Spain’s catering sector has kicked off 2025 on a good footing, prolonging the upward trend of previous years. However, the pace of growth has moderated: according to data from the National Statistics Institute (INE), turnover was up 2.6% year-on-year on average in Q1 2025, compared to 6.5% in 2024 and 9.7% in 2023. The pattern shown by the CaixaBank Research catering spending indicator is similar: total expenditure on catering, which includes both in-person and electronic payments with Spanish and foreign cards, grew by 6.4% year-on-year on average between January and May 2025. This falls short of the growth recorded in 2024 and 2023 (6.7% and 12.9%, respectively), although it is more than 2 pps above the growth of total consumption, which encompasses all items of expenditure.
The granularity offered by our internal data allows us to confirm that the buoyancy of the tourism sector explains the strength of catering spending. On the one hand, domestic tourist spending on catering grew by 12.8% year-on-year between January and May 2025, surpassing the figure of 2024 (10.6%). On the other hand, spending on catering by international tourists who visited Spain during the same period recorded rapid growth of 12.6%. Despite registering a slight slowdown compared to 2024 (19.5%), it is once again evident that the boost from international tourism is key for the catering sector. So much so that, according to our estimates, around 30% of Spain’s catering establishments are highly dependent on spending by tourists, with 10% of them being dependent on international tourists.