What the Ministry clarified about the DeCA in its webinar

Spain’s Ministry of Transport (Ministerio de Transportes y Movilidad Sostenible) has answered the most frequent questions about the DeCA (Documento electrónico de Control Administrativo) in two places: the presentation by the Deputy Directorate-General for Road and Rail Transport Inspection (Subdirección General de Inspección de Transporte por Carretera y Ferrocarril) that was shown in its webinars, and its FAQ page. The essentials: private own-account transport (transporte privado complementario) does not need a DeCA, anyone who already issued a control document (documento de control) carries on doing so electronically, applications do not have to be certified and DeCAs do not have to be uploaded to any Ministry platform, and there is a free public tool, SIMPLE. Here is each clarification, in brief and with its source.

Who has to make the DeCA

Not private own-account transport

The FAQ answer on private transport starts from article 1 of Order FOM/2861/2012 (Orden FOM/2861/2012), which makes the document “required in public transport” (our translation). That is why the DeCA does not apply to private own-account transport: transport by companies whose business is not transport, but for which transport complements their main activity.

That does not mean travelling without paperwork. The vehicle must carry enough documentation to prove points a), c) and d) of article 102.2 of the LOTT (Spain’s Land Transport Act), which the Ministry sums up as follows: that the goods belong to the company or form part of its main activity (purchase, sale, hire, production, extraction, processing or repair) and that the vehicles and drivers are part of its organisation. The other cases are in DeCA exemptions (in Spanish).

Whoever issued a control document still does

Digitalisation does not change the Order. The answer on parcel services, which remain exempt, says so: “those who did not issue a control document before still do not have to, and those who issued it on paper will now have to issue it electronically”. The presentation stresses that the control document “exists before the digitalisation obligation” (slide 5) and recalls its scope: domestic transport only, national and cabotage (cabotaje), and public (hire-or-reward) transport only (slide 6).

Nor is there a grace period: according to the FAQ, no penalty-free phase is planned after 5 October 2026. We cover this in there is no DeCA grace period.

Applications, registration and certification

Applications do not need to be certified

In the FAQ’s own words: “No, DeCA software applications do not have to be certified”. The Ministry puts the question down to “a confusion with eFTI (electronic Freight Transport Information) platforms, which will indeed have to be certified”. No DeCA application therefore needs approval (homologación) from the Ministry.

There is no Ministry platform to upload DeCAs to

According to the FAQ, the DeCA “is not a software application of the Ministry”: each company uses its own application or a provider’s, and “there is no need to upload all the DeCAs to any Ministry platform”. The PDFs stay in a repository from which the authorities download them if there is a check. Slides 15 and 16 illustrate it: each PDF has its URL in the repository, with a file name or a code, and the arrow pointing to the Ministry is crossed out.

The domain no longer has to be registered

The technical resolution of 5 June 2026 (Resolución de 5 de junio de 2026) replaces the 2023 one (section ten, apartado décimo), and the Ministry’s DeCA page highlights one change: “the need for prior registration of the domain where the DeCAs are stored has been removed”. Section one of the Resolution confirms it: the repository domain “may be any domain and will not require prior notification”.

The three phases and the roadside check

Slide 14 sets out the life of a DeCA in three phases:

1. Before the service: collect at least all the data required by the Order, turn it into a PDF and store it.
2. During the service: the PDF must be downloadable from its URL, because there may be a roadside inspection.
3. After the service: keep it for at least one year. Any inspection now takes place at the company, by “on-site visit or formal request”, and download by URL is not needed for it.

That does not bring forward switching off the link: section three of the Resolution only allows the download to be deactivated “once seven calendar days have passed after the end of the service”.

Slide 17 shows the roadside check: from their tablet, the officer sends the DeCA’s URL (the one in the QR code) to a Ministry gateway, the “Pasarela DGTCF” (DGTCF gateway), which calls that URL over HTTPS on the repository where the DeCA is stored, receives the PDF and hands it to the officer. The step-by-step, seen from the cab, is in the DeCA roadside inspection.

Using the CMR format does not turn the transport into CMR transport

Article 5 of the Order leaves the document’s format up to each party, and section eight of the Resolution accepts the format of other transport documents. But the FAQ answer on formats asks you to distinguish the format, “the fields and their visual layout”, from the legal nature: in a national transport operation you can use the CMR format, “but that does not mean the service is being performed under the CMR Convention, since it does not apply to national transport”.

Whatever format you use, it must contain all the data of article 6, with the contractual shipper (cargador contractual) and the effective carrier (transportista efectivo) identified expressly and distinctly. The eCMR, incidentally, is not mandatory (the first question in the FAQ). The substantive differences are in DeCA vs CMR (in Spanish), and the case of the dangerous goods document in DeCA and the ADR document.

SIMPLE, the free tool from the public administration

The fourth part of the presentation (slides 26 to 28) is devoted to SIMPLE, a platform for digitalising freight transport and logistics “door to door”, integrating rail, sea and road transport. It was developed by the Ministry of Transport and Sustainable Mobility, Puertos del Estado and ADIF, it is free and one of its functions is generating DeCAs.

Access is requested at simple-hmi.plataformasimple.es: first you have to apply to register an entity, and after that additional users can be requested. If you are looking for a tool that costs nothing and is developed by the public administration itself, it is worth a look.

It is not the only route: according to the FAQ, each company can use its own application or hire a provider. DeCAya is one of those providers: each DeCA has its own link, which downloads the PDF directly from DeCAya’s repository, with no credentials or buttons, and nothing is sent to the Ministry.