Since Monday 5 October 2026, the administrative control document (DeCA) for hire-and-reward road freight in Spain has been electronic only, under the eighth transitional provision of Spain’s Sustainable Mobility Act (Law 9/2025). It applies to domestic transport, meaning national transport and cabotage, but not to international transport that only partly crosses Spain, nor to own-account transport. Its technical requirements are set by a resolution of 5 June 2026 from the Spanish Directorate-General for Road and Rail Transport, and the Spanish Ministry of Transport states that no additional penalty-free period is planned after 5 October.
What it means for your routes
- The DeCA is generated before departure, from the service data and always before the service actually starts: a natively digital PDF (not a scan) of 5 MB at most, with a QR code pointing to its web address. A route finalised at the last minute delays the document, and therefore the departure.
- The driver carries a copy, on a mobile device or printed, always with the QR code. At a roadside check, the driver shows the DeCA or, failing that, the QR code alone. Handwritten notes on a paper copy are not taken into account.
- A multi-drop route can fit in a single DeCA if the contractual shipper and the actual carrier are the same for every shipment, with the origin, destination, type and weight of the goods given for each one. The order of shipments in the document does not set a delivery order.
- A change on the road leaves a trail: if the data change during the service, either complete the existing PDF with the reason while keeping the old data, or generate a new one and keep the original. In both cases, the driver must receive the new version.
- For cabotage, check your data flow: the DeCA is not the electronic consignment note (eCMR), which the ministry does not make mandatory for international transport. What matters is that each service’s data reaches the application that generates the DeCA before departure.