Spain Digital Nomad Visa

The regime is aimed primarily at employees of foreign companies; as a general rule it does not cover ordinary freelancers. The key conditions and effects:

• You were not a Spanish tax resident during the previous 5 years (the standard rule outside the regime is 10 years)
• Employment income up to 600,000 euros per year is taxed at a flat 24%; the excess is taxed at 47%
• Income from foreign sources (dividends, interest, rent abroad) is generally not taxed in Spain; employment income is taxed worldwide at 24%
• No obligation to file the foreign assets declaration (Modelo 720)
• Wealth tax applies to Spanish assets only
• The regime lasts for the year you acquire tax residency plus the following 5, so up to 6 tax periods, after which you move to the general rules

How it is filed: this is a separate procedure, independent of the residency application. The election is made on Form 149 within 6 months of registering with Social Security (the start of activity), not from the date the card is issued. The deadline cannot be extended: missing it even by a day means automatic denial. The annual return is then filed on Form 151, not the ordinary Form 100.

1. Choose your route: the consulate in your country of origin (1-year visa) or a direct application to the UGE from Spain (3-year card).
2. Gather the documents: employer letters and contracts or client agreements, proof of qualification, apostilled and translated criminal record certificate, insurance, proof of income. This is the heaviest stage: some documents take weeks to obtain.
3. Submit the application: at the consulate by appointment (each consulate has its own rules and its own additional requirements) or online through the UGE electronic platform. An NIE number is assigned to you on filing.
4. Wait for the decision: it must be issued within 20 working days. Positive administrative silence applies, so if there is no answer within the deadline, the application is deemed approved.
5. Get the TIE: book an appointment on the cita previa extranjería platform, give your fingerprints at the police station and pay the card fee. The physical card is ready in around 30 days. More: TIE and NIE explained

Applications in this category run under the fast-track procedure of Ley 14/2013: up to 20 working days with positive administrative silence, considerably quicker than the general track. The government fee is paid using form tasa 790 038; the current amounts for initial applications and renewals should be taken from the fee schedule in force at the time of payment. The TIE card fee is paid separately. If the application is refused, a recurso de reposición (request for reconsideration) can be filed within 1 month starting the day after notification.

The sequence looks like this: the 1-year visa (on the consular route) is converted into a residence card, while a card obtained in Spain is issued for 3 years and renewed for 2-year periods as long as the conditions still hold. You can only request the switch from visa to residence card during the last 60 days of the visa’s validity - not before. To renew, you must keep meeting the original conditions: an ongoing relationship with your foreign employer or clients, the income level and the insurance. You may spend no more than 6 months outside Spain per calendar year, or the conditions of the status are treated as broken. After 5 years of legal residence you can apply for long-term residency, and the years spent in this status count in full toward Spanish citizenship. The flip side of genuine residence is tax: over 183 days a year makes you a tax resident, and that needs to be planned in advance.

• Letting Spanish-sourced income exceed 20%, or taking on a Spanish employer: this breaks the legal basis of the status both at filing and at renewal.
• Applying too early: a working relationship shorter than 3 months, or an employer company that has existed for less than a year, leads to refusal.
• A criminal record certificate missing the apostille or the sworn translation, or missing for one of the countries you resided in over the last two years: the file bounces and deadlines burn.
• Missing the 6-month window for Form 149 (counted from registration with Social Security, not from the card being issued): the residency survives, but the impatriate regime is lost permanently.
• Insurance with co-payments or partial coverage instead of full coverage: a formal ground for refusal that is easy to avoid at the preparation stage.

Very possibly. US employers increasingly run payroll through platforms like Gusto, Deel or Rippling, and if your bank statement or pay stub only shows the payroll platform’s name, an examiner may not read that as proof of an actual employment relationship with the company you named in your application. The fix at filing stage is straightforward: submit a signed employer letter, your contract, and, if you can get one, a pay stub or tax document that names your real employer alongside the Gusto records. Don’t let the bank statement carry the whole burden of proof on its own.

If you’re already denied and have filed a recurso de alzada, keep in mind that the appeal alone does not extend your legal stay or pause your Schengen 90/180 days - Spanish administrative law (art. 117 Ley 39/2015) does not suspend a challenged decision automatically. If staying in Spain past your Schengen limit matters to your case, ask specifically whether a suspensión cautelar of the denial has been requested; without it, the appeal and your day count run on two separate tracks.

Renewal files are increasingly checked for whether your autónomo (RETA) registration start date matches when your qualifying activity actually began. A gap between the two tends to trigger a requerimiento asking you to backdate the registration and settle the corresponding contributions. On the income side, the legal requirement stays 200% of the SMI (the exact euro figure changes every year - see our income requirement page), but in practice recent renewal reviews are leaning more on your last two years of Spanish tax returns than on bank statements, so make sure what you filed matches what you originally declared to obtain the visa.

Income, not headcount. One Spanish client and ninety foreign ones is fine if the Spanish one stays under 20% of total invoiced income for the period under review; the reverse ratio with the wrong income split is not. Track the cap in money, not in the number of relationships.

No. Restructuring paperwork to obscure who actually controls the company you’re contracting through is not a clever workaround - it’s a misrepresentation, and if it surfaces at filing or at a later renewal, it risks the whole status rather than a delay. If your real setup doesn’t fit cleanly into the employee or self-employed-with-foreign-clients profile, that’s exactly the kind of situation a lawyer should structure and document honestly - not something to improvise from advice in a Facebook thread.

Processing well beyond the nominal 20 working days has become common rather than the exception lately. Positive administrative silence does mean that, legally, no answer after 20 days counts as approval - but in practice you still need a certificado de silencio administrativo positivo to put that status to use, for example to book your TIE appointment. Don’t treat the silence itself as a document you can show anyone; get it certified.