Embargo & apremio All guides

Seguridad Social says you owe more cuotas: what the regularization letter means

Last reviewed: 26 September 2026 · 4 official sources (BOE / AEAT) · Informational — not asesoría fiscal

A letter from Seguridad Social asking you to pay a difference in your autónomo cuotas is the annual regularization: the monthly contributions you paid were provisional, and once your real net income for the year is known, they are recalculated (art. 308.1.c LGSS). If you owe, you have until the last day of the month after the notification to pay, without interest or surcharge.

Why this letter exists

As an autónomo you choose a monthly contribution base from a bracket (tramo) according to the average monthly net income you expect (art. 308.1.a, rule 1, LGSS). That base is provisional (rule 6). The following year, the tax administration sends Seguridad Social your actual income, and the Tesorería General de la Seguridad Social (TGSS) checks which bracket you really fell into.

The income it uses is your net business income under IRPF rules, plus the Seguridad Social contributions you paid as the business owner if you’re in estimación directa, minus a 7% deduction for generic expenses (3% for certain company-linked autónomos) (art. 308.1.c, rules 1 and 2, LGSS). So the figure in the letter will not match your IRPF return line for line. That is expected.

Three possible outcomes

1. You paid within your real bracket. If your definitive base sits between the minimum and the maximum of the bracket your income falls into, nothing changes (art. 308.1.c, rule 3).
2. You paid less than your bracket’s minimum. You have to pay the difference by the last day of the month following the month you were notified, with no late-payment interest and no surcharge if you pay in that window (rule 4). The protection exists only inside that window, so don’t let it pass.
3. You paid more than your bracket’s maximum. TGSS refunds the difference on its own, without interest, before 30 April of the year after the tax administration sent it your income (rule 4). You don’t need to request it.

The brackets change every year. For 2026 they are set by Orden PJC/297/2026 (art. 18); your letter uses the table of the year being regularized, not the current one.

Where the letter arrives and how to check it

The result is notified through Seguridad Social’s electronic notification service and in DEHú. Seguridad Social states that you have 10 calendar days to read the notification. Open the detail in Import@ss (“Acceder a la Regularización”), where you can see the income figure used and the resulting amount.

The expensive part is the letter nobody opened. A regularization sitting unread in DEHú keeps its deadline running. Gestorro is being built to keep TGSS and AEAT notices in one list, with the deadline that matters for each, and to nudge you when DEHú hasn’t been checked in a while.

Before you pay: check the income figure

• Compare it with your IRPF return for the same year, remembering the 7% generic-expense deduction and the add-back of your own cuotas described above.
• If the tax administration later corrects your income (on its own initiative or because you filed a correction), you can request a refund of anything paid in excess. If the correction raises your income, it is passed to the Labour and Social Security Inspectorate, which may regularize the difference (art. 308.1.c, rule 6).
• If you didn’t file IRPF, or filed without declaring income under estimación directa, your definitive base becomes the minimum base of group 7 of the Régimen General (rule 5). Filing is the way to get a result based on your real numbers.
• Old debts don’t disappear. Cuotas you left unpaid during the year are not refunded or modified by the regularization, and surcharges or interest already charged are never refunded (rule 4).

This is one more official letter that can sit unread next to the AEAT ones. For the full map of what can land in your inbox, see the Spanish tax emergencies survival map.