Europe wants your savings. What are its tax-free accounts worth?

On 30 September, Spain’s official gazette published a new kind of savings product: an account where you can buy European shares and funds, sell them, switch, and pay no tax until you take the money out.¹ Two days later, Congress threw out the decree that contained it, by 178 votes to 172. The account had been bundled into a housing law, and the opposition voted against the housing part.² The government re-issued it on 6 October in a decree of its own, then dissolved parliament for a general election on 29 November. The new text has to be approved by a standing committee by 13 November or it lapses too.³

Nobody in Spain can open one yet. The same can be said, in one form or another, of most of the accounts that European governments have announced this autumn. They are the national answer to a request from Brussels, and they all rest on the same idea: if investing were simpler and taxed less, Europeans would move some of their bank deposits into the stock market. This piece looks at what those accounts actually offer, runs the numbers for an ordinary saver, and asks whether the idea works where it has been tried.

Useful, if you pick cheap fundsIn brief

A tax-free account is worth having, but less than the headlines suggest. In Spain, a saver who puts away €7,500 a year for twenty years would save about €9,700 in tax, around 3% of the final pot. Paying 1.9% a year for a bank’s equity fund instead of 0.5% for an index fund would cost that saver about five times as much. Sweden shows that a truly simple account can reach millions of people. The research also shows that tax breaks mostly move money that was already invested, and the people who use them most are the ones who need them least.

What Brussels asked for

In March 2025 the European Commission launched its Savings and Investments UnionSavings and Investments UnionThe EU plan, launched in March 2025, to channel more household savings into European capital markets and companies.Read in the glossary →, a plan to get more European money into European companies. Its starting point is a number: “around €10 trillion in bank deposits” held by households, which “usually earn less money than investments in capital markets”.⁴ Eurostat puts the share of EU household financial assets held in cash and deposits at 30.6% in 2024. Shares and investment funds make up 36.6%, a figure that includes stakes in unlisted family companies.⁵

Where EU households keep their money

Share of household financial assets, 2024. Shares and funds include stakes in unlisted family companies.

The gap with the United States is the part officials keep returning to. An ECB blog in September put deposits at about a third of euro area household assets, against about 11% in the US. Among the richest fifth of households, more than 65% of Americans hold listed shares, bonds or funds, against fewer than 45% in the euro area.⁶

The Commission’s answer, in September 2025, was a recommendation to every member state to offer a savings and investment accountSavings and investment account (SIA)An account for shares, bonds and funds with simplified, favourable tax treatment, which the Commission asked every EU country to offer.Read in the glossary →: opened online or in a branch at banks and brokers, holding shares, bonds and funds including ETFs, with “well-targeted” tax incentives and the tax paperwork handled by the provider.⁷ It suggested several tax models, from exempting gains to the Swedish approach of a small flat charge on the account’s value. It set no cap and no deadline. A recommendation is not binding; the Commission will check progress in 2027.⁸

On 9 October, finance ministers agreed what the Council called “key elements” of the Savings and Investments Union. That deal was about who supervises stock exchanges and clearing houses, not about savers, and it was watered down at Germany’s request so that Deutsche Börse stays under national supervision.⁹¹⁰ The EU’s separate rules on investment fees, the Retail Investment Strategy, are not expected to apply before 2029.¹¹ For now, whatever changes for savers changes country by country.

Spain: generous, slow and fenced in

Set the politics aside and the Spanish account, called Financia Europa, is a serious product. The rules in the decree are these:¹

• One account per person, opened with cash, with up to €150,000 of contributions inside at any time. It is a ceiling on money in, not an annual allowance.
• No tax while the money stays in. You can sell a fund and buy another without triggering capital gains tax, which is due only when you withdraw.
• After five years, part of the gain is tax-free. On gains from contributions held more than five years, the first €10,000 is exempt (once in a lifetime) and 20% of the rest is exempt. Money comes out oldest first.
• Dividends are not sheltered. They are paid outside the account and taxed every year at the normal rates of 19% to 30%.¹²
• Eligible funds must be European. A fund qualifies only if at least 70% of its portfolio is in the European Economic Area, at least 50% in shares and at least 35% in European shares. Shares must be from EEA companies; bonds must be from EEA issuers rated at least BBB.

The last rule matters more than it looks. A fund tracking the MSCI World or the S&P 500 does not qualify. Neither, in all likelihood, does a fund tracking the MSCI Europe, because the United Kingdom and Switzerland, which are outside the EEA, make up about 37% of that index. That leaves about 63% in the EEA, below the 70% threshold. Euro area funds and “Europe ex UK” funds should pass, subject to a register of eligible funds that the securities regulator, the CNMV, has four months to build.¹³¹ That is home biasHome biasThe tendency to hold too much of your money in your own country or region, which reduces diversification.Read in the glossary → written into law: a tax break conditional on putting most of your money in one region.

Sales also have to wait for a ministerial order on tax reporting, which has no date. So far only one broker, MyInvestor, has said it will offer the account.¹⁴

What the Spanish account is worth

To put a number on it, take a saver who puts €7,500 a year into an accumulatingAccumulating fundA fund or ETF that reinvests its dividends automatically instead of paying them out to you.Read in the glossary → index fund for twenty years, at a steady 7% a year, then withdraws everything. That fills the €150,000 ceiling exactly. Because the fund reinvests its dividends, the account’s weak point does not apply, and because the saver never sells along the way, a normal account would also defer tax until the end. The only difference is the exemption.

The pot reaches about €329,000. Withdrawing it from a normal account would cost about €40,000 in tax at the 2026 savings rates. From the new account, about €30,400. The saving is about €9,700, or 2.9% of the pot. At 5% a year it falls to about €6,600.¹⁵

Now compare that with a choice most savers make without noticing. ESMA, the EU markets regulator, found that actively managed equity funds sold to European retail investors cost on average 1.9% a year all in, against 0.5% for equity ETFs.¹⁶ Run the same saver through a bank fund at 1.9% instead of an index fund at 0.5%, and the pot ends about €46,700 smaller before tax.

The tax break against the fee gap

€7,500 a year for 20 years at 7% a year before costs, in Spain. What the new account saves in tax, and what a 1.9% fund costs against a 0.5% one.

The account helps. What goes inside it helps or hurts about five times more. If banks fill these accounts with their own expensive funds, as they often do with tax wrappers, the tax break goes to the fund manager. For Spanish savers there is one more point: Spain already lets you switch between investment funds without paying tax, so the deferral mainly helps people who buy ETFs and shares directly.¹⁴

Sweden: the account everyone copies

Sweden’s investeringssparkonto, or ISKISK (investeringssparkonto)Sweden's investment savings account: no tax on gains or dividends, but a yearly charge of about 1% of the account's value in 2026.Read in the glossary →, opened in 2012 and is the model the Commission cites most. It does not tax gains or dividends at all. Instead, each year the provider applies a notional return to the account’s average value and the state takes 30% of that notional return. In 2026 the notional rate is 3.55%, so the charge is about 1.07% of the account’s value, calculated by the bank and filled in on your tax return.¹⁷¹⁸ Since this year, the first SEK 300,000 (about €27,000) across ISK and similar accounts is tax-free.¹⁷

The design is so simple that millions of people use it. Holders went from about 206,000 at the end of 2012 to about 4.2 million in this year’s tax data.¹⁹²⁰

Sweden’s ISK: from 200,000 to 4.2 million holders

People holding an investment savings account. Points are the years with published figures.

The numbers behind that success are less flattering. In 2021 the average ISK held SEK 450,000 but the median only SEK 74,000. About three-quarters of holders had less than SEK 300,000, so most now pay nothing, and the government’s own analysis found that the allowance benefits higher earners more, both in number and in amount.²¹ And the tax works against you in bad years: it is due even when markets fall, which is why Sweden’s National Audit Office concluded in 2018 that the account is “not clearly favourable” for tax.²²

The more important finding is about where the money came from. Between 2014 and mid-2024, Swedes put a net SEK 360 billion into funds through ISK, while selling a net SEK 208 billion of funds held in ordinary taxable accounts. A large part of the “new” investing was old investing in a new wrapper. Use also tracked education: in 2020, 17% of people who left school after compulsory education had funds in an ISK, against 45% of university graduates, even at the same income.²²

The rest of the map

Ireland announced its own version on 6 October, and it is Swedish in all but name. The Personal Investment Account will take up to €12,000 a year from July 2027. The first €50,000 is tax-free; above that, a charge of 1% a year on the value replaces capital gains tax, dividend tax and the deemed disposalDeemed disposalAn Irish rule that taxes fund holdings every eight years as if you had sold them, even if you did not.Read in the glossary → rule that taxes Irish fund holders every eight years whether they sell or not.²³ Michael Healy of the broker IG called the limit “far too low” and objected that the charge “taxes the value of an investment rather than the returns it generates”.²³

Poland’s account, the OKI, starts on 1 January 2027. Gains are exempt from the country’s 19% capital gains tax on up to PLN 100,000 of investments, with a charge of 0.85% of the value above that in 2027. Like Spain’s, it leans home: the eligible assets are mostly złoty instruments, and the government’s stated goal is PLN 25 billion of new money for the Warsaw stock exchange by 2030.²⁴²⁵

Italy has had its own since 2017. The PIRPIR (piano individuale di risparmio)Italy's individual savings plan: gains are tax-free after five years if 70% is invested in Italian companies.Read in the glossary → exempts gains from tax if you hold for five years and keep 70% in Italian companies, a requirement designed to finance small and mid-sized firms. After years of outflows, PIR products took in €2.1 billion in 2025, but bond products took €2.5 billion while equity products lost money to withdrawals.²⁶²⁷ Germany is going another way: a new subsidised pension account, without guarantees and with costs capped at 1% a year for the standard version, from January 2027, and a “Frühstart-Rente” that pays €10 a month into an equity account for each child from age six to 18, voted by the Bundestag on 16 October and still awaiting the Bundesrat.²⁸²⁹

Europe’s accounts, from Stockholm to Warsaw

Blue: accounts open or opening. Red: Spain’s stop-start autumn. Hover or tap each point for the detail.

Sources for the table: BOE; Skatteverket; Irish Examiner; Bankier.pl; Agenzia delle Entrate.^117232427

French readers have had a version of all this since 1992 in the PEAPEAPlan d’épargne en actions: a French tax-advantaged brokerage account for European shares and funds, capped at €150,000 of deposits.Read in the glossary →, which holds €150,000 of contributions in European shares and, after five years, owes only social charges, now 18.6%.³⁰ With 7.3 million plans, it shows that a European-only wrapper can still attract savers, provided it is cheap to hold.

Do tax breaks make people invest?

The best evidence comes from Denmark, where economists followed 41 million observations of retirement saving. Each dollar of government spending on tax subsidies raised total saving by about one cent. About 85% of people did not react to the subsidy at all; the 15% who did were wealthier and mostly moved money from taxable accounts, what economists call crowd-outCrowd-outWhen a tax-advantaged account attracts money that would have been saved anyway, moved from elsewhere, instead of new saving.Read in the glossary →. What did change behaviour was automatic contributions, which people simply left in place.³¹

Finland’s equity savings account, introduced in 2020, points the same way. Researchers at Aalto University found that people who already owned shares in 2019 were far more likely to open one: their adoption rate was 6.6 points above the 2.3% predicted for people who had never invested.³² The ECB, which supports these accounts, says capital gains relief “could support a shift toward capital markets” but that “the impact may be modest due to households’ strong preference for deposits”.³³

The United Kingdom has had a tax-free account since 1999, and it shows the preference clearly. Of the £135.7 billion paid into ISAs in 2024 to 2025, about 70% went into cash ISAs, according to HMRC’s figures.³⁴ The government is now cutting the cash allowance to £12,000 for under-65s from April 2027 to push savers toward shares.³⁵

Britain’s tax-free account is mostly a cash account

Money paid into adult ISAs in the 2024 to 2025 tax year, in billions of pounds.

What to do with one

If your country offers one of these accounts, or will soon, the decision is mostly about what you put in it:

• Choose the fund before the wrapper. A cheap index fund in a taxable account beats an expensive fund in a tax-free one over most horizons. Look up the ongoing chargesOngoing chargesThe yearly cost of running a fund, taken from its value, shown as a percentage in the key information document.Read in the glossary → and any entry fee before you sign.
• Check what the rules make you hold. Spain’s 70% EEA rule and Italy’s 70% Italy rule concentrate your money. If the account is a large share of your savings, keep your global funds elsewhere.
• Read the fine print on dividends and time limits. In Spain, dividends are taxed every year and the exemption only starts after five years per contribution. In Sweden and Ireland, the charge is due in years when markets fall.
• In Spain, wait. Until the decree is approved, the ministerial order is out and the CNMV’s list of funds exists, there is nothing to open. If the decree lapses on 13 November, the account goes with it.

Wrappers do not make investors

Europe’s governments have discovered that the cheapest way to look busy about the €10 trillion in bank deposits is to design an account. Some of them, like Sweden’s and now Ireland’s, are good products: simple, cheap to run and open to the whole market. Others, like Spain’s and Poland’s, mix a saver’s tax break with an industrial policy, and ask the saver to give up diversification in exchange.

None of them, on the evidence so far, will turn many cautious savers into investors. What moves people is automatic saving and low fees, and the tax break mostly rewards those who were already investing. If you are one of them, take the account when it exists. If you are not, the account is a reason to start, as long as you choose a cheap fund to put in it.

Sources

All links accessed 21 October 2026.

Footnotes

1. Boletín Oficial del Estado, Real Decreto-ley 29/2026, de 6 de octubre, BOE núm. 249, 7 October 2026 (article 21, new Title XI of Ley 6/2023); first version in Real Decreto-ley 26/2026, 30 September 2026. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

2. Boletín Oficial del Estado, Resolución de 2 de octubre de 2026 del Congreso de los Diputados; Euribor.com.es, “El Congreso deroga los decretos de vivienda”, 3 October 2026. ↩

3. Infobae/EFE, “Los decretos de vivienda agotan su plazo de convalidación el día que arranca la campaña del 29N”, 16 October 2026. ↩

4. European Commission, “Commission unveils Savings and Investments Union strategy”, IP/25/802, 19 March 2025. ↩

5. Eurostat, Households: statistics on financial assets and liabilities, data for 2024, extracted 24 October 2025. ↩

6. ECB Blog, Dumitrescu, Gati, Meyer, Parisi and Spolaore, “Why Europeans save differently and how to put those savings to work”, 15 September 2026. ↩

7. European Commission, “EU to boost financial literacy and investment opportunities for citizens”, 30 September 2025; Commission Recommendation (EU) 2025/2029. ↩

8. KPMG, Euro Tax Flash 568: Commission Recommendation on savings and investment accounts, October 2025; Loyens & Loeff, “Recommendations on savings and investment accounts”, 14 October 2025. ↩

9. Council of the EU, “Savings and investments union: Council agrees key elements of crucial measures to deepen EU capital markets”, 9 October 2026; Euronews, “EU countries agree to shift oversight of major financial markets to European authority”, 9 October 2026. ↩

10. Reuters via Global Banking & Finance Review, “EU ministers reach watered-down compromise on centralised capital market supervision”, 9 October 2026. ↩

11. European Commission, Request to ESMA for technical advice in the context of the Retail Investment Strategy, August 2026. ↩

12. Agencia Tributaria, Gravamen de la base liquidable del ahorro; COPE, “Hacienda eleva en 2026 la tributación del ahorro”, 11 February 2026. ↩

13. Rankia, Enrique Valls Grau, “Mejores fondos indexados para la cuenta Financia Europa”, 7 October 2026. ↩

14. Rankia, Enrique Valls Grau, “Cuenta Financia Europa: qué es, requisitos y fiscalidad”, updated 7 October 2026. ↩ ↩²

15. Own calculation. Contributions at the start of each year, constant return, full withdrawal at the end of year 20, accumulating fund, no other savings income, 2026 savings tax scale. Contributions from the last five years get no exemption. At 5% a year: pot €260,394, tax €24,271 in a normal account and €17,629 in the new one. ↩

16. ESMA, Costs and Performance of EU Retail Investment Products 2025, 3 March 2026 (equity UCITS excluding ETFs, 2020 to 2024: total costs 1.9% a year; equity ETFs 0.5%). ↩

17. Skatteverket, Skatt på investeringssparkonto. ↩ ↩² ↩³

18. Carnegie, “Högre skatt på ISK under 2026”. ↩

19. Privata Affärer, “Så många har ISK”, 25 March 2014 (Skatteverket figures via Dagens Nyheter). ↩

20. Börskollen, “Ny ISK-boom: nära en halv miljon nya sparare på två år”, 14 April 2026; Fondbolagens förening, Investeringssparkontot i fokus, October 2024. ↩

21. Regeringen, Lagrådsremiss: En skattefri grundnivå för sparande på investeringssparkonto och i kapitalförsäkring, 30 May 2024. ↩

22. Fondbolagens förening, Investeringssparkontot i fokus, October 2024 (citing Riksrevisionen, RiR 2018:19). ↩ ↩²

23. Irish Examiner, Ronan Smyth, “Budget 2027: new investment account”, 6 October 2026; Irish Times, Proinsias O’Mahony, “Ireland goes Swedish on investment”, 12 October 2026. ↩ ↩² ↩³

24. Bankier.pl/PAP Biznes, “Prezydent podpisał ustawę o osobistych kontach inwestycyjnych”, 13 August 2026. ↩ ↩²

25. Prawo.pl, “Ustawa o osobistych kontach inwestycyjnych”, 13 August 2026. ↩

26. Il Sole 24 Ore, Isabella Della Valle, “In 2025 PIR collected 2.1 billion”, 24 January 2026. ↩

27. Agenzia delle Entrate, Circolare 10/E del 4 maggio 2022; PMI.it, PIR: piani individuali di risparmio. ↩ ↩²

28. Bundesregierung, Fragen und Antworten: Private Altersvorsorge reformiert. ↩

29. Deutscher Bundestag, “Bundestag beschließt die Frühstartrente”, 16 October 2026. ↩

30. Meilleurtaux Placement, “Le taux des prélèvements sociaux appliqué au PEA passe à 18,6 %”, 13 February 2026; PEA.fr, Statistiques PEA, citing Banque de France data for end 2025. ↩

31. Chetty, Friedman, Leth-Petersen, Nielsen and Olsen, “Active vs. Passive Decisions and Crowd-Out in Retirement Savings Accounts: Evidence from Denmark”, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2014. ↩

32. Breitkopf and Knüpfer, Aalto University, “Who Opens a Stock Savings Account in Finland? Evidence and Lessons for Policy”, May 2026. ↩

33. ECB, Financial Integration and Structure in the Euro Area, May 2026. ↩

34. HM Revenue & Customs, Commentary for Annual savings statistics: September 2026, 16 September 2026. The cash share is our calculation from the published totals and increases. ↩

35. HM Revenue & Customs, Cash Individual Savings Account (ISA) limit reduction, updated 17 September 2026. ↩