Rosa left a textile factory in Murcia, where she earned €1,200 a month, to become a truck driver. She now earns between €1,700 and €2,300 a month delivering for Mercadona, nearly double her factory wage. Born in Ecuador and raised in Spain from the age of nine, she found the factory work grueling and the atmosphere tense. The pay barely covered her bills. The turning point came when her brother, already established in the transport industry, encouraged her to consider trucking as a way out. After a night shift, she often hears the same remark when stepping down from her Ford 500 truck: “I could never do your job.”
Getting behind the wheel took time. Rosa invested around €4,000 and waited a year to obtain her commercial license, delayed by a shortage of examiners. Spain’s heavy-vehicle licensing pathway includes category C and C+E licences. Specialist work such as ADR tanker operations requires additional dangerous-goods competence. That distinction helps explain why the number of licence holders is not the same as the number of people ready and available for every driving job. Her first job took her across Europe on international routes that kept her away from home for weeks at a time. The pay was better, at €1,700 a month, but the cost was high: she saw her daughter only every other weekend. “When you start, you earn very little,” she recalls. “I like my job, but it took a lot of trial and error to find the right fit.”
Determined to be present for her daughter, Rosa switched to regional transport. The reality, but, fell short. She worked from late afternoon into the night, often waiting for hours at loading docks and sometimes not returning home until dawn. The unpredictable hours left her feeling guilty about missing time with her child. The emotional strain nearly drove her to quit.
Rosa refused to give up and found a new chance: night shifts delivering for Mercadona, one of Spain’s largest supermarket chains. The schedule finally let her return home every morning, offering a rare balance between work and family. Her earnings now range from €1,700 to €2,300 a month, nearly double her factory wage. “I have flexibility to adjust my hours,” she says. “It’s made a huge difference for my family life.” The work is part of a wider logistics operation. A recruitment listing for a fleet-area manager in Ciempozuelos described responsibility for leading Mercadona’s distribution project and coordinating teams and resources, a glimpse of the structured fleet operations behind supermarket deliveries.
Rosa’s experience is not unique. Women remain a small minority of Spain’s trucking workforce. A report cited by El Español put women at about 2% of truck drivers in Spain. It estimated their share at roughly 3% across Europe, with Italy at 7% and Germany at 5%. The report estimated around 5,000 female truck drivers in Spain, while approximately 25,000 women held the relevant licence. The figures show the gap between gaining a licence and entering the profession. Separately, the Spanish Ministry of Transport was reported in March 2025 as saying women accounted for 11% of truck licences issued annually by the Dirección General de Tráfico. That figure measures new licences, not the share of active professional drivers.
The sector also faces an ageing workforce and recruitment pressure. Randstad Research figures reported by Autopos put the share of professionals in driving and mobile-machinery occupations aged 45 or older at 64% in the first quarter of 2026. Truck drivers numbered 377,392, or 53.9% of the group, and their number was down 2.6% year on year. Women represented 4.8% of the wider group studied. A January 2024 analysis by Diario de Transporte placed Spain’s estimated driver shortage at 15,000 to 20,000 and cited around 235,000 people with category C or C+E licences. More than one in five transport companies reportedly struggled to fill vacancies. These measures describe different parts of the labour market: licence ownership alone does not show who is employed, available, or qualified for specialist duties.
As coverage of other female drivers breaking into the sector has shown, the path is rarely easy. Long hours and unpredictable schedules are common hurdles in a male-dominated environment. Yet for drivers like Rosa, financial stability and the ability to shape their own routines can outweigh the challenges. Road freight supports retail distribution and broader supply chains, making it impressive to bring more people into the profession as the sector faces recruitment pressure.
Information from El Español Motor, demand for regional and night drivers continues to rise, especially among logistics giants like Mercadona. For many women, trucking offers a practical route to higher pay and greater autonomy, even if getting there is far from straightforward.
