Spain's Supreme Court strikes down the 1 VTC per 30 taxis cap

In short: Spain's Supreme Court has set aside the cap of one VTC authorisation per 30 taxis in the Canary Islands and ordered the Gran Canaria Cabildo to resume processing 200 authorisations that had been blocked. The headlines say 200 new Uber and Cabify cars. The small print is worth reading, because they are not granted yet and the ratio has not fallen in the rest of Spain.

What the Supreme Court actually decided

The court dismissed the appeal brought by the Gran Canaria Cabildo and Fedetax, the regional taxi federation, and upheld the judgment the Canary Islands High Court had already handed down in 2024. The reasoning, as reported by La Revista del Taxi, rests on three legs:

• Freedom of establishment. Article 49 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union protects that right, and the court finds the ratio clashes with it.
• Necessity and proportionality. A cap like this only holds if the authority shows it is suitable and proportionate to a legitimate aim: managing traffic, protecting public space or the environment. The Canary Islands did not show it.
• Less restrictive measures. The court points out those same aims can be pursued other ways, such as restricting circulation in certain areas and at certain times, or setting emissions requirements.

The geography argument did not work either: the court answers that being an outermost region is not, on its own, enough to justify the cap.

The 200 licences have not been granted

This is the detail that drops out of nearly every headline. The ruling does not award 200 authorisations: it orders the rejected files to be unblocked and processed. The Cabildo now has to retrieve them and check one by one whether they meet the requirements.

How many make it through is anyone's guess. Between “the procedure has to start” and “200 new VTCs on the street” there is an administrative stretch that has not been covered yet.

Why it matters beyond the Canaries

If you work on the mainland, it is tempting to scroll past. That would be a mistake, and it is worth explaining why without overstating it.

The ruling is about the Canaries and does not strike down the ratio in the rest of the country. Anyone telling you the 1-in-30 rule is finished in Spain is going further than the judgment does.

What does travel is the argument. The court has not said the ratio is unlawful in the abstract: it has said it cannot be applied automatically without justification. That is the route the platforms have been taking through the courts for years, and it is also the ground on which the new Catalan taxi law is being fought, with the European Commission asking for its restrictions to be justified on the same terms: necessity and proportionality.

Put another way: a cap based on the number of taxis stands up less and less on its own; what a judge wants is data behind it. Meanwhile the national register keeps moving and, as we saw when going through how many taxi licences there are in Spain, VTC numbers are rising while taxi authorisations fall.

What the taxi sector says

Fedetax acknowledges the blow but has ruled out protests: it takes the view that a judgment is not reversed by demonstrating. Its president, Juan Artiles, summed it up by saying the game is not over, as reported by La Gaceta del Taxi. The sector's bet is to negotiate caps that are actually justified by real local conditions, which is precisely what the Supreme Court found missing.

How Taxio handles it

Whether more cars or fewer come into your city is not up to you, and not up to an app either. What you can decide is whether you notice in time that it is affecting you.

With Taxio you log every ride with its platform commission and every expense, and you get your real average euros per hour and your net instead of gross, month by month. If competition in your city changes, that series tells you in numbers, not by word of mouth at the rank.

Frequently asked questions about the ruling