Basque Country, Madrid, and Navarre are the autonomous communities that allocate the most public spending to finance concerted education, while Canary Islands, Extremadura, and Castilla-La Mancha allocate the least percentage of their educational budget.
However, in the case of Madrid, there is the paradox that the highest investment in concerted education is due to the significant weight of this network of centers in the region, since if the spending allocated per concerted student is taken into account, it is the lowest.
These are data from the twelfth report 'Commented Indicators on the State of the Spanish Educational System' corresponding to 2026, prepared by the Ramón Areces Foundation and the European Foundation Society and Education, and which indicates that while the Basque government allocated 26% of public educational spending to concerted education in 2024, Madrid allocated 18%, Navarre 17%, and the Balearic Islands, La Rioja, and Catalonia, 16%.
Canary Islands, Extremadura, and Castilla-La Mancha financed concerted places with 8% of their public educational spending, while Asturias invested 9.5% and Andalusia and Galicia, 10.6%.
Nevertheless, when measuring the actual spending received by a concerted place, Madrid is the community with the lowest spending (3,400 euros per student in 2023), followed by the Valencian Community (3,463 euros) and Galicia (3,481 euros).
The average public spending on concert agreements per student was 4,705 euros, compared to 7,943 euros per student in public centers.
The senior analyst at the Funcas study center, Juan Carlos Rodríguez, points out in an article in this report that families of concerted schools, especially in Madrid and the Valencian Community, must assume additional expenses to cover a "deficit in public funding" per student.
And indeed, the maximum spending per student by households is registered in Madrid (2,676 euros) and the minimum in Extremadura (737 euros).
According to the INE, household spending on education was 1,668 euros on average in the 2023-2024 academic year, mainly on Higher Education (2,935 euros per student) and Early Childhood Education (1,390 euros per student).
How has funding for concerted education evolved?
The latest report 'Data and Figures for the 2026-2027 School Year' from the Ministry of Education, Vocational Training and Sports indicates that currently 66.8% of students are enrolled in public schools, 24.5% in private concerted schools, and 8.7% in private non-concerted schools.
There are 19,436 public centers and 9,326 concerted and private centers.
And public spending allocated to concerts and subsidies represented 11.5% of total spending in 2026.
However, the evolution has been very different: in 1992 this item amounted to 9% of public spending, between 2010 and 2014 it grew by about 12%, and between 2020 and 2023 it decreased by one point due to a greater increase in other public items as a consequence of the COVID pandemic.
Between 2004 and 2023 the increase was 68.5%, and during the 2008 crisis, spending on subsidized schools did not fall, unlike the cuts that occurred in public education.
The Funcas analyst also suggests that in those communities governed by the PP, subsidized schools received greater funding, as on the analyzed dates there were "considerable increases" in Madrid or Murcia (with PP Governments) compared to the worsening in Andalusia, the Canary Islands, Asturias, and Extremadura, governed by the PSOE for a large majority of those years.
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