What changed in April 2025, and why every visa article written before then is now wrong
The Spanish Golden Visa ended on 3 April 2025. The repealing instrument was Ley Orgánica 1/2025, of 2 January 2025, published in the BOE on 3 January and entered into force ninety days later. The government's stated reason was that residency-via-real-estate had inflated prices in tense markets and that the right to housing came first. The European Commission had been asking member states to dismantle these regimes since 2022. Ireland and Portugal had already done so.
For a non-EU buyer reading this in 2026, the operational consequence is short. The €500,000 real-estate route to residency is gone. So is the €1 million Spanish-equities route and the €2 million sovereign-debt route. Applications filed before 3 April 2025 are still being processed under the prior rules. Visas already granted keep their validity for the period they were issued; renewals follow the legal regime in force at the original grant. If you applied in March 2025 and got a yes, you can renew. If you did not, that door is closed.
The Spanish state did not replace the Golden Visa with anything for second-home buyers as such. It already had two visas that work, and it expects you to use those. Both pre-date the Golden Visa's repeal by more than a year, so the post-April-2025 landscape is less a new world than a clarified one. The two visas are the Digital Nomad Visa (DNV) and the Non-Lucrative Visa (NLV). Almost every relocating second-home buyer I have spoken to in the last twelve months ends up at one of them.
A note on framing before we go into either of them. A visa controls how much time you spend in Spain, not whether you own a Spanish house. A non-resident can buy a Spanish house with nothing more than an NIE number and a Spanish bank account. The deed at the notary's office in Cáceres does not check your residency status. Visa is about time. Title is about money. Most articles you will read on this topic conflate the two; almost every relocator I have met learned the distinction the hard way.
The Digital Nomad Visa — the route most relocators will land on
The DNV's statutory home is Ley 28/2022, of 21 December, on the promotion of the startup ecosystem — what everyone calls the Ley de Startups. Its fifth additional provision amends Ley 14/2013 (the Entrepreneurs' Law) to create a new figure: the teletrabajador de carácter internacional. The applicant-facing portal is at PRIE, the residency programme run jointly by the Ministerio de Economía and the Ministerio de Inclusión. Applications outside Spain go through the consulate of your country of residence; applications from inside Spain go through the UGE-CE.
The eligibility frame is narrow but not difficult to meet. You must be a non-EU national. You must work for one or more companies based outside Spain, exclusively via electronic and telecommunications systems. You may also work for a Spanish employer or client provided no more than 20% of your total activity is for that Spanish entity. You must show either a university degree, a recognised vocational or business-school qualification, or three years of professional experience in your field. You must show your relationship with the foreign employer has existed for at least three months, and you must show the work can in fact be done remotely.
The income threshold is set at 200% of the Spanish minimum wage (SMI) for the principal applicant. In 2026 most legal-advisor sites are quoting €2,849 per month gross.
Family economics scale from there. The first dependant — a spouse, an unmarried partner under specific conditions, a child — adds 75% of the SMI to your required income. €1,069 per month at the 2026-rumoured SMI. Each additional dependant adds 25% of the SMI, around €356 per month per child. A family of four would therefore need to clear roughly €4,630 gross per month to qualify. That figure is high for some American freelancers and unremarkable for two-income tech households. It is also the single number most aspiring relocators get wrong.
The procedural piece is where the DNV pulls ahead of every other Spanish visa route. The application is resolved by the UGE-CE — the Unit for Large Companies and Strategic Collectives, a centralised body inside Inclusión y Migraciones. The legal maximum resolution period is twenty business days. If the UGE-CE does not resolve within that window, positive administrative silence operates: the authorisation is considered granted. Twenty business days versus the months-to-a-year clock on most ordinary residency routes is the structural reason your friend who moved in 2025 was already settling into a padrón office while your friend who chose the NLV was still waiting on a consulate.
The visa you get from a consulate is for one year. While you are in Spain on that visa, you apply for the longer-form autorización de residencia, which is granted for three years. From there you renew, and at five years of legal residence in Spain you can apply for permanent residency. The DNV is also tax-optimised. Holders can opt into the special regime under Article 93 of the Personal Income Tax Law — the Beckham regime, more on that below — which taxes Spanish-source employment income at a 24% flat rate up to €600,000 for six years. The NLV does not give you that option, because the NLV does not let you work.
The realistic timeline, end to end, for a family applying from outside Spain with an organised gestor: four to six weeks to assemble paperwork; one to three weeks to get the consulate appointment; six to ten weeks from consulate submission to visa in hand. Add four to six more weeks if you are applying for the in-Spain autorización directly. The friction point is not the UGE-CE — it is the notarised, apostilled, sworn-translated stack of supporting documents that has to come from your home country. Build in time for that.
A walked-away moment from a relocator I sat with in March: an American freelance designer with three foreign clients, plenty of income, no problem on paper. The DNV requires three months of demonstrated relationship with the foreign company. Two of her three clients were month-to-month engagements with no contract longer than ninety days at a stretch. She had to spend six weeks rewriting her client agreements before she had a paperwork story the consulate would accept. The lesson she gave me, sat in a café in Trujillo: the income threshold is not the constraint. The contract-stability story is.
The Non-Lucrative Visa — for people who do not need to work
The NLV predates the entire startup-visa apparatus. It is the older, simpler, more constrained Spanish residency route. The Ministerio de Inclusión publishes the canonical procedural sheet — Hoja 6, Autorización inicial de residencia temporal no lucrativa — and that sheet is the document any honest article about the NLV should cite first. The visa lets you live in Spain. It does not let you work. No work in this context means no work for anyone, anywhere, including a foreign employer over a Zoom call from your kitchen in the Sierra de Aracena.
The economic threshold is set against the IPREM — the Indicador Público de Renta de Efectos Múltiples — a parallel reference index Spain uses for social-policy calculations. The IPREM has been frozen at €600/month since 2023. The principal applicant must show 400% of the annual IPREM — €28,800 per year, or roughly €2,400 per month — in passive income or accumulated savings. Each dependant adds 100% of annual IPREM, €7,200 per year. A family of four therefore needs to demonstrate around €43,200 per year in passive income or savings.
The form the savings take matters less than that they are demonstrable and stable. A bank statement showing a year's worth of required funds works. A pension income document works. Dividend statements from a foreign brokerage work. What does not work is I'll do some remote consulting once I'm there. The Spanish state will read that as an intent to work, and the visa will be denied or, worse, granted and then revoked on first renewal when the empadronamiento data and Hacienda data tell a different story than the visa application did.
Other requirements track the DNV's: private health insurance with full coverage and no co-payments, valid in Spain, from an authorised insurer; a criminal-record certificate from your country of origin (apostilled, sworn-translated); a medical certificate. Empadronamiento — registering at your local town hall — is mandatory within the first month of arrival.
The duration structure is one year for the initial visa, then two years on first renewal, then two more on second renewal. Five years total puts you at the threshold for permanent residency, on the same five-year clock as the DNV. At ten years of legal residence you can apply for Spanish citizenship; for Latin American applicants (and Sephardic Jews, Andorrans, Filipinos, Equatorial Guineans, Portuguese), that clock drops to two years. American and British applicants stay on the ten-year clock and lose their original citizenship on naturalisation unless they apply under one of the bilateral exceptions, which most cannot.
The walked-away moment on the NLV, almost always, is the no-work clause. I have watched two different relocators get to the consulate appointment with a strong NLV file — savings stacked, insurance bought, paperwork apostilled — and then realise, in conversation with the consular officer, that the LLC they intended to keep running from their finca in the Alpujarras counts as work. Even passive Patreon income above a certain threshold has been read as work by some consulates. The NLV is the right visa for a retiree with a pension, an early-retired couple with savings and dividend income, an heir living on a trust. It is the wrong visa for almost everyone else.
DNV vs NLV — the decision matrix in one screen
What follows is the comparison I draw on the back of a napkin for everyone who asks me which one to file for.
The DNV is the right pick if you have remote-work income from a non-Spanish employer or client base, you can show three months of stable engagement, and you want the option of Beckham-regime tax treatment. The NLV is the right pick if you have passive income or savings, you do not need to work, and you want the simplest paperwork story. Where both could in principle work, the DNV is usually faster (twenty business days at UGE-CE versus the variable consulate-led NLV timeline), more flexible (you can work; the NLV does not let you), and more tax-efficient (Beckham regime available; not available on NLV).
The numbers in 2026, side by side:
- Income required, principal applicant: DNV ≈€2,849/month gross, indexed to 200% SMI; NLV €2,400/month equivalent in passive income or savings, indexed to 400% annual IPREM.
- First dependant: DNV +€1,069/month; NLV +€600/month equivalent.
- Per additional dependant: DNV +€356/month; NLV +€600/month equivalent.
- Work permitted in Spain: DNV yes for foreign employers, ≤20% Spanish; NLV no, for anyone.
- Resolution period: DNV 20 business days at UGE-CE; NLV variable, often 1–3 months at consulate.
- Initial duration: DNV 1 year then 3-year residency authorisation; NLV 1 year then 2+2 renewals.
- Path to permanent residency: both at 5 years.
- Tax-regime option: DNV can opt into Beckham; NLV cannot.
- Health insurance: both require private, full-coverage, no co-pay, valid in Spain.
- Empadronamiento: both require, within the first month.
The honest tie-breaker, when the income story works for either, is the work clause. If there is any chance — including a hobby that pays, a side LLC you cannot quite close, a part-time consulting gig you cannot quite give up — you want the DNV. The NLV is brittle on its no-work edge. The DNV is permissive.
The tax overlay — Beckham, IRPF, IRNR, and which one applies to you
This is the section of the article most competing pieces fumble. Spain's tax treatment of a relocator depends on residency status, not visa type, but visa type shapes what is available.
If you spend more than 183 days in a calendar year in Spain, or your centre of economic interests is in Spain, the Agencia Tributaria considers you a Spanish tax resident. Tax residents pay IRPF — the personal income tax — on their worldwide income, at progressive rates that can run to 47% or higher depending on the autonomous community. They also file modelo 720 on foreign assets above €50,000.
If you spend less than 183 days in Spain in any given year and have no other Spanish ties, you are a non-resident. Non-residents pay only IRNR — the non-resident income tax — and only on Spanish-source income. The flat IRNR rate is 24% for non-EU non-residents (19% for EU residents). If you own a Spanish house but live elsewhere most of the year, you file an annual modelo 210 on either your rental income or, if the house is empty, the imputación de rentas inmobiliarias (an imputed rental income of 1.1% to 2% of the cadastral value).
The Beckham regime sits on top of this. Formally it is the régimen fiscal especial aplicable a los trabajadores desplazados a territorio español — Article 93 of the IRPF Law. It allows certain workers who become Spanish tax residents due to a job-related move to be taxed as if they were non-residents on most income, while still legally being tax residents. A 24% flat rate applies to Spanish-source employment income up to €600,000 per year, with anything above taxed at 47%. The regime runs for the year of the move plus the following five years — six years total.
The Ley de Startups expanded Beckham eligibility in 2023 to cover digital nomads, highly qualified professionals, and innovative entrepreneurs, alongside the executives the regime was originally designed for. To qualify you must not have been a Spanish tax resident in any of the five tax years before your move. You must apply via modelo 149 within six months of starting your first Spanish work activity. The annual return is modelo 151. Get either deadline wrong and the option is lost.
For a DNV holder earning €120,000 from a US employer, opting into Beckham means paying 24% on that income to Spain (subject to bilateral tax-treaty offsets in the US) for six years. Without Beckham, the same income would be taxed at IRPF progressive rates, which in Andalucía or Extremadura would average somewhere closer to 30–35% on that band. The delta over six years is enough to fund a renovation in most rural regions.
For an NLV holder there is no Beckham option, because Beckham is keyed to work and the NLV forbids work. NLV holders who become Spanish tax residents pay full IRPF on their worldwide income, including their pension and investment income from abroad. The mitigation, where it exists, is bilateral tax treaty offsets — the US-Spain treaty, the UK-Spain treaty — but those are partial. Plan with a cross-border tax advisor on day one; this is not a Reddit thread question.
Do you even need a visa?
You can spend up to 90 days in any 180-day rolling period in the Schengen Area, including Spain, on a US, UK, Canadian, Australian, or other visa-exempt passport, with no visa at all. If your second-home plan is two months in spring and two months in autumn, you are inside that limit. If it is six months in summer and six months back home, you are not.
The visa-exempt 90/180 rule is the right answer for a meaningful slice of second-home buyers — those who actually want a second home and not a relocation. It is the wrong answer for anyone whose plan creeps past 90 days, who wants to enrol kids in a Spanish school, who wants to register for the public health system, or who wants the legal certainty of empadronamiento. The 90-day cliff is real, and the Schengen entry-exit system the EU is rolling out is making informal overstays measurably harder than they were five years ago.
A specific scenario worth naming: the jubilado tranquilo (the easy retiree) plan of three months in winter at the village and the rest of the year at home in Maine or Brighton. That works without a visa, and the property tax overhead is the modelo 210 annual filing plus IBI (municipal property tax) — nothing more. Once that plan becomes four months, the visa conversation starts.
From visa to permanent residency to citizenship
Whichever visa you choose, the five-year mark is the milestone. At five years of legal residence in Spain you can apply for permanent residency (residencia de larga duración), which decouples your stay from the original visa's conditions. Five years gets you the right to live in Spain indefinitely; five years also gets you EU long-term resident status, which in turn unlocks easier movement to other EU member states under their own rules.
At ten years of legal residence you can apply for Spanish citizenship by naturalisation. The clock drops to two years for citizens of Latin American countries, the Philippines, Equatorial Guinea, Andorra, Portugal, and for Sephardic Jews of demonstrated Iberian descent. Most American and British applicants are on the ten-year clock and must renounce their original citizenship on naturalisation, which, for an American, also triggers tax implications worth a separate consultation.
The intermediate path many second-home buyers stop at is permanent residency at five years. It is enough for stability — schools, healthcare, mortgage access, the lot — without forcing the citizenship choice. A common pattern is DNV for the first year, then DNV-derived residency authorisation through years two through five, then residencia de larga duración in year six. From there, the citizenship question is its own ten-year project, and many relocators never take it up.
What the data says about who is actually doing this
In 2025, foreigners closed approximately 97,300 home purchases in Spain — roughly 13.8% of the country's 705,000 total residential transactions, a new record share. British buyers led in absolute numbers, followed by Germans, Dutch, French, Romanians, Italians, and Belgians; American buyers are smaller in absolute volume but among the fastest-growing nationalities. The autonomous communities with the highest foreign-buyer share in Q4 2025 were the Balearics (32.8%), the Comunidad Valenciana (29.6%), the Canary Islands (24.5%), Murcia (22.8%), Catalonia (16.5%), and Andalucía (14.0%). Alicante province alone saw almost half of all transactions go to foreign buyers.
What the Registradores data does not tell you directly is what share of these buyers ever applied for a residency visa. The internal sense from gestores I have spoken to in rural Andalucía and Extremadura is that the visa-to-purchase ratio is moving up sharply — three or four years ago, most foreign buyers stayed inside the 90/180 envelope and never applied. In 2025 and 2026, the DNV applications going through UGE-CE doubled year-on-year. The Golden Visa repeal did not push capital out of Spain; it pushed it through a different door.
The relocation profile is also bifurcating. The high-net-worth buyer who used to take the Golden Visa now either takes the DNV (if they can show remote-work income) or does not bother with residency and stays under 90 days a year, treating the Spanish house as a guest house. The middle-tier remote-work family — the dominant La Otra Vida reader — increasingly goes through the DNV, often within twelve months of buying. The retiree cohort stays with the NLV, and the visa-exempt-but-frequent-visitor cohort is the one most exposed to the Schengen entry-exit tightening.
What to do this week if you have read this far
Three concrete next steps. First, work out whether your income story is DNV-shaped or NLV-shaped. If you have remote-work income that can clear €2,849 a month for one person or €4,600-ish for a family of four, and you can show three months of stable foreign-employer engagement, the DNV is your route. If you have passive income or savings of €28,800+ per year and you can survive a literal no-work regime, the NLV is yours.
Second, talk to a gestor before you talk to anyone else. The €400–€800 you will spend on a one-hour consultation in Spanish is a cheaper substitute for the €4,000 mistake you will make if you rely on the first six Google results. Find someone who handles your nationality regularly. If you are American, the lawyer should know about the FATCA reporting overlay. If you are British, they should be reading the UK-Spain reciprocal rules monthly.
Third, download the DNV cheat sheet at the end of this article. It is the seven-page distillation of everything above, plus the exact document checklist, the consulate-by-consulate quirks I have seen, and the questions to ask a gestor in your first call. It is free. It is what I would have wanted in my first month of researching this.
The visa is the on-ramp. The house is the destination. Get the order right and Spain is waiting; get it wrong and you spend two years untangling paperwork instead of meeting your neighbours.