Spain's Moves III electric-car grant scheme has run into the failure mode that makes buyers stop trusting incentives altogether: the money was announced, the cars were bought, and the payments have not arrived. At least five autonomous communities now concede they cannot settle every pending application from the 2025 round.
Who is short, and by how much
The regions that cannot cover their pending applications are Madrid, Andalucía, Castilla y León, Navarra and Extremadura, according to La Tribuna de Automoción.
Madrid is the clearest case. It is short €24.73 million on the line funding car purchases, plus a further €11.3 million on charging points. The region has already run three internal fund reallocations, freeing roughly €7 million, with a fourth worth €1.5 million planned. Even completed, that closes well under half the gap.
| Item | Figure |
|---|---|
| Madrid shortfall, vehicle purchases | €24.73 million |
| Madrid shortfall, charging points | €11.3 million |
| Released so far by reallocation | ~€7 million |
| Further reallocation planned | €1.5 million |
The top-up was real, and it was not enough
This is not a case of a government failing to add money. In December 2025 the state approved a €400 million increase, of which €381.76 million reached the autonomous communities, taking the cumulative budget to €781.76 million.
The structural numbers explain why that still fell short. Across the 2021–2024 programme, Moves III carried a budget of €1,335.9 million, of which €1,101.5 million — about 82% — had been awarded by 30 June 2026. The waiting list for the 2025 round alone has been reported at over 40,000 people, worth roughly €300 million. An administration source put the obstacle plainly: articulating resources retroactively is very difficult.
The design problem, not the budget problem
Moves III is administered regionally, which means a national announcement becomes fourteen separate queues moving at different speeds. A buyer sees "grant available", signs for a car, and then discovers their region exhausted its allocation months earlier — or that processing will take longer than the grant's own validity window.
The result is that the incentive stops functioning as an incentive. Its purpose is to change a purchase decision at the moment it is made, and it cannot do that if the payment is contingent on which region you live in and how quickly its officials process paperwork.
What comes next
Spain's successor scheme, Plan Auto+, is framed as fixing exactly this: simplifying subsidy management rather than only adding budget. It does not retroactively resolve the 2025 backlog, and it is the administration of the pending cases — not the design of the new plan — that decides whether current claimants are paid.
Spain is not alone in hitting the ceiling. Germany's purchase grant drew more than 103,500 applications at a pace that outran its budget, and Italy's Ecobonus for electric vans exhausted its funds outright. The lesson repeating across all three is that a subsidy sized by budget rather than by demand ends as a lottery, and the buyers who lose it are the ones who already bought the car.