Decree-laws

📜 Decree-laws: governing by decree

A royal decree-law is a rule with the force of law passed by the Government, not by Parliament (the Cortes). The Constitution (art. 86) only allows it in cases of extraordinary and urgent need, bars it from certain matters (fundamental rights, State institutions, electoral law…) and requires Congress to validate or reject it within the following 30 working days. Using the Official State Gazette (BOE), this page counts how many each government passes and what share of legislation is made this way.

How many are passed each year

Decree-laws passed each year, coloured by the party of the prime minister who governed for longest that year. 2026 only includes the year so far.

The number of decree-laws does not depend only on who is in government: the years with the most decrees often coincide with crises (2012, in the depths of the financial crisis; 2020, with the pandemic), and election years, with Parliament dissolved for part of the year, have fewer laws and therefore a higher share of decree-laws.

What share of legislation is made by decree

So as not to depend on how much legislation is passed each year, the chart shows the percentage of decree-laws out of all the State's law-ranking rules (decree-laws plus laws and organic laws passed by Parliament). 50% means that for every law passed by Parliament the Government passed one decree-law.

By government

Each decree-law is attributed to the prime minister in office on the day the Council of Ministers approved it (the date in its title). To compare terms of different length, the table gives the average per year in office.

By party: observed versus expected

A simple count favours whoever has governed least. The table compares each party's decree-laws with those expected if every government since 1977 had passed decree-laws at the same pace, shared out according to the time each one has governed. A ratio of 1 is what would be expected; 2, twice as many; 0.5, half.

The PSOE has passed 0.91 times the decree-laws that would correspond to its time in office, the PP 1.00 times and the UCD 1.47. This comparison has an important limitation: the use of decree-laws has grown over the years, so more recent governments come off worse than the earliest ones. That is why it is worth also looking at the comparison within the same period: since 1997, in the full years governed by a single prime minister, the PP and the PSOE have alternated in power.

Validated and rejected

Congress must vote on each decree-law within 30 working days of its publication. If it validates it, it remains in force (and Congress may also process it as a bill in order to amend it); if it rejects it, it ceases to be in force. Since 1979, Congress has rejected 16 decree-laws. In 15 cases the Congress resolution could not be found in the BOE: 4 are from the last 60 days (awaiting a vote) and the rest mostly from the early years, when the resolution was not always published in the BOE under that title.

All decree-laws

Methodology and sources

• Source: daily summaries of the Official State Gazette (BOE), open data API, since July 1977. We take the royal decree-laws and laws from section I (Head of State) and the resolutions of the Congress of Deputies ordering publication of the validation or rejection of each decree-law. Each rule is counted once even if the BOE publishes it in several parts.
• Date and government: the date is that of the provision (the Council of Ministers date, shown in the title), not the publication date; the decree is attributed to the prime minister in office that day, including when acting in a caretaker capacity. Premierships: Adolfo Suárez (UCD) until 26 February 1981, Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo (UCD), Felipe González (PSOE), José María Aznar (PP), José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (PSOE), Mariano Rajoy (PP) and Pedro Sánchez (PSOE; in coalition with Unidas Podemos and later Sumar since January 2020).
• Force of law: the percentage compares decree-laws with laws and organic laws passed by Parliament (including the budget act). It does not include legislative decrees (consolidated texts the Government approves under powers delegated by Parliament) or regional laws.
• Expected: total decree-laws since 5 July 1977 multiplied by the share of that time each party governed. It assumes a constant pace, which is not the case (see the text).
• Validation: before the Constitution (29 December 1978) decree-laws did not need to be validated by Congress; that is why the status counts start in 1979.
• International comparison: not included. Each country has different instruments (decreti-legge in Italy, ordonnances in France, medidas provisórias in Brazil…) and there is no consistent official statistic.