The Ayudante de Instituciones Penitenciarias oposición gets you into Spain’s prison service as a subgrupo C1 civil servant, and its written test has a shape candidates often get wrong. Here is what BOE-A-2026-13226 actually sets.
What is the Ayudante de Instituciones Penitenciarias oposición?
It is the selection process for the Cuerpo de Ayudantes de Instituciones Penitenciarias, subgrupo C1, sistema general de acceso libre. The current convocatoria is the Resolución de 14 de junio de 2026 (BOE-A-2026-13226), issued by the Subsecretaría del Ministerio del Interior and published in the BOE, offering 1050 plazas. Passing the selection process leads to a post inside Spain’s prison establishments, working under the Secretaría General de Instituciones Penitenciarias.
Who runs the process?
The Subsecretaría del Ministerio del Interior issues the convocatoria that sets the rules, dates and plaza count for each sitting. An órgano de selección then administers the actual exercises: setting the questions, marking them and applying the scoring rules the convocatoria fixes.
What is the format of the first exercise?
The primer ejercicio (the written test) has two parts sat on the same day, and both are separately eliminatory.
- Primera parte: 120 multiple-choice questions, with up to 3 additional reserve questions, in 105 minutes, covering the full theory syllabus.
- Segunda parte: 8 supuestos de carácter práctico, each with 5 multiple-choice questions (40 questions total), in a maximum of 80 minutes.
Failing either part fails the whole exercise, and the segunda parte is only marked for candidates who already passed the primera parte.
What is the second exercise?
A medical fitness examination, scored simply Apto or No Apto, with no written questions at all. It checks whether a candidate meets the physical requirements for the post rather than testing knowledge, so there is nothing to study for it in the usual sense beyond confirming your own fitness beforehand.
How is the exam scored?
Every wrong answer in the first exercise deducts one third of the value of a correct answer, and a blank answer is not penalised. Each of the two parts is scored from 0 to 20 points, and a candidate needs at least 10 points in each to pass, since the parts are separately eliminatory: scoring well in the primera parte does not make up for failing the segunda. That one-third deduction is the exact fraction that cancels out a random four-option guess, so ruling out even one wrong option before answering tips the balance towards guessing rather than leaving the question blank.
What does the syllabus cover?
The theory programme behind the primera parte runs across state organisation and the Constitution, prison-service personnel rules, administrative law, voluntariado and social policy, open government and transparency, and financial management and budgets. The segunda parte’s supuestos draw on criminal law, the prison regime itself, treatment and sentence execution, and conducta humana, the psychology and social-skills tema that has no governing statute behind it. The convocatoria fixes how many questions each part carries overall, but it does not publish how those questions split across individual temas within a part.
How much does it cost, and how many plazas are on offer?
The 2026 convocatoria set the application fee at 15.57 euros, with a reduced rate of 7.79 euros for large families. It offered 1050 plazas by the sistema general de acceso libre, with a 20 working-day window to submit applications after publication in the BOE. Both the fee and the plaza count are specific to this sitting and are reset with every new convocatoria, so confirm the figures in whichever resolution governs the sitting you are applying for.
How do you prepare for the Ayudante de Instituciones Penitenciarias exam?
Start with the primera parte’s breadth: it draws from six distinct subject areas in a single 105-minute sitting, so even coverage across all of them matters more than depth in any one. RiverMap Learning’s Ayudante Instituciones Penitenciarias app covers the programme with 540 original questions, 520 of them written from the current consolidated BOE legal texts with the specific article named in the explanation, and 20 covering the conducta humana tema from the programme itself. It also includes 16 original supuestos prácticos with 80 linked questions in the segunda parte’s case-study format, and a timed mock matching the convocatoria’s question counts and time limits, drawing the segunda parte’s questions by subject rather than reproducing the exact 8-case structure of the real exam.
Every fact above comes from the current convocatoria, Resolución de 14 de junio de 2026 (BOE-A-2026-13226), published by the Boletín Oficial del Estado at boe.es.