What is Euribor — and which figure your Spanish mortgage follows
The Euribor is the rate at which European banks lend to each other unsecured. It is calculated and published by the European Money Markets Institute in Brussels, on every TARGET day at around 11 a.m., in five tenors. Only one of them matters for a variable Spanish mortgage: the twelve-month figure — and not as a daily number either.
What does “Euribor (Euríbor hipotecario)” mean?
The Euribor is the rate at which European banks lend to each other unsecured. It is calculated and published by the European Money Markets Institute in Brussels, on every TARGET day at around 11 a.m., in five tenors. Only one of them matters for a variable Spanish mortgage: the twelve-month figure — and not as a daily number either. The administrator is the European Money Markets Institute in Brussels; the calculation agent is Global Rate Set Systems. Under the EU Benchmarks Regulation 2016/1011 the Euribor is a critical benchmark, and since 1 January 2022 supervision has sat with ESMA. The hybrid methodology originally had three levels. The third, the bank's own estimate, has been abolished; the last bank moved across in October 2024. The process is now two-level, and the figure is a 15 per cent trimmed mean from 21 panel banks.
What matters about these two points
The answer box above states the case. The two points it is built from carry their own heading here — together with what each of them means in practice.
Who calculates the Euribor, and who supervises it
So the figure is not set by a bank but calculated by a supervised administrator. What your own bank does with it is governed by your contract alone.
How it is determined — in two levels since October 2024
Any description still built on three levels is out of date. It changes nothing about your instalment — but a good deal about how solid the figure is.
Five tenors, and only one of them counts
It is published on every TARGET day at around 11 a.m. Central European Time, in five tenors: one week, one, three, six and twelve months. There is no fixing at weekends or on TARGET holidays. For a variable Spanish mortgage only the twelve-month figure governs.
In Spain the official monthly average counts, not the daily rate
This is where most calculations go wrong. What governs is not the daily fixing but the official monthly average of the twelve-month Euribor: the simple arithmetic mean of every daily value in the month. That is how Anejo 8 of Banco de España Circular 5/2012 defines it. The Banco de España publishes the figure monthly by resolution in the BOE. Colloquially it is called the Euríbor hipotecario — that is not a legal term.
How that becomes your new instalment
At the annual or half-yearly reset the bank takes the monthly average published in the BOE for the reference month set out in your contract and adds the agreed differential. That gives the rate until the next reset. Two things follow: the reference month is in the contract and is not always the previous month — and a daily figure read off somewhere is never the number the calculation uses.
Euribor and the euro short-term rate are not the same thing
The Euribor is a forward-looking term rate for maturities from one week to twelve months. The €STR is a backward-looking overnight rate that the ECB calculates from transactions actually settled the previous day, first published on 2 October 2019. Replacing the Euribor is not planned; the working group on euro risk-free rates states expressly that the Euribor is not scheduled to be discontinued. In Spain a €STR-based rate has additionally been listed as an official reference rate since Circular 1/2021.
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