Anyone who has worked in a country with a Social Security agreement with Spain can add those years to those contributed here to reach the 15 years of contributions required for retirement, which is known as totalization of periods. But in some of these countries the worker can withdraw the money he has been saving for his pension, and if he does, those years would stop counting in Spain.
The lawyer Miriam Ruiz Acosta (@compromisolegal), has explained it in a TikTok video with the Social Security criteria in hand. “Be very careful with withdrawing your contributions if you have contributed in any of these countries,” warns the lawyer. With this agreement, “you can use the contributions you have made in those countries to obtain here in ours, for example, a retirement or permanent disability pension,” he remembers.
The problem is how pensions work in those countries, because “they have a system called individual capitalization that allows you to withdraw part or all of the contributions you have made.” In Spain, today’s contributions pay for today’s pensions (what is known as the pay-as-you-go system and explains the Social Security official, Alfonso Muñoz), while in these systems the worker accumulates his money in his own account, and it is that money that he can request to be returned according to the rules of each country.
The lawyer relies on Social Security management criterion 2/2023. That document cites eight countries whose law allows withdrawal and they are Andorra, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, Mexico, Peru and the Dominican Republic. Furthermore, remember that all the agreements signed by Spain, except for China, allow adding periods, but that things get complicated when a pay-as-you-go system and a capitalization system are combined.
If the worker withdraws all the money, the periods “disappear,” says the criterion, and Social Security cannot add them. If the withdrawal is partial, the years are cut in the same proportion as the money withdrawn, and it is understood that what has been withdrawn corresponds to the oldest periods.
For example, with round figures, someone who withdraws half of their account balance in one of those countries after contributing there for 20 years would lose 10, the first years they worked. He would keep the 10 most recent, which added to 5 years in Spain would leave him just within the 15 years required by article 205 of the General Social Security Law.
What happens if you remove everything
The lawyer gives the example of total withdrawal. “If you, for example, have 20 years of contributions in Colombia and 5 years in Spain, and those 20 years in Colombia decide to withdraw them in a single payment, you will no longer be able to use them to generate a retirement or permanent disability pension in Spain.”
In that case, he adds, “you would only have 5 years of contributions and to generate a retirement pension you would need to contribute another 10 years in our country.” Without retirement, those 25 years would give access to the pension without working another day, as long as “the requirement of specific deficiency and minimum retirement age” is met (two of the years of contributions must be within the last 15).
Of course, totalizing does not mean collecting the full pension in Spain. The agreement with Colombia (found in article 9) requires that the pension be first calculated as if contributions had been made here every year and then only the proportional part to be paid in Spain, 5 out of 25 years in the example. The other part is paid, if applicable, by the country where the person worked, as already explained in who pays the pension to Spaniards who contribute abroad.
Social Security is obliged to count towards the pension the contributions of self-employed workers paid without being registered, even if the registration was before 1994, if the retirement is from 2022
He receives a pension of 2,671 euros after Social Security forced him to pay five years of contributions because it was considered that he requested leave late and was not taken into account when retiring.
Finally, Ruiz says that “if you have contributed in any of these countries and are thinking of withdrawing all or part of your contributions, think about it first because it could later affect your pension in Spain.”