VTC regulation in Spain: from Law 16/1987 to Royal Decree-Law 13/2018, which authorisation covers what and what a fleet must check before accepting a service

Where does the VTC come from: what do the LOTT and the ROTT say?

Chauffeured vehicle hire was not born with the apps. Law 16/1987 on Land Transport Planning, the LOTT, already regulated it as an activity distinct from the taxi and from discretionary coach transport: hiring out a vehicle with its driver to whoever contracts it for a specific journey. Its regulation, Royal Decree 1211/1990, the ROTT, developed the conditions of the activity, and the successive reforms of the law, especially the 2013 one, expressly framed it as a form of discretionary passenger transport requiring an administrative authorisation. That is the root of everything else: the VTC is public passenger transport in passenger cars, not a car rental with an extra, and that is why the transport inspectorate polices it.

The law divides the roles between administrations from the outset. The State sets the general rules for access to the activity and issues, through the regions by delegation, the authorisations of national scope; the regions regulate transport that runs entirely within their territory where they have assumed that power; town councils order urban transport, which is transport that starts and ends within the same municipality, and they are the ones who grant taxi licences. That distinction between urban and interurban, which for decades had little practical importance for the VTC because the national authorisation covered any trip, is the one Royal Decree-Law 13/2018 turned into the boundary that defines the business today.

How do the VTC authorisation and the ratio to taxis work?

The VTC authorisation is an administrative title issued to a holder, person or company, and referring to a specific vehicle; it is not a licence of the company or of the driver. To obtain it, the regulation requires the holder to show good standing, financial capacity and a vehicle registered in their name or under finance lease that meets the prescribed characteristics, and the authorisation is endorsed periodically, as the piece on fleets explains. What sets it apart from almost any other transport authorisation is the numerical cap: the rule allows the regions to refuse new authorisations when the ratio between VTC authorisations and taxi licences in their territory exceeds the one the regulation sets.

That ratio rule has a troubled history. A 2009 services liberalisation law removed its legal basis in the LOTT and, during the years in which the regulation kept it without statutory cover, thousands of applications for authorisations were filed and refused, and a good part of them ended up granted by the courts, which held that what the law did not limit could not be refused. The 2013 reform of the LOTT returned the ratio to the law, and Royal Decree 1057/2015 spelled it out again in the regulation. The result is the stock of authorisations that exists today: in most territories no new ones are granted, and a fleet grows by buying existing authorisations with their vehicle or by working with holders who already have them.

What do prior contracting and the communications register require?

The VTC's second hallmark is prior contracting. The LOTT and the ROTT require the service to have been contracted before it starts, and forbid the vehicle from driving around public roads looking for customers, waiting at a rank or taking whoever hails it in the street: that is the taxi's exclusive ground. The fixed price derives from this, because a service contracted with a known origin, destination and time can have a known price, and so does the duty to document each contract, because the inspectorate needs to be able to check at the roadside that the passenger on board contracted the service before the car set off to collect them.

For years that proof was the route sheet, a document per service with the contract details that had to travel in the vehicle. Royal Decree 1076/2017 replaced it with an electronic communication to a national register, the Register of Communications of Chauffeured Vehicle Hire Services, which must be made before the service starts with the contract, the vehicle and the route, and which the inspectorate consults. For a fleet, the operational consequence is that the communication is as much part of the service as the driver and the car: a service not communicated is, for the law, a service not contracted, and the piece on fleet operations explains how to build it into dispatching.

What did Royal Decree 1057/2015 and the 2018 royal decree-laws change?

Royal Decree 1057/2015 rewrote the regime of VTC authorisations in the regulation: it set the ratio to taxis again, laid down minimum fleet and vehicle requirements and recalled the duty to provide services habitually within the territory of the region where the authorisation is domiciled. Royal Decree 1076/2017 added the communications register and restricted the transfer of new authorisations for a time. In spring 2018, Royal Decree-Law 3/2018 raised the ratio and the territorial habituality rule to statutory rank, with the declared purpose of shielding them from the appeals that had defeated them in the past.

The fundamental change came with Royal Decree-Law 13/2018, of 28 September. Since then the VTC authorisation of national scope entitles the holder to carry out interurban transport, that is, services that leave the municipality where they start; urban transport in passenger cars came to depend on what the regions regulate and, within them, the town councils, which may create their own authorisations or entitlements and set their conditions. The rule granted a transitional period, now expired, during which existing authorisations could keep providing urban services, and recognised the holders' right to claim compensation for the change. The piece on regulation by region tells what has come out of it.

What have the European and Spanish courts said?

Case law is the other half of the story. In recent years, the Supreme Court has reviewed the successive regulations and has upheld some rules, such as the ratio to taxis and territorial habituality, and struck down others as disproportionate or lacking statutory cover, and it has decided hundreds of appeals over authorisations refused in the years when the cap was not in the law. The Constitutional Court, for its part, has ruled on the division of powers between the State and the regions where a regional rule has regulated the VTC, and on whether a decree-law was the proper instrument to do so.

At European level, the Court of Justice of the European Union has examined in recent years, on questions referred by Spanish courts, whether capping the number of VTC authorisations or requiring a second authorisation for urban service is compatible with the freedom of establishment. Its view, broadly, is that an administration may impose requirements for reasons of general interest such as traffic management or environmental protection, but that it must justify them and the restriction must be proportionate to the aim pursued; protecting the economic viability of the taxi is not enough on its own. That view has forced regions and councils to reason their rules better, and it keeps producing rulings.

What does this framework mean for a fleet today?

For a fleet, the practical reading is that each vehicle carries an entitlement with a scope, and that scope must be known before accepting anything. The national VTC authorisation covers interurban trips anywhere in the country, with the duty to provide services habitually within its region's territory and to communicate each service to the register before setting off. For an urban service, one that starts and ends in the same municipality, what the region and the council of that place require is also needed: an urban authorisation of their own, an entitlement, a badge or nothing, depending on the territory. And the taxi licence, with its interurban authorisation, covers urban trips in the municipality that issued it and the trips that leave it.

Before accepting a service, the check is always the same, even if the system does it in seconds: that the assigned vehicle holds a valid, endorsed authorisation; that the trip is interurban or, if urban, that the vehicle holds the entitlement that territory requires; that the service is contracted before it starts and is communicated to the register with its details; that the driver may drive that vehicle that day; and that the price is fixed and communicated to the customer. A fleet working with a pre-booking platform receives services with those details already set, but the responsibility for the vehicle it accepts being entitled to that trip remains its own, because the authorisation is its own.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Ley 16/1987, de 30 de julio, de Ordenación de los Transportes Terrestres: arrendamiento de vehículos con conductor, autorizaciones, contratación previa y régimen sancionador (consulted on 27 October 2026)
• Real Decreto 1211/1990, Reglamento de la Ley de Ordenación de los Transportes Terrestres: condiciones del arrendamiento de vehículos con conductor (consulted on 27 October 2026)
• Real Decreto 1057/2015, régimen de las autorizaciones de arrendamiento de vehículos con conductor: proporción con el taxi y requisitos (consulted on 27 October 2026)
• Real Decreto-ley 13/2018, de 28 de septiembre, en materia de arrendamiento de vehículos con conductor: ámbito interurbano de la autorización y competencia autonómica y municipal sobre lo urbano (consulted on 27 October 2026)