The Spanish Traffic Act gives you twenty calendar days from receipt of the penalty notice to pay half the fine, and the same twenty days to file submissions against it. If you let those twenty days go by without doing either, the notice itself takes effect as the sanctioning decision and the fine becomes final without the authority having to issue anything further. Waiting therefore costs you 50 % of the amount and the chance to argue the fine before the body that imposed it, and what follows is the enforcement procedure, with surcharges of up to 20 % plus interest and the garnishment of your bank account or wages. What follows is the full timeline of non-payment, stage by stage and with the article that supports each step, because the question we hear most often at the firm is what can still be done at each point.
The full calendar of an unpaid fine
The governing statute is Royal Legislative Decree 6/2015 of 30 October, which approves the consolidated text of the Act on Traffic, Circulation of Motor Vehicles and Road Safety, known as the Traffic Act. The whole timeline comes from articles 94 to 98.
First stage. Once the penalty notice is served, article 94 opens the abbreviated procedure. You have twenty calendar days to pay with a 50 % reduction. That payment has consequences worth knowing before you make it. It amounts to waiving the right to file submissions, and any you do file are treated as not made. It ends the procedure without an express decision and exhausts the administrative route, so the only remaining challenge is a judicial review claim before the administrative court, with a two-month deadline and the cost of litigation. The sanction is final from the day of payment and, if the offence carries a loss of licence points, they are deducted the following day.
Second stage. If you do not pay, article 95 gives you the same twenty calendar days to file submissions and propose evidence. If you do, the file continues under the ordinary procedure, the authority must respond and issue a reasoned decision, and that decision can be challenged by an optional application for reconsideration within one month under article 96, which does not suspend enforcement unless suspension is requested and granted. Once that route is exhausted, the judicial review claim under Act 29/1998 remains. If within the twenty days you neither pay nor file submissions, article 95.4 turns the notice into the final decision and the sanction may be enforced thirty calendar days after notification.
Third stage. Once the sanction is final, article 98 allows fifteen calendar days to pay the full amount. There is no longer a discount and there is not yet a surcharge.
Fourth stage. Once those fifteen days expire, the Traffic Act itself refers the debt to the enforcement procedure, governed by Act 58/2003, the General Tax Act, and the General Collection Regulations. Article 28 of the General Tax Act sets three surcharges. The enforcement surcharge is 5 % and applies if you pay after the voluntary period has ended but before the enforcement order is served on you. The reduced surcharge is 10 % if you pay within the deadline stated in the enforcement order itself. The ordinary surcharge is 20 %, and from that point late-payment interest and procedural costs are added. The enforcement order deadline is set by article 62.5 of the same Act. If the order is served between the 1st and the 15th of the month, you have until the 20th of that month. If it is served between the 16th and the end of the month, you have until the 5th of the following month. Paying within that window keeps the debt at 10 % and avoids garnishment. Letting it pass takes it to 20 % and opens the garnishment stage.
For a 200 euro fine, which is the fixed amount for serious offences under article 80 of the Traffic Act, the figures come out as follows.
| When you pay | Amount you pay | Rule |
|---|---|---|
| Within 20 calendar days of service of the penalty notice | €100 | Art. 94 Traffic Act |
| Between the sanction becoming final and the following 15 calendar days | €200 | Art. 98 Traffic Act |
| After the voluntary period, before the enforcement order is served | €210 | Art. 28.2 General Tax Act |
| Within the deadline stated in the enforcement order | €220 | Art. 28.3 General Tax Act |
| After the enforcement order deadline | €240 plus late-payment interest and costs | Art. 28.4 General Tax Act |
The gap between the first row and the last is 140 euros plus interest and costs, and in time it can be a matter of a few months. There is no fixed legal period for how long each authority takes to move from one row to the next, as it depends on its workload, but the margin the law gives you is fixed and is the one I have just described.
Who collects, the DGT, the Tax Agency or your town hall
This is the question almost nobody answers and the one that decides which door to knock on. The answer depends on who imposed the fine.
Fines from the Central Traffic Headquarters, meaning roadside speed cameras, the Guardia Civil traffic division and most notices bearing the DGT letterhead, pass in the enforcement stage to the State Tax Administration Agency, which collects them under an agreement with the traffic authority. That is why, when the fine is from the DGT, the enforcement order, the bank account garnishment and the wage garnishment notice carry the letterhead of the Tax Agency. It is the same agency that handles income tax, and it applies to the fine the same collection procedure it applies to any tax debt.
Municipal fines, meaning those from the local police, parking meters, low-emission zones and urban speed cameras, are collected by the town hall itself through its treasury or, where it has delegated enforcement, by the relevant provincial or regional body. In the province of A Coruña many municipalities have delegated collection to the Provincial Council, while the City of A Coruña manages its own. This matters because the status of the debt, instalment plans and objections to enforcement are handled by whoever collects, and going to the DGT about a local police fine, or to the Tax Agency about a municipal fine, wastes weeks that count.
One more detail. The Tax Agency does not send text messages with payment links for fines, and neither does the DGT. Messages along the lines of «you have an outstanding fine, pay here to avoid the surcharge» are impersonation scams. We explain what to do when a message like that arrives in this post on bank impersonation scams, and what the bank must refund if you have already paid in this one on refunds after phishing.
What gets garnished and how much of your salary they can touch
The order of garnishment is set by article 169 of the General Tax Act. Money in bank accounts comes first, because it is the easiest to seize. The authority issues a garnishment notice and the bank withholds the balance until the debt, surcharge, interest and costs are covered. If the account does not hold enough, the usual next step is wages, salaries and pensions, and after that other assets, including the vehicle, whose seizure can be recorded in the Vehicle Register.
On wages there is a limit that almost nobody explains with figures and that decides whether the garnishment is real or exists only on paper. Article 607 of the Civil Procedure Act, to which the collection rules refer, declares any wage, salary or pension not exceeding the national minimum wage to be exempt from seizure. Above the minimum wage a sliding scale applies by bands. Of the excess up to twice the minimum wage, 30 % may be garnished. Of the next band, up to three times, 50 %. Up to four times, 60 %. Up to five times, 75 %. Anything above five times the minimum wage, 90 %.
The 2025 minimum wage was set at 1,184 euros per month in fourteen payments and is updated every year. With a monthly salary of 1,500 euros, the garnishable band is the difference between 1,500 and 1,184, which is 316 euros, and only 30 % of that may be withheld, roughly 95 euros a month. With a salary equal to or below the minimum wage nothing can be garnished from the payslip. And there is a point that prevents many wrongful seizures. Article 171.3 of the General Tax Act requires those same limits to be respected when the account into which the salary is habitually paid is garnished, taking as the reference the salary paid in that month or the previous one. If the bank has withheld from your account the amount of a payslip that does not exceed the minimum wage, the withholding can be challenged.
The article 607 limit works the same way against any creditor, public or private.
As for timing, there is no legal minimum period between the sanction becoming final and garnishment. It depends on the volume handled by the collecting authority. What can be said is that, for DGT fines, the Tax Agency processes enforcement orders and bank account garnishments in an automated way, and that the debt may be collected for four years from the date the sanction became final, a period that restarts with every collection step served on you. Once the debt is in enforcement, the first thing we check at the firm is whether the underlying sanction was served as the law requires and whether the garnishment respects the limits, which is where most of these files are stopped, and it is part of the work we do in criminal and road traffic law.
Failing to identify the driver costs double or triple
When the camera or the officer cannot identify the person driving, the authority turns to the registered keeper. Article 11 of the Traffic Act requires the keeper to truthfully identify the driver at the time of the offence, with the licence details needed to locate that person in the Driver Register. The same obligation extends to long-term lessees and to the registered habitual driver under article 82.
If the keeper does not reply to the request, or replies without the required details, that is the very serious offence of article 77.j, and the fine, under article 80, is double the amount set for the original offence if it was minor and triple if it was serious or very serious. With a 200 euro offence, the fine for failing to identify is 600 euros. With a 100 euro offence, 200 euros. This second fine is independent of the first and carries no loss of points, which explains why some keepers prefer to absorb it rather than identify a driver who would lose their licence. That is a legitimate decision if taken with the figures in front of you. Naming someone who was not driving is a different matter. False identification so that someone else takes the points has led to convictions for document forgery and to complaints against both parties.
Two situations deserve a separate mention. If the vehicle belongs to a company, the duty to identify lies with the company as keeper, and if it fails to do so the tripled fine is directed against the company. Legal entities are also required to hold an electronic road traffic address, so the identification request arrives in the electronic mailbox and the deadline runs even if nobody opens it. If the vehicle is a rental, the hire company can comply by identifying the hirer with the contract details, and the fine passes to the customer.
When an identification request arrives it is worth checking first whether the original notice was properly drawn up and whether the offence itself is worth contesting before discussing who was driving. These cases also need to be distinguished from those in which the conduct stops being an administrative offence and becomes a crime, as happens with drink-driving above the criminal threshold, where the procedure and the consequences are different.
The fine that arrives by ordinary post, the electronic address and the official gazette notice board
A good share of the defences that succeed against fines in enforcement do not dispute the offence. They dispute that the sanction was properly served, because without valid service no deadline runs, nothing becomes final and there is no debt to enforce.
The Traffic Act regulates service in articles 89 to 92. If the officer stops you, the notice is served on the spot. Otherwise, the general rule is service at the electronic road traffic address, compulsory for companies and optional for individuals, and failing that at the address held in the Vehicle or Driver Register. Article 91 requires two delivery attempts at the address on different days and at different times before service is deemed to have failed. Only when those attempts fail does article 92 allow the notice to be published on the Single Edictal Board of the Official State Gazette, and twenty calendar days after publication service is deemed to have taken place and the deadlines begin to run. Nobody receives a warning of that publication.
This has several practical consequences. A letter sent by ordinary post, without acknowledgement of receipt or proof of delivery, is not valid service of a sanction. Act 39/2015 requires in articles 40 to 44 that service leave a record of dispatch, receipt, date and content, and an ordinary letter satisfies none of that. If the envelope you have received is of that kind, it may be an informational communication or a courtesy reminder, and what matters is what formal service exists behind it. On the other hand, if you moved and did not update your address with the traffic authority, service at the old address and the subsequent gazette publication are valid even if you never saw them, because the law places the burden of keeping the details current on the keeper. And if you hold an electronic road traffic address and do not check it, the deadlines run regardless.
Defective service is a ground for objecting to the enforcement order recognised in the General Tax Act, alongside payment and limitation. Furthermore, under article 40.3 of Act 39/2015, defective service only takes effect from the moment the person concerned shows awareness of it, which reopens deadlines the authority treated as closed. How that is proved and how it is raised is the lawyer’s job, but the reader should know that finding out through a garnishment does not necessarily mean there is nothing left to do.
The speed camera fine without a photograph
The Traffic Act does not require the photograph to travel with the penalty notice. It requires the notice to state the facts, the provision infringed, the sanction and the device used, and article 88 gives officers’ notices a presumption of truthfulness, subject to proof to the contrary, as to the facts and the identity of the offender. That presumption has limits. The speed camera must have passed the metrological control required by metrology legislation, in particular Order ITC/3123/2010, with its periodic verification in force on the date of capture, and the authority must be able to produce the certificate and the photograph if they are requested in submissions. A speed camera fine in which the device is not identified, or whose verification had lapsed, is open to challenge, and that is the kind of defect that only shows when the full file is read.
Limitation, the offence and the sanction do not run together
There are two different limitation periods and they should not be confused, because a lot of undue payments come from that confusion. Under article 112 of the Traffic Act, the offence becomes time-barred after three months if minor and after six months if serious or very serious, counted from the day it was committed, and the period is interrupted by service of the penalty notice. This means that if a serious speeding offence is first served on you more than six months after the facts, the offence is time-barred and the fine can be annulled, regardless of whether the speeding was real.
The sanction, once final, becomes time-barred after four years counted from the day after it became final, and as regards collection it is governed by the General Tax Act, so every enforcement order, every garnishment notice and every validly served demand restarts the clock. A 2019 fine that the authority has kept pursuing with served steps is still alive in 2026. A 2019 fine with no served step in four years is time-barred, even if the authority still lists it as a debt. The same article 112 also sets the lapse of the file at one year from its opening if the decision is not served within that time, without prejudice to the offence being pursued again if it is not time-barred.
Points, licence, roadworthiness test, selling the car and credit blacklists
The loss of points occurs when the sanction becomes final, regardless of payment. Paying with the discount brings the finality forward to the day of payment and the points are deducted the next day. Not paying only delays the loss of points until the sanction becomes final by default, and from then on the debt and the points run separately. Nobody loses their licence for not paying a fine. The licence is lost by exhausting the points balance or through a suspension sanction, and licence renewal is not conditional on being up to date with fines.
The roadworthiness test is also unaffected by having fines in enforcement. Selling the car can become complicated, because the collecting authority can record a seizure of the vehicle in the Vehicle Register, and with that entry the transfer is not processed until it is lifted. For DGT fines garnished by the Tax Agency this is a frequent situation that the seller discovers at the traffic office on the day of the transfer.
Immobilisation of the vehicle over a fine is exceptional and is designed in article 104 for drivers without residence in Spain who do not deposit the amount on the spot, and for safety situations. It is not a consequence of ordinary non-payment.
As for credit blacklists, traffic fines are not reported to private credit files such as ASNEF. The authority has its own compulsory collection route and does not need them. The debt does appear in tax compliance certificates issued by the Tax Agency when the enforcement is handled by it, which can affect anyone who needs those certificates for a grant or a public contract.
What you can do today without waiting for anyone
Keep the envelope with the postmark and the postal notice if there was one, because the date of service sets every deadline and it is the first thing we will look at. Do not throw away any earlier letter, even if you considered it informational. If you hold an electronic road traffic address, log in and download whatever is there, with the date it was made available. If you are not sure whether you have fines in enforcement, you can check pending notices on the Single Edictal Board of the Official State Gazette and on the DGT’s electronic office, and check with the Tax Agency whether any enforced debt is recorded in your name.
Do not pay with the discount until you know whether the fine can be contested, because payment closes the administrative route. Do not let the enforcement order deadline pass if you already have one, because when it expires the surcharge jumps from 10 % to 20 % and garnishment begins. If you are deciding whom to identify, do it with the article 80 figures in front of you and never with a name other than that of the person who was driving.
What the firm does with a traffic fine
Those who handle this on their own usually make one of two mistakes. They pay with the discount a fine that was time-barred, badly served or unsupported by evidence, and with that payment give up any challenge other than a court claim. Or they let the twenty days pass meaning to appeal later and discover that the notice is already final, that the discount is gone and that all that remains is enforcement. At the firm we review the service, the limitation periods and the evidence in the file, and we tell you with the figures in front of you whether it makes sense to pay, file submissions, identify or object to the enforcement order, and we handle it within our criminal and road traffic practice. You can call +34 677 841 007 or write through the contact page. Have ready the complete letter with its envelope, the date you received it, the registration number, who was driving that day, whether you hold an electronic road traffic address and any earlier communication about the same fine, including anything received from your bank about amounts withheld from your account.
Frequently asked questions
Who is going to garnish me, the DGT, the Tax Agency or my town hall?
It depends on who imposed the fine. Fines from the DGT and the Guardia Civil traffic division pass in enforcement to the Tax Agency, which issues the enforcement order and garnishes the account or the wages. Fines from the local police, a parking meter or an urban speed camera are collected by the town hall, directly or through the Provincial Council or whichever body it has delegated to. Any step concerning the debt, instalments or an objection to enforcement must be taken before whoever collects, which is why it pays to identify that body before doing anything.
What if the fine never reached me and I only found out through the garnishment?
You need to check how the authority says it served you. If it was through the gazette notice board after two failed attempts at an address you had not updated, service is probably valid and the debt is owed. If there was only an ordinary letter without acknowledgement of receipt, or the attempts were not made as the law requires, service is defective and you can object to the enforcement order on that ground, as well as asking for a deadline to file submissions on the underlying fine. Request the file before paying.
Can I still pay with the discount if the enforcement order has already arrived?
The 50 % discount was lost twenty days after service of the penalty notice and cannot be recovered. What you can do is stay at the 10 % surcharge by paying within the deadline stated in the order itself, until the 20th of the month if it was served in the first half or until the 5th of the following month if it was served in the second half. After that deadline the surcharge is 20 % plus late-payment interest and costs, and garnishment begins. You can also request deferral or instalments from the collecting body.
Is it worth appealing a 200 euro fine or is it better to pay half?
If the offence is real, service was correct, the fine carries no points and you are within the twenty days, paying 100 euros is almost always the best option and you do not need a lawyer. An appeal is worthwhile when the offence is time-barred because more than six months passed between the facts and the first service, when service was defective, when the camera is not identified or its verification had lapsed, when the fine carries points that bring you close to losing your licence, or when you are being charged triple for failing to identify the driver. In those cases what is at stake far exceeds the 100 euro discount, and that is when it makes sense for us to review it before the deadline runs out.