How to download your Informe de Vida Laboral and your Bases de Cotización

No, and this is the one thing that catches people out. A Spanish pension is a percentage of your regulatory base - the earnings you contributed on - applied to how long you contributed. The Informe de Vida Laboral only carries the second half: your coverage, in months and periods, with no euro figure anywhere on it. The earnings live in a separate report, the Informe de Bases de Cotización. Give us the vida laboral alone and we can confirm your years but have no base to price the pension against, so the estimate can't produce a real number. Both together is what makes it work - and both come from the same personal area, so it's one more report, not a second errand.

It's in the same 'Vida laboral e informes' menu as the vida laboral. Once you're logged in and have downloaded the vida laboral, go back to that menu and pick 'Informe de bases de cotización', press 'Consultar bases', and download the PDF. You don't log in again - one session covers both reports, and both are free.

Both generate instantly once you're logged in and reach the service - there's no waiting. The only slow routes are telephone or postal requests, which several sources describe taking roughly a week to arrive by mail; avoid those unless the online route isn't available to you.

No. Every online route is free, issued directly by the Tesorería General de la Seguridad Social. Any third-party site charging a fee is not the official service.

Yes - the 'Via SMS' option on the login gateway needs no account, no password and no certificate, only your DNI/NIE and a one-time code sent to the mobile Social Security already has on file for you. If that number isn't on file, the SMS option is closed and you'll need Cl@ve or a certificate to log in.

You can't self-register a new number through the SMS login itself. You need to log in another way - Cl@ve, a digital certificate, or a telephone/in-person request - and update your contact details from inside your account, or have Social Security update it directly. This is the single biggest reason the SMS shortcut doesn't apply to every expat: it depends on a phone number most emigrants haven't kept current.

Yes - the portal doesn't check your location. The genuine obstacle for someone abroad is Cl@ve registration, not the request itself: the no-certificate internet registration route sends an activation letter to a Spanish postal address, which most emigrants no longer have. The documented workaround is a video-call identity check with the Agencia Tributaria rather than the postal route.

Cl@ve Permanente is a persistent username/password login reinforced with SMS one-time codes, meant for frequent use. Cl@ve Mobile (elsewhere called Cl@ve PIN) is a temporary, occasional-use code issued fresh each time you need it, with nothing to remember between uses. Either is sufficient to download these reports.

A chronological list of every employer or self-employed activity you've been registered under with Social Security: the regime (general, autónomo, agrario, etc.), exact start and end dates, and your grupo de cotización - a 1-to-11 professional-category code. It does not show a pension amount or projection, and it does not show month-by-month contribution figures in euros; that lives in the Informe de Bases de Cotización.

No. They are a record of registered periods, categories and contribution bases, not a forecast. Entitlement and amount are only determined when you actually claim, calculated against the regulatory base and the rules in force at that time.

A professional-category code from 1 to 11 - for example 1 covers engineers and graduates, 7 covers clerical staff, 10 covers unskilled labour - used historically to set contribution bases. It looks like it could be a pension-relevant multiplier and isn't; treat it as a job-category label, not a benefit calculation.

A minimum of 15 years contributed, at least 2 of them within the 15 years immediately before you claim, is the qualifying floor - that gets you 50% of your base reguladora. The full ordinary retirement age and contribution profile shift by year under current reform rules: in 2026, reaching ordinary retirement age at 65 requires roughly 38 years 3 months contributed; with less than that, ordinary retirement age rises to around 66 years 10 months. These figures move with policy - confirm against Seguridad Social's own published tables before relying on them for a specific decision.

Yes, under Regulation (EC) No 883/2004, the same EU social security coordination framework that applies to Ireland. Insurance periods completed in other EU/EEA states, Switzerland, or the UK (under its own post-Brexit arrangement) are totalised with your Spanish record for both qualifying and calculating a pension, with each country paying pro-rata for its own periods, and overlapping periods counted once.

No. The institutions exchange contribution records directly with each other once you formally claim - you are not the courier. Your reports exist so you can check the Spanish side of the record is complete and correct before that happens, since disputes are slow to resolve and are best caught before a claim is in progress.