How electricity pricing works in Spain
Spain is the European country where hourly electricity pricing has become a genuine household habit. If you are on the regulated PVPC tariff, the price you pay changes every hour of every day, and knowing when the cheap hours fall is worth real money.
The PVPC tariff
PVPC stands for Precio Voluntario para el Pequeño Consumidor — the regulated tariff available to households with a contracted capacity of 10 kW or less. Its defining feature is that the energy component tracks the wholesale market hour by hour, rather than being fixed by a supplier. Roughly a third of Spanish households are on it. The alternative is a fixed-price contract from a supplier on the free market, where you pay the same rate at 3am as at 8pm and this site is mostly of academic interest.
The 2.0TD access tariff and its three bands
Separate from the energy price, every Spanish household pays grid tolls under the 2.0TD structure. Unusually for Europe, these are set nationally rather than by regional network operators, which means we can model them precisely rather than estimating. There are three time bands on weekdays. P1, the peak band, runs 10:00–14:00 and 18:00–22:00. P2, the flat band, covers 08:00–10:00, 14:00–18:00 and 22:00–24:00. P3, the valley band, covers midnight to 08:00. Weekends and national public holidays are P3 all day, which is why a Sunday afternoon can be cheaper than a Tuesday night.
Taxes on top
Two taxes apply. The Impuesto Especial sobre la Electricidad is a percentage of the energy and capacity terms rather than a per-kWh amount, currently 5.113%. VAT is then applied to everything, currently 21%. Both were temporarily reduced during 2026 — VAT to 10% and the excise duty to 0.5% from 22 March — and both reverted on 1 June when energy inflation did not breach the threshold that would have extended the relief. This kind of change is why our figures are stored as dated rules rather than fixed numbers.
What the daily curve actually looks like
Spain has an enormous amount of installed solar, and it shows. On a sunny day the midday hours frequently collapse toward zero, occasionally going negative, while the evening peak between 20:00 and 22:00 can be twenty or thirty times higher. This is the opposite of the traditional advice to do everything overnight: in Spain, in summer, the middle of the day is often the cheapest window even though it falls in the P1 peak band for grid tolls.
Practical advice
If you are on PVPC, the highest-value habit is checking tomorrow evening rather than reacting in the moment. Prices publish in the afternoon for the following day, so you can set the dishwasher and washing machine timers once and forget about it. If you have an electric car, the difference between charging at 21:00 and charging at 03:00 is usually larger than any supplier switch you could make.