Spainmobilitylaw:fileyoursustainableplanbeforeDecember5

Juanjo Mestre (CEO and cofounder at Dcycle) and Ana Mateu (Customer Success and Sustainable Mobility Plan specialist) walked through Law 9/2025, published in Spain's official gazette on December 3, 2025: what it requires, who it applies to, and how to build a plan that passes audit, avoids penalties, and completes the scope 3 commuting footprint along the way. They told it through a practical case: a quality manager at a multi-site company who discovers the obligation mid-way through an ISO 14001 audit.

Who it applies to and what counts toward the threshold

The obligation to approve a Sustainable Mobility Plan (SMP) reaches work centers with more than 200 people, or more than 100 per shift. The threshold is measured per work center, not per company (under article 1.5 of the Workers' Statute), so a company can have some centers obligated and others not. The law does not set an explicit rule for counting temp-agency staff or subcontractors toward that threshold, but those who access the center steadily do generate real commuting and it is sensible to include them in the diagnosis. A multi-site company needs one plan per center, because the mobility options of an urban office and an isolated industrial park are not the same.

Two regulatory layers: national and regional

Beyond the national law, some regions already had their own rule: Catalonia (decree 132/2024, commuting plan since August 2025) and the Basque Country (law 4/2019, since 2022 for centers over 100 people per shift), with thresholds that differ from the national one. You must check both layers: the regional rule can bind you even if you do not reach the national threshold of 200, and the national law prevails and must also be reported.

What the plan must contain

The plan must capture how employees, visitors and suppliers commute, and propose measures following the hierarchy principle: first active mobility (walking, cycling), then public transport, low-emission vehicles, shared mobility and, last, the individual car. It also includes three often-overlooked points: remote work where possible, road-safety measures (commuting accidents are the leading cause of workplace accidents in Spain) and, for centers with more than 1,000 people in cities over 500,000 inhabitants, flexible hours to avoid rush hour.

The three mandatory phases

A valid SMP goes through three phases: diagnosis (understanding how people actually commute, via a mobility survey with a representative response rate), negotiation with union representatives (it cannot be approved unilaterally, like the equality plan) and registration in the EDIM (the integrated mobility data space), the public platform managed through each region. Because it is public, clients, investors and the works council will see it: the absence of a plan is as visible as the fine (100 to 2,000 euros for minor infringements), and the real risk is being flagged as non-compliant in a procurement process. The plan is reviewed every two years.

The deadline and why the effort is worth it

The deadline is December 5, 2026. The original law gave 24 months, but the royal decree in force cut it to 12, leaving only a few months (fewer once you subtract the summer). The key takeaway: the SMP diagnosis uses exactly the same data as scope 3 category 7 (employee commuting). If you build the plan on data that already serves your carbon footprint, the work stands on its own even if the rule changes. In the demo, Dcycle showed how to launch the mobility survey, see the diagnosis in dashboards that update themselves, and generate the per-center plan PDF with AI-assisted drafting connected to the platform data via MCP.