Spain's GECCO order: hiring seasonal workers at origin in 2026

GECCO is Spain's collective hiring at origin scheme, governed this year by Order ISM/1547/2025, published in the Boletín Oficial del Estado on 30 December 2025. It lets an employer contract seasonal workers in their country of residence for up to nine months a year, with accommodation, travel and information duties written into the order.

The order was made on 23 December 2025. The Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration administers the scheme and sets the occupational forecast each year. The order runs from 1 January to 31 December 2026 and can be reviewed after six months if the labour market shifts. During 2025 the ministry recorded 25,767 workers arriving through circular migration programmes from 17 countries, a quarter more than in 2024.

Two tracks, two durations

The order separates circular migration from stable migration, and the distinction decides how long a worker may stay and how often they return.

Circular migration covers seasonal activity. The authorisation runs for four years, and within it the worker may be employed for up to nine months per calendar year under Article 6.3, on a fixed discontinuous contract. The worker returns to the country of origin after each activity period, and the return is a condition of being called again the following season. Stable migration is the other track, under Article 14.2, and produces a one year authorisation for a continuing role rather than a seasonal one.

Employers submit either named offers, where the individual worker is identified in advance, or generic offers, where the selection is made by the authorities of the origin country in cooperation with the Spanish administration. Generic offers are how Spanish agriculture fills large volumes in a single campaign. The WAFIRA II programme, running from 2026 to 2028, will bring 3,000 Moroccan workers, predominantly women, under that arrangement.

What the order puts on the employer

GECCO is unusual among European schemes in writing the employer's welfare obligations into the regulation rather than leaving them to national labour law. Four of them carry a direct cost.

IPREM is the Spanish public income indicator, fixed annually in the state budget law, so the rent ceiling moves with it rather than being a fixed euro figure. Automatic payroll deduction of rent is prohibited. Where an employer does not intend to pay for the return journey, the order requires that to be stated expressly in the travel commitment document, which means silence on the point is read against the employer rather than in its favour.

The accommodation clause is the one that produces most of the friction in a Spanish campaign. An employer who has secured labour but not beds is not ready to file, because the guarantee is part of the offer and not a follow up step. The procurement side of that problem, including how far ahead beds have to be contracted for a seasonal peak, is set out in accommodation procurement for foreign workers.

Why a Nepali or Indian crew cannot enter through GECCO

This is the part most employer guides leave out. GECCO is not an open route. It operates through instruments agreed with a defined set of origin countries, in practice Morocco, Colombia, Honduras, Ecuador, Senegal and Mauritania, and recruitment is channelled through the labour authorities of those states. An employer in Huelva or Almería planning a campaign with Nepali or Indian workers cannot use the order at all, however well the role fits the seasonal definition.

The route for those corridors is the ordinary regime: an initial authorisation for residence and work applied for by the employer at the provincial immigration office, with the national employment situation tested against the catalogue of hard to fill occupations, followed by a long stay visa at the Spanish consulate with jurisdiction over the worker's residence. It is slower, it is priced per file rather than per campaign, and it does not carry the collective processing that makes GECCO efficient at volume.

Two comparable European schemes are worth putting beside it before choosing a destination. Italy's decreto flussi runs a quota with a fixed click day and a nulla osta issued by the prefecture, described in the decreto flussi and the nulla osta. Greece operates seasonal admission through bilateral agreements with named origin states and a separate quota instrument, set out in the Greek bilateral quota route. Both are closer to a Nepali or Indian corridor than GECCO is, and Greece in particular has been the more realistic alternative to Spain for South Asian seasonal supply.

The binding date in a Spanish campaign is rarely the quota. It is the gap between the moment the offer is lodged and the moment the consulate in the origin country can issue visas at volume, which in a large generic offer is measured in months rather than weeks. Filing in February for a June harvest leaves no room for a consular appointment backlog, and a campaign that starts three weeks late loses the fruit, not the paperwork.

Werklist maps the corridor before the offer is drafted, so an employer knows on day one whether the origin country is inside the GECCO instrument or outside it. What that mapping covers, and what stays with the employer as the contracting party, is set out on our employers page.