These requirements are accurate at the time of posting.
The UGE is constantly tweaking and changing them slightly so it’s always best to book a consultation to double-check you have the up to date list.
Proof of no Criminal Record
A full background check plus a declaration of no criminal history within last 5 years
Letter form your employer/client
Authorising to work by telematic means from Spain
Proof of their business registration
The company you work for either as an employee or independent contractor MUST have been incorporated for 12 months minimum
Professional qualification
OR verified work experience. A relevant Bachelor's degree OR provable 3 years of industry experience
Ongoing Contract
You must have a work contract. Ideally this is open-eneded/permanent
Proof of healthcare coverage
Via a social security certificate, Autonomo registration or private insurance
If you’re a remote worker, freelancer or contractor thinking about moving to Spain, the Spanish Digital Nomad Visa is probably the route you’ve been reading about. And if you’ve been reading about it, you’ve also probably found ten different versions of the “requirements,” half of them out of date and most of them written by someone who’s never actually submitted an application.
This guide is different. It’s based on the current official guidance from the UGE (the unit that processes these applications) and on the day-to-day reality of getting people through the process.
The Digital Nomad Visa lets non-EU nationals live in Spain while working remotely for companies or clients based outside the country. It came in under Spain’s 2013 Startups Law (Ley 14/2013) and is sometimes called the international teleworker visa or the remote work visa.
Two things worth clearing up straight away.
First, the “visa” and the “residency authorisation” are not the same thing. If you apply from your home country, you get a visa from a Spanish consulate, which lets you enter and then move to a residency authorisation. If you’re already legally in Spain, for example, on a tourist stamp, you can apply directly for the three-year residency authorisation without ever holding the visa. Most of this guide talks about that residency authorisation, because that’s what most people we work with actually need.
Second, this is a real residency route, not a long holiday. It comes with tax implications, social security obligations and renewal requirements. It’s worth understanding properly before you commit.
This visa is designed for people who earn their living remotely from outside Spain. In practice, that usually means one of the following:
It works for individuals, couples and families. You can bring a spouse, a registered or unmarried partner, children, and in some cases, dependent parents. We’ll cover all of that further down.
The common thread is simple: your income comes from outside Spain, your work can be done over the internet, and you intend to actually live here.
This is the part most guides skip, so here’s my honest opinion.
If you’re only planning to spend a few months a year in Spain, this is probably not the visa I’d push you towards.
Spain’s tax and social security system is an expensive system to be part of. Depending on your route, you may be paying into Spanish social security, and those contributions are not small. If you’re not planning to be here long term, it’s fair to ask what you’re actually getting for that money. For some people the honest answer is “not much.”
None of this is meant to put you off. For people who genuinely want to build a life in Spain, it’s a strong, sensible route. But if you want a part-time, few-months-a-year arrangement, there may be a better fit and it’s worth having that conversation before you spend money on apostilles and translations.
There are two ways in.
Through a consulate. You apply at the Spanish consulate responsible for your home region before you move. You receive a 12 month visa, enter Spain, and then switch to the residency side within the last 60 days of your visa.
From within Spain. You come to vidit Spain, most commonly as a tourist within your 90-day allowance or Schengen visa and you apply directly for the three-year residency authorisation.
For a lot of people, applying from within Spain works out better. You get a longer initial authorisation, you’re dealing with one process rather than two, and in the end it will work out cheaper. It isn’t the right answer for everyone, and timing matters… if you go the apply during a tourist visit route, my advice is to apply well within your 90 days, not in the last few days of your stay. If your application doesn’t go through first-time and you need to reapply you’ll need to still be here in a legal status.
One timing note for anyone already on the visa route: if you hold the Digital Nomad Visa and want to continue living in Spain, the renewal application is made in the 60 calendar days before your visa expires.
Here’s where we’ll get more specific. The visa sounds simple online, but the document list gets very precise very quickly. These are the core requirements.
You need to show you can financially support yourself and anyone coming with you for the duration of the authorisation.
The required income is tied to Spain’s minimum wage (the SMI) and rises with each family member. As current monthly and annual figures, that works out as:
| Household | Per month | Per year |
|---|---|---|
| 1 applicant | €2,849 | €34,188 |
| 1 applicant + 1 dependent | €3,917 | €47,009 |
| 1 applicant + 2 dependents | €4,274 | €51,282 |
| 1 applicant + 3 dependents | €4,630 | €55,556 |
| 1 applicant + 4 dependents | €4,986 | €59,829 |
A few important details here. These amounts are gross — before tax, social security or any other deductions. The income needs to come from the work the application is based on, and you prove it with payslips or invoices from the three months before you apply, backed up by bank statements in your name, stamped or signed by the bank, covering the same period. The payments on those statements need to match your payslips or invoices — and you should mark the relevant transactions clearly so whoever reviews the file can see them at a glance.
If your regular income falls short of the threshold, you can make up the difference with savings or other liquid funds — but you’ll need updated bank certificates proving you hold enough to cover the gap for the whole validity of the authorisation, not just a month or two.
The SMI changes from time to time, so always check the current figure before you build your application around it.
The whole basis of this visa is that your work can genuinely be done remotely. You’ll need a letter from your employer or evidence from your professional relationship confirming that the role can be carried out over the internet, from anywhere — including Spain.
You need to show that your working relationship with the foreign company or companies isn’t brand new. Specifically, you must prove a working or professional relationship of at least three months before the date of your application, evidenced by the relevant employment or professional contract.
There’s a useful exception: if you already hold an earlier authorisation or the Digital Nomad Visa itself, you don’t need to prove this again — it was established the first time round.
One subtle but important point: proof of an employment relationship doesn’t count as proof of a professional (freelance) relationship, and vice versa. They’re treated separately, so make sure the evidence matches the route you’re applying under.
It’s not enough that your employer or client exists — they need a track record. You must show that the foreign company (or group of companies) has been genuinely and continuously trading for at least one year. This is normally evidenced through an official certificate from the commercial registry, or the equivalent body, in the company’s home country.
You need to show you’re qualified for the work you’ll be doing. That means either:
If you’re going down the experience route, you’ll typically prove it with an official work-history record from your home country, tax documents and a letter from the company confirming you worked there as well as your roles and duties (they’re checking this was genuinely related to what you’re doing now).
If your profession is a regulated one, there’s an extra step — either official recognition of your qualification in Spain, or a declaration before a notary that you won’t practise that regulated profession here.
You’ll need a criminal record certificate from any country where you’ve lived during the last two years. If you already hold a Spanish residency or stay authorisation of more than six months and you’ve already provided this certificate to get it, you won’t need to provide it again.
Separately, you also sign a declaration confirming you have no criminal record in any country you’ve lived in over the last five years.
How you handle this depends entirely on your working relationship — see the dedicated section below — but in short, you’ll need to show you’re correctly covered, either through the Spanish social security system or through valid private health insurance.
If you’re an employee — working under an employment contract for a foreign company — your social security home is Spain’s general regime (Régimen General).
In practice, that means your foreign employer registers with Spanish social security as a company without a workplace in Spain, and there’s a commitment to register you in the general regime once your authorisation comes through and before you start working here.
The alternative, if a relevant social security agreement exists between Spain and your home country, is to stay in your home system — more on that below.
If you work through a professional or freelance relationship — invoicing clients rather than drawing a salary — you fall under Spain’s special regime for self-employed workers, known as RETA.
Here, you commit to registering as autónomo in RETA once your authorisation is granted and before you begin working in Spain. Once you’re registered, the obligation to pay contributions kicks in — and failing to keep that up can put your authorisation at risk. This isn’t a box to tick and forget.
If you own the company you work for, read this carefully, because this is where applications get more complicated.
Company owners have and haven’t been able to apply for this visa more times than I can count at this point. Currently the safest route to apply is as an independent contractor to your own company.
However, Spain has a specific category for what it calls an autónomo societario — broadly, someone who works for their own company. If you’re the sole owner of the company, or you don’t own all of it but hold effective control, and the UGE figure that out, the rules treat you differently from a straightforward employee or freelancer and they might ask for some more documentation to prove your company really can support you in yoru new life here.
If that happens you will have to provide a chunk of extra documentation on top of the standard list, including:
This is where people most often get caught out, especially if their company structure is unusual or spread across more than one country. It’s also where tax questions start to matter a great deal — and that’s genuinely a conversation for a qualified tax adviser, not something to wing based on a forum post. We can help you get the immigration documentation right; the tax planning around owning a company while resident in Spain needs a professional in your corner.
Social security is one of the most confusing parts of this visa, so I’ll try and make it as simple as I can.
The general rule is that the type of relationship you have with your company decides which Spanish system you go into. Employees go into the general regime. Freelancers and company-based self-employed people go into RETA, the autónomo system.
But there’s an exception. If there’s a social security agreement between Spain and your home country, you may be able to stay in your home country’s system rather than paying into Spain’s. To do that, you provide a “certificate of applicable legislation” from your home country’s social security body — this is the document people often refer to as an A1 (within the EU) or its equivalent under a bilateral agreement. It has to specifically state that it covers you working remotely from Spain. A mere application for that certificate isn’t accepted — it needs to be the actual issued document.
Countries with social security certificates that are currently being accepted:
That certificate matters for two reasons. It exempts you from registering with Spanish social security — but it also means you need to think about healthcare. If the agreement covering you doesn’t include access to Spain’s public health system, you’ll need private health insurance that does. (Within the EU, the document that provides public healthcare cover when you’re insured in another member state is the S1 — worth asking your home authority about if this applies to you.)
On health insurance generally: if you do need a private policy, it has to provide cover comparable to Spain’s national health system. Travel insurance doesn’t count. Neither do policies that only reimburse medical costs, or policies with co-payments or waiting periods. If you’ll be joining Spanish social security anyway once your authorisation comes through, you won’t need the separate private policy but be aware that it could be several months before you are able to see a doctor with your card in hand so private is always a good idea anyway.
Here’s the practical checklist. Treat it as the usual list — the UGE can request additional documents at any point if they feel your file doesn’t fully prove a requirement, so the stronger your application is from the start, the smoother things go.
For company-based self-employed owners, you should prepare, but not necessarily always submit: proof of ownership/effective control, the company’s last corporate tax return, evidence of investment in productive means, and the home-country social security report on the company’s employee history.
You can bring your immediate family on this visa. What you need to prove depends on who they are.
Straightforward: a marriage certificate.
If your partnership is registered, you provide the certificate of registration of the union from the relevant public registry.
If you’re not married and not registered, you can still qualify — but you have to evidence a genuine, lasting relationship. The benchmark is at least one continuous year of living together as a couple immediately before the application, proven by any legally admissible evidence.
In practice, you’re expected to show at least two of the following: joint bank accounts; registration at the same address (empadronamiento); a joint tenancy, mortgage or property ownership; or joint ownership of a business.
If you have a child together, the rules ease: you don’t need to prove the full continuous year of cohabitation, but you do need to show the relationship genuinely exists at the time of the application, with the child’s birth registration as proof.
One thing worth knowing in advance: if your union isn’t registered in a public registry, your partner doesn’t automatically become a beneficiary of your Spanish social security cover — which means they’ll likely need their own private health insurance. It’s a real practical consequence of staying unregistered, so factor it in.
A birth certificate. If the child isn’t the child of the main applicant or their spouse, and hasn’t been adopted by the non-parent, you’ll need notarised authorisation from the other parent expressly agreeing to the child living in Spain with the applying parent. Adoption cases have their own registration requirements depending on where the adoption took place.
Adult children can come, but only as genuine dependants, and the bar is higher.
Aged 18 to 25, they need to show all of the following: that they don’t have income from work or public benefits (proven with negative certificates from the home country’s social security and tax authorities); that they’re either studying — something they can study in or from Spain, evidenced by enrolment — or actively job-seeking, evidenced by registration with the employment service; and that they haven’t formed their own family unit, evidenced by a certificate of single status or equivalent.
Aged 26 or over, they need to evidence a disability that genuinely prevents them from being economically independent.
You can bring a dependent parent (yours or your partner’s), but “dependent” has a specific meaning here, and it’s assessed individually and carefully. The dependency must be real, stable and genuine — not something created in order to obtain residency.
There are two recognised forms:
Financial dependency — where you’ve been providing the material support that covers their basic living needs. It must be real, sustained over time, taking place in their home country, and already in place before the application. You’ll typically prove it with evidence of living together for at least the year before the application (or, if you haven’t lived together, evidence you’ve been covering their housing costs for that year), bank records showing the financial support over that year, and certificates showing the parent has no income from work and receives no public benefits.
Physical dependency — where serious health problems mean you genuinely need to take personal care of them, and they lack adequate family support in their home country. This is evidenced through medical reports or social services reports.
There’s one helpful presumption built into the rules: a parent over the age of 80 is treated as dependent automatically.
This is the bit that quietly trips people up, so get it right early.
Foreign public documents generally need to be legalised or apostilled before they’ll be accepted. An apostille is a standardised certification used between countries signed up to the Hague Convention; legalisation is the alternative process where the apostille doesn’t apply.
On translations: any public document not written in Spanish must be submitted with a translation done by a sworn translator (traductor jurado) authorised by Spain’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The official Spanish Foreign Ministry website has detailed guidance on legalisations and apostilles, and it’s worth checking the exact process for your specific country, because it varies.
A practical tip straight from the official guidance: it’s genuinely worth including a short covering note explaining the documents you’re submitting, especially where something doesn’t exactly match the standard request. It makes the reviewer’s job easier and can move your file along faster.
After enough applications, the same problems come up again and again:
The thread running through all of these: this isn’t about making the application look pretty. It’s about making it make sense to the person reviewing it.
Once your file is in, it’s assessed against the requirements of the Startups Law. They have 20 working days to do this. If the reviewer feels something isn’t fully proven, they can request additional documents at any point, which is exactly why a strong, complete, well-explained application from day one matters so much. The fewer questions your file raises, the smoother the process. If they request more documents, you then have 10 working days to get those documents to them. You may request an additional 5 working days, but they onyl count if you requested them within the first 5 working days of the 10 working day window.
Approval isn’t quite the finish line — there are a few important steps that follow.
If you applied for the residency authorisation from within Spain, you move on to getting your TIE — the Tarjeta de Identidad de Extranjero, your physical residency card. The TIE process involves booking an appointment, having your fingerprints taken, and then collecting the card once it’s produced. It’s the document that proves your residency status on the ground in Spain, so it’s not a step to delay.
You’ll also need to make sure the commitments you made in your application — registering with Spanish social security, or as autónomo — are actually carried out, and on time.
If you’re on the self-employed route, the commitment you made in your application becomes real here: you need to register as autónomo, in RETA, once your approval comes through and before you start working in Spain. Generally within the first 7-14 days is considered acceptable.
This is also the point where a good gestor — a Spanish administrative specialist — earns their keep. There are tax filings (modelos) to deal with, and your gestor will work out exactly how you should be registered, including your tax residency position. Don’t treat autónomo registration as an afterthought to the visa; it’s part of doing this properly, and getting it wrong can have consequences for the authorisation itself.
The initial residency authorisation isn’t permanent, and renewal isn’t automatic.
If you hold the visa version and want to move to a residency authorisation, remember the timing: that application is made within the 60 calendar days before the visa expires. And if anything about your circumstances changes during the life of your authorisation in a way that affects its conditions, you’re required to report it within 30 days.
Requirements and figures do change over time — the SMI, document lists, processes — so always check the current rules rather than relying on what was true a year or two ago.
If you’re self-employed, no you don’t need to inform the UGE if your clients change since your initial application, but you do need to maintain all of the key requirements (financial, contracts etc) ready for renewal.
Honest answer: it depends entirely on what you actually want.
If you want to genuinely live in Spain, to be here most of the year, build a life, settle in, then yes, this is a solid, sensible route, and it does what it’s designed to do. Plenty of people use it exactly as intended and are very glad they did.
If you want to spend a few months a year here and treat Spain as a part-time base, I’d be straight with you: this probably isn’t the visa I’d steer you towards. The social security cost is high, the residency expectation is real, and you’d hit trouble at renewal. There’s no benefit in being part of an expensive system you’re not really using.
Spain is genuinely worth it. But the bureaucracy isn’t something to wing, and the visa isn’t something to apply for on a vague maybe. Be honest with yourself about your plans first — the rest follows from that.
I moved to Spain myself, navigated the bureaucratic maze the hard way, and later spent over two years working for a leading immigration consultancy learning the rest. I built Your Virtual Assistant in Spain so that you don’t have to do it alone, or by trial and error, or by piecing together half-answers from Facebook groups.
If you’re seriously considering the Digital Nomad Visa, I can help you work out whether it’s genuinely the right route for you, get your documentation right from the start, and avoid the mistakes that cost people time and money. Straightforward, affordable, honest support — no confusion, no endless Facebook group searches, just a clear path to your new life in Spain.
If that sounds like what you need, let’s chat about how I can support you on your journey.
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02 Decide whether you're doing this alone or need some help
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03 Start gathering documents 2 - 4 months prior
Some countries are quicker than others when it comes to requesting a document and getting it Apostilled. 2-4 months prior is a good amount of time to reduce stress!
04 submit the application once in spain
You need to be physically in Spain to do the Spain-based application. You will need an NIE number and a digital certificate if you're doing this yourself.
Whether you need the full assistance or need some additional help if you’re trying to submit by yourself, I can help.
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