Spain's record low of evictions in early 2026 and the court reform: a pre-registered test

Spain's General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) reported 4,005 evictions practised in the first quarter of 2026, −45.4% on the 7,334 of a year earlier. That is the lowest quarter since its series began in 2013, except Q2-2020 under the lockdown (1,383); the next lowest is Q3-2025 (4,839).

Readings differed:

• que.es took it as a sign that tenant protection was working.
• PAH Barcelona disputed it on the day of release. It asked why court-practised evictions fell while those received and completed by the common services rose (16,167, +19.2%; 7,696, +16.6%), and pointed to the court reform.
• Electomanía, in September, attributed part of the fall to changes in court procedure.

Under Organic Law 1/2025 the first-instance courts became tribunales de instancia, district by district: 315 districts on 1 July 2025, 16 on 1 October and 100 on 31 December, 431 in all.

The counting changed with the reform, and the CGPJ's own data-collection forms document it.

• Before. Each court reported the evictions practised «bien directamente por el juzgado o bien por un servicio común» (item 1.13 of the court form).
• After. The 2026 form of the new civil section has no such item. Practised evictions are now item 1.4.2 of the common-services form, filled in by the common execution service, which «deberá recabarla del resto de Servicios comunes del Tribunal de Instancia» when it lacks information. A new item counts voluntary handovers.
• Not in the published statistics. The CGPJ's methodology page and release notes do not mention the change.

We registered a protocol on 4 October 2026, before the CGPJ's next release. It tests whether the fall follows this change district phase by phase. The study measures the effect of a documented change in who reports the series.

The data neither establish that the record low is an artefact of that change nor rule it out.

• The main test is inconclusive (H1). Provinces with more of their evictions in phase-3 districts fell more in Q1-2026 than in the quarter before: b3 = −1.23, Holm-adjusted p = 0.18, permutation p = 0.047. The registered sensitivity analysis S3, run after the review, gives −1.18 (p 0.088). Phase 1 left no detectable mark in Q3-2025 (b1 = −0.13, p = 0.34). One quarter earlier, before phase 3, the same regression already gives −0.755 (two-sided p 0.024). That pre-reform slope is an exploratory check, and it weakens H1a.
• The service-side tests rest on Q4-2025 (H2 inconclusive, H3 supported). The ratio of court-recorded to service-completed evictions fell more where phase 3 weighed more (b3 = −2.28, Holm-adjusted p = 0.026). The signal comes from the quarter before phase 3: in phase-3-heavy provinces the common services' figures collapsed in Q4-2025 and recovered in Q1-2026. Madrid's completed evictions went 955 → 193 → 867 (Q4-2024, Q4-2025, Q1-2026). In Q1-2026 alone, year on year, the slopes are −0.30 and −0.83 and not significant. Nationally, receipts were −29.6% in Q4-2025 and +19.2% in Q1-2026, and −4.2% over the two quarters together. The +19.2% is mostly a rebound.
• The concentration is in rent evictions (H4, falsified). Rent minus mortgage is −2.11 (p = 0.011). The mortgage estimate is near zero but very imprecise: only 18 provinces have enough cases.
• The district-level test passes, on doubtful data (H5). Within provinces, phase-1 districts recorded −33% relative to phase-3 districts in 2025, but the gap was already −17% in 2024. The district file's 2025 column disagrees with the CGPJ's province figures in all 50 provinces.
• No size can be given. The pooled model registered to size the effect is degenerate: one parameter sits at its search bound.

Explanations the design cannot separate:

• the change in who counts;
• a real slowdown of the reorganised courts (the CGPJ reports resolved cases −13.7% overall and civil −22.3% in Q1-2026);
• rent-specific channels. One is the suspension of evictions for vulnerable households, in force for most of Q1-2026 but lapsed from 28 January to 4 February and finally from 28 February. Another is the pre-filing negotiation required since April 2025.

Missing and estimated data, in the CGPJ's own words.

• Q3-2025. «En este trimestre los datos de lanzamientos han sido estimados debido a la falta de información completa en algunos partidos judiciales». It lists 64 districts, 63 of them in phase 1, transformed that quarter; the common-service series carry the same note. The first estimate, 5,053, was later revised to 4,839.
• Q1-2026. The CGPJ lists three phase-3 districts without data at the close of the report: Donostia/San Sebastián, Gijón, Vinarós. It marks Madrid's rent figure «*Dato estimado». The release's own province sheet gives 2,249 rent evictions nationally, the series 2,600; the difference is how Madrid's 475 non-mortgage evictions are split.
• The district file. It places 2,944 evictions of 2025 in Ribadavia (Ourense), which had at most 11 in any earlier year.

The CGPJ has met this problem before. It stopped publishing its seizures series because, it says, «muchos juzgados practican directamente el embargo sin que sea necesaria la intervención de los servicios comunes». It explains: «Las bajadas que se venían observando se deben más a esta causa que a una verdadera reducción del número de embargos practicados».

Still to come. The CGPJ publishes Q2-2026 on 16 October 2026. Predictions were frozen before (commit 321bce1); the out-of-sample test of PROTOCOL.md §7 will be added after that date.

An artefact of counting would be nobody's wrongdoing. The reform's timetable is set by law, and the CGPJ itself disclosed the missing and estimated data.