Peak, flat and off-peak hours in Spain, and what they actually apply to

Peak, flat and off-peak are fixed hours, identical all year, written into a CNMC circular. What almost nobody knows is that they are not the price of energy.

Peak, flat and off-peak are not the price of electricity

This is the most widespread confusion in the whole subject, and it is worth clearing up before looking at a single timetable. Peak, flat and off-peak do not set what energy costs. They set what the tolls and the charges cost, which is a different thing.

The toll is what you pay to get electricity to your home: transmission and distribution. Its values and its hours are set by the CNMC, Spain’s markets and competition regulator, in Circular 3/2020 of 15 January. The charges are the part of the bill that funds system costs — the support scheme for renewables, the accumulated deficit, the non-mainland territories — and the government sets them under the methodology of Royal Decree 148/2021. That decree does not invent a timetable of its own: it points back to article 7 of the CNMC circular. Tolls and charges therefore use exactly the same hours.

The toll that applies to an ordinary home is called 2.0TD: the one for supplies connected at no more than 1 kV with contracted power of 15 kW or less. It has two power terms and three energy terms, and it is those three energy terms — peak, flat and off-peak — that depend on the clock. The gap between them is wide: in 2026, toll and charge combined, the energy term of a peak hour is more than triple the flat one and almost thirty times the off-peak one.

The exact hours, identical all year

On the mainland, in the Illes Balears and in the Canaries — the circular puts all three in one column, with the same bands — from Monday to Friday on working days:

• Peak (P1): 10:00 to 14:00 and 18:00 to 22:00.
• Flat (P2): 08:00 to 10:00, 14:00 to 18:00 and 22:00 to 24:00.
• Off-peak (P3): 00:00 to 08:00.

In Ceuta and Melilla everything runs one hour later: peak from 11:00 to 15:00 and from 19:00 to 23:00, flat from 08:00 to 11:00, 15:00 to 19:00 and 23:00 to 24:00. Off-peak is identical to the mainland, 00:00 to 08:00.

There are no seasons. The table in article 7.3 of the circular is headed «Winter and summer (Monday to Friday, working days)», so these hours hold in January exactly as they hold in August. The higher-power tolls, 3.0TD and the 6.xTD family, do have four electricity seasons. The 2.0TD does not.

The power term works differently: it has only two periods. One merges peak and flat, from 08:00 to 24:00 Monday to Friday on working days, and the other is off-peak, priced at a tiny fraction of the first.

Weekends and public holidays

The circular treats as off-peak every hour of Saturdays, Sundays, 6 January and the national public holidays, with one exclusion that matters a great deal: holidays that can be swapped for another day are left out, and so are those without a fixed date.

The 2026 example is Good Friday. It fell on 3 April, it is a non-substitutable national holiday, and even so it was not billed off-peak but as an ordinary working Friday. The reason is simply that its date moves every year.

Applying the rule to the 2026 calendar, the days billed entirely off-peak, on top of every Saturday and Sunday, are 1 and 6 January, 1 May, 12 October, 8 December and 25 December. 15 August falls on a Saturday, and 1 November and 6 December on Sundays, so they are already off-peak for being weekends. The rule works the same way in Ceuta and Melilla.

What actually happens to the price of energy

Here is the point. If you are on the PVPC — the Voluntary Price for the Small Consumer, the electricity tariff whose calculation the government sets and whose price changes every hour — your energy term has two pieces added together: the tolls and charges, which do follow the bands, and the cost of the energy itself, which does not.

Royal Decree 216/2014 leaves no room for doubt: the production cost of energy «shall take a different value for each hour h». Twenty-four different prices every day. The Ministry for the Ecological Transition describes the PVPC as a dynamic price indexed to the wholesale market, varying hour by hour, and nowhere does it group that piece into peak, flat and off-peak. Since 1 January 2026 that component no longer simply copies the day-ahead market either: 45 % of the signal comes from the day-ahead and intraday markets and 55 % from forward markets.

Hence the paradox. The 10:00 to 14:00 stretch is peak on the toll, and Hence the paradox. The 10:00 to 14:00 stretch is peak on the toll, and it is also part of the window in which solar drives the wholesale price down. May 2026 was the month with the highest share of photovoltaics in the Spanish generation mix on record, at 28.5 %. As the sun sets and household demand climbs, the price rebounds, and there the second peak band does tend to line up with the expensive hours. In the small hours, deep in off-peak, the market price need not be the day’s lowest either.

Taxes sit on top of all of the above and do not change the ranking: the electricity excise duty, at an ordinary rate of 5.11269632 %, and VAT, back to 21 % since 1 June 2026.

How to decide on an hour

1. Find the band. It is fixed, and you will learn it in two days. It tells you what you will pay in tolls and charges, and nothing more.
2. Look at that specific hour's price. This is the part that moves. Red Eléctrica publishes the next day's hourly prices at 20:15 every day, so by the evening you already know how tomorrow looks. PrecioLuz lays out those hours for your zone — mainland, Canaries, Balearics, Ceuta or Melilla — on a colour scale whose thresholds you set yourself.
3. Compare it with the day's minimum and average. Knowing an hour is expensive is useless unless you know how much cheaper the alternative is. Some days are flat, and waiting is not worth the disruption.
4. Think about how much the appliance draws. The saving is proportional to the kilowatt-hours you move: it shows on a washing machine or a car charge, and it is negligible on a phone.

The daily PrecioLuz alert arrives each afternoon, when the next day’s price is published, with the average, the comparison against today and the cheapest stretch. You will know the time bands by heart within a week. The price of each hour has to be looked up.

The band is fixed. The price is not

PrecioLuz shows the price of every hour of the day for your zone, with the day's minimum, average and maximum marked. Each afternoon it tells you how tomorrow looks and where the cheapest stretch falls.

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