Sumar is going to present this week in the Congress of Deputies a non-legal proposal with which it proposes restricting the granting of variable rate mortgages to those cases in which the borrower proves “high financial solvency” and the ability to assume significant increases in the installment.
The initiative will be debated in the Economy Commission and is part of a battery of measures aimed at limiting the possibility of risk households being exposed to changes in the interest rate.
The document, promoted by the group’s economic spokesperson Carlos Martín, together with deputies Aina Vidal and Féliz Alonso (En Comú), is based on previous work in which they have verified how variable mortgages are a channel for transmitting financial uncertainty to families.
For Sumar, households “are not in a position to manage” complex long-term financial risks, especially in a context of international instability that can cause sudden changes in installments.
Families are not equal when it comes to interest rate risk
In the group’s opinion, transferring the rate risk to families implies placing on the weakest party in the contractual relationship a responsibility that it cannot manage on equal terms, lacking tools such as hedging models, diversification capacity or negotiating power comparable to that of the bank.
Sumar also focuses on mixed mortgages, according to the document that Europa Press has had access to, whose expansion in recent years has been considerable and in which they see a problem. Although in 2025 92% of new loans included a fixed-rate initial period, nearly a quarter resulted in mixed products. These, the group warns, do not eliminate the risk, but rather postpone it, which could mean a deferred reintroduction of exposure to rate volatility.
Opens the debate on mortgage benchmarks
The initiative proposes to open the debate on mortgage reference indices. Sumar proposes studying alternatives to the Euribor and the IRPH, to which it attributes structural limitations such as volatility or, in some sections, the lack of transaction volume. The objective would be to design more stable and appropriate indicators for long-term contracts, thus reducing the vulnerability of households to sudden market changes.
The group also calls for evaluating, within a year, the social impact of the Spanish mortgage model, with special attention to the financial effort of families and the risk of losing their primary home.
Legal measures that defend the consumer
In the legal field, the proposal includes measures to strengthen consumer protection in mortgage disputes. Sumar proposes legislating on the “significant imbalance” in contracting to facilitate the declaration of abusiveness of non-transparent clauses, as well as adapting the legislation to the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in relation to the IRPH index.
At this point, the group recalls that the CJEU has reiterated that the clauses linked to this index are not outside the transparency control, and that it is up to the national courts to verify whether the consumer understood its operation. Therefore, it is proposed to review final sentences that have not followed these criteria, in order to guarantee the full application of European law.