retire with no one to take over, both the business and the knowledge and bonds forged over decades can disappear. That is the risk UPTA is warning about, especially in small retail, hospitality, the trades and rural municipalities. That is why its president insists on “transferring knowledge, transferring professional experience”. While new self-employed workers move towards engineering, health or technological development, other activities find continuity among those arriving from abroad. “We are abandoning the traditional retail and small hospitality sectors,” Abad notes. The new businesses meet other demands, but they do not replace the workshop or the bar that has always been there. Thus, to sustain them, he points to migrant entrepreneurs: “We have a possible solution precisely in people from outside.”

One in four self-employed workers is over 56

But what is the demographic structure of the Canary Islands’ self-employed? In the Islands, 26,120 self-employed individuals are aged 56 or over, slightly more than one in four, according to August 2026 data from the Ministry of Labour and Social Economy. If the analysis is extended to the group as a whole, including company members, the proportion reaches 28.32%. Moreover, comparison with January 2024 places the Canary Islands as the region where the weight of this group has increased the most: 1.95 percentage points, from 26.37%, the largest rise of the 17 autonomous communities.

A plan to match owners with successors

In this regard, Manuel Domínguez says the regional government is preparing an initiative to connect owners nearing retirement with people interested in taking the reins of their businesses. The aim is to prevent economically viable activities from disappearing through lack of continuity. “We are looking for one self-employed person to replace another,” the vice-president sums up, arguing that those wishing to start out should be steered towards already consolidated establishments and services, whose track record offers a base of stability and profitability.

Pension worries

Alongside the lack of succession comes concern about the pensions with which these workers will retire. In March 2026, 87.6% of Canary Islands self-employed workers were contributing on the minimum contribution base or on one between that and 1.5 times its amount. Specifically, 42,038 – 28.4% of the total – were contributing on the minimum, 16.4% more than a year earlier. “The contribution bases are a disaster,” denounces Abad, who considers “an absolute failure to have frozen the increase in contribution bases in 2026”. For UPTA, these low contributions, together with the reductions applied since 2023 and the subsequent freeze, compromise the adequacy of future benefits. According to its president, the difference between the pension of a retired self-employed worker and that of an employed worker in the Canary Islands exceeds 600 euros. His concern can be summed up in one question: “Who can live in the Canary Islands on 960 euros? To us, at any rate, it seems very difficult.”

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