Key Aspects of the Recent Amendment to the Catalan Regulations on Commercial Facilities and the Law on Commerce, Services and Trade Fairs of Catalonia
On December 31, Law 12/2025, of December 29, was published in the Official Gazette of the Generalitat of Catalonia, which aims to introduce various modifications to both Decree-Law 1/2009, on the Regulation of Commercial Facilities, and Law 18/2017, on Commerce, Services and Fairs.
This Law 12/2025 introduces relevant modifications both in the regime of location of commercial establishments and in the regime of commercial regulation.
Below, we briefly summarize the main new features:
1.- Location requirements for the establishment of small commercial establishments (up to 800 m2 of sales area) are made more flexible:
Small commercial establishments in municipalities with a population of 5,000 or less are permitted to be located where urban planning allows, without the need for residential use to be dominant.
It is expressly stated that small commercial establishments, in municipalities with a population of more than 5,000 inhabitants or similar to these or that are the capital of a region, may be established by way of the so-called "adjacency exception" with the consolidated urban fabric.
And it is expected that this implementation will be carried out through a Communication regime.
2. The requirements for applying the so-called "adjacency exception" for establishing commercial businesses outside the consolidated urban area are reduced and simplified. The main changes are as follows:
The requirement that the location of the establishment outside the consolidated urban area be justified is eliminated .
Regarding the requirement that urban planning must allow commercial use as dominant or main on the plot where the commercial establishment is intended to be located , it is defined when the commercial use is considered to have such dominant or main character : when the built area of the commercial establishment represents, at least, 51% of the net buildability of the plot.
The requirement that the commercial establishment must be located on an isolated plot is eliminated . And the definition of an isolated plot included in the regulation is removed.
The requirements previously demanded regarding the accessibility of the commercial establishment in urban and interurban public transport are being made more flexible .
3. The possibility is reopened for neighboring municipalities that are conurbated through residential areas or communication systems that connect them to graphically delimit the perimeter corresponding to the area of the consolidated supra-municipal urban fabric jointly . In these cases, for the purposes of the location criteria of Article 9 of Decree-Law 1/2009, the population of the municipality with the largest population must be taken into account for the entire resulting consolidated urban fabric .
4. Some measures to make trading hours more flexible are introduced:
The possibility of temporarily modifying business hours is extended, in the case of commercial events at night (known as “ tastos de nit ” or “ shopping night ”), in the following cases: (i) areas of high tourist traffic, (ii) municipal markets, and (iii) other collective establishments; cases that until now were excluded from being able to carry out this type of promotional activity.
In order to avoid the increase in the undervaluing of perishable food products that occurs when two or more consecutive public holidays coincide with mandatory closure of commercial establishments , companies that operate with commercial establishments of personalized sale or in a self-service system and that have an offer oriented essentially to everyday purchase and food products, are allowed to present up to 3 alternative dates that replace the dates approved in the calendar of Sundays and public holidays with authorized commercial opening.
5. Several changes are introduced to the regulation of sales promotion activities (sales, clearance sales, overstock sales, and promotional sales) in an attempt to address the need to unify the regulation of different types of sales promotion, given the observed trend in the sector towards offering various promotional activities simultaneously. Among these changes, the following stand out:
Several changes have been made to the regulations governing sales promotions and discounts . For example, the concept of " pre-promotion price " has been revised to refer to the lowest price applied to identical products or services in the 30 days preceding the promotion. In the case of successive and uninterrupted price reductions, establishments may also indicate the product's original price as the pre-promotion price.
6. New developments are included regarding companies that engage in distance selling, with the aim of mitigating the environmental and urban impacts that arise from the delivery of products to buyers:
It is expected that these companies, in addition to offering the possibility of delivering the product to the postal address indicated in the purchase, may offer the possibility of collecting and returning the product at a physical establishment or collection point, owned or belonging to third parties, within the perimeter of the consolidated urban area, or in urban micro-distribution logistics centers.
And it is expected that, in rural municipalities, the local councils can offer the collection and return service with their own or external means.
7.- Regarding the promotion of the circular economy model in commercial activity, it is expected that companies must offer the option of using reusable packaging and of collecting and returning it at "clica-i-recull" service points in accordance with the regulations on packaging and packaging waste, with the aim of guaranteeing the deposit, return and refund systems for packaging.
8.- The statute of limitations for minor and very serious offenses, and for minor sanctions, as set out in Law 18/2017, is modified, reducing the limitation periods, since those previously provided were declared unconstitutional.
9. Articles 33 and 34 of Law 18/2017, which regulate selling at a loss, are repealed, as they are now obsolete, given the European regulatory framework and the Judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union of 19/10/2017 (Case C-295/16, “Europamur Alimentación”), which declared that the Spanish regulations that generally prohibited selling at a loss were contrary to European Union law, and as a result of which the Spanish State went on to prohibit selling at a loss only in cases where it is deemed unfair.
