Visa & Residency Routes for Buying in Spain — What Changed, and What Works in 2026

If you’ve read older guides — including an earlier version of this page — promising a “Golden Visa” route into Spanish residency through property investment, that route is closed. It’s worth saying plainly and early, because it’s still one of the most common searches UK buyers make before they even start looking at Costa Blanca property, and the honest answer has changed.

Here is what replaced it, what still doesn’t require a visa at all, and which of the two remaining residency routes actually suits a UK buyer’s situation.

What happened to the Golden Visa

Spain’s Golden Visa let non-EU nationals get a renewable residence permit by investing in Spanish real estate, typically from €500,000. It was popular with UK buyers after Brexit removed the automatic right to live in Spain.

It no longer exists. Spain stopped accepting new Golden Visa applications from 3 April 2025, under Organic Law 1/2025, which was published on 3 January 2025 and took effect three months later. The government’s stated reasoning was housing-market pressure — the same law was bundled with wider housing measures aimed at reducing speculative demand.

If you already held a Golden Visa before that date, it’s unaffected: existing visas can still be renewed under the old rules. But there is no new application window, and no indication one is coming back. Property purchase, at any price, does not currently open any residency route in Spain on its own. If a route to residency through buying alone reappears, we’ll update this page — but for now, treat any site or agent claiming otherwise with real scepticism.

You don’t need a visa to own property — the 90/180-day rule

This is the fact most first-time buyers miss: you do not need any visa to buy a home in Spain, and you don’t need one to visit it regularly, provided you stay within the limit that applies to all non-EU visitors.

As a UK national, you can spend up to 90 days in any rolling 180-day period across the entire Schengen Area — not just Spain — without a visa. It’s a rolling window, not a calendar year: every day inside Schengen counts toward the 90, and it resets on a rolling basis, not on 1 January. Two months in Spain and a month in France add up to the same 90 days.

Owning property makes no difference to this limit. It’s a common misconception, but a deed to a Costa Blanca apartment doesn’t buy you extra days — only a residency permit does.

Enforcement has also tightened. The EU’s Entry/Exit System (EES) — which replaces manual passport stamping with biometric, automated tracking of every Schengen entry and exit — became fully operational at all Spanish borders on 10 April 2026, after a phased rollout that began at Madrid–Barajas in October 2025. In practice, this means your remaining days are now calculated automatically at the border, and overstaying is far harder to do unnoticed than it was even a year or two ago. The fine that follows isn’t an EU or EES rule, even though EES is what usually catches it — it’s Spanish national law. An irregular stay of this kind is a serious offence (“infracción grave”) under Article 53.1.a of Ley Orgánica 4/2000, punishable by a fine of €501–€10,000; EES is simply the detection mechanism, not the legal basis for the penalty. On top of the fine, a Schengen-wide entry ban can follow — typically three to five years, and longer in serious cases, under the EU’s Returns Directive (2008/115/EC, Art. 11).

For most holiday-home owners, none of this is a problem: you buy, you visit within your 90 days, and that’s the end of the story. It only becomes relevant if you want to spend more time in Spain than the 90/180 rule allows — which is where the two remaining visa routes come in.

Non-Lucrative Visa: for retirees and the financially independent

The Non-Lucrative Visa (NLV, visado de residencia no lucrativa) is the long-standing route for people who want to live in Spain without working there at all — the classic fit for a retiree or anyone supported by pensions, savings, rental income or investments.

Income requirement (2026): the benchmark is 400% of Spain’s IPREM (Indicador Público de Renta de Efectos Múltiples) per year for the main applicant, plus 100% of IPREM per dependent family member. For 2026, IPREM remains €600 a month / €7,200 a year on a 12-payment basis. That figure was fixed for 2023 by Law 31/2022 of 23 December (Disposición Adicional Nonagésima) and has simply rolled forward every year since, 2026 included: with no new General State Budget passed for 2024, 2025 or 2026, Article 134.4 of the Spanish Constitution automatically extends the previous year’s budget — IPREM included — until a new one is approved. That puts the practical threshold at roughly:

• €28,800 a year (about €2,400 a month) for a single applicant
• An extra ~€7,200 a year for each dependent (spouse, partner, child)

This can be evidenced through 12 months of bank statements, a pension income letter, or a mix of the two; retirees generally only need to show the last five months of statements plus proof of regular pension or Social Security income.

The catch: the NLV genuinely means non-lucrative. You cannot work — employed or self-employed, locally or remotely — while holding it. It has to be supported entirely by passive income. If you need to keep earning from remote work, this is the wrong visa (see below).

Other requirements: private health insurance with full coverage and no co-payments, a clean criminal record (apostilled, with a certified Spanish translation), and a recent medical certificate.

Cost and where to apply (UK applicants): UK nationals apply through whichever Spanish consulate covers their part of the UK, via the BLS International visa centre serving that region — London, Manchester or Edinburgh. The visa itself carries a reciprocity-based consular fee, since Spain broadly charges UK nationals what the UK charges Spanish nationals for the equivalent visa — around £516, plus BLS’s own mandatory service charge of roughly £15. On top of the visa fee itself, budget for private medical insurance (roughly £500–£3,500 a year depending on age) and for apostilling and sworn-translating supporting documents such as your criminal-record certificate — together these typically add several hundred pounds more.

Duration and renewal: the NLV is granted for 1 year initially, then renewed in 2-year blocks. After 5 years of continuous legal residence (spending the required majority of each year physically in Spain), you become eligible for Spain’s long-term/permanent residency, at which point the income test falls away.

Digital Nomad Visa: for remote workers and freelancers

The Digital Nomad Visa (DNV) was introduced under Spain’s Startups Act (Ley 28/2022), in force since January 2023, specifically to let remote workers and freelancers live in Spain while earning from employers or clients based elsewhere.

Who qualifies: employees working remotely for a non-Spanish company, or freelancers/self-employed people whose clients are mostly outside Spain. If self-employed, income from Spanish clients cannot exceed 20% of total professional activity — go over that and renewal becomes difficult. You’ll also need a university degree or at least 3 years’ relevant professional experience, and evidence of at least 3 months’ existing relationship with the foreign employer or clients.

Income requirement (2026): the threshold is 200% of Spain’s minimum wage (SMI), calculated on the 12-month equivalent basis immigration authorities use for comparison. The SMI for 2026 was set at €1,221 a month over 14 payments (€17,094 a year) by Real Decreto 126/2026; converted to a 12-month figure that’s about €1,424.50 a month, and 200% of that comes to roughly:

• €2,850 a month (about €34,200 a year) for a single applicant
• An extra ~€1,068 a month for the first family member, and ~€356 a month for each additional dependent

Methodology note: the dependent supplements above (75%/25% of SMI) are applied to the same 12-month-equivalent SMI figure as the main threshold, per UGE (Unidad de Grandes Empresas) guidance. Some sites instead apply the 75%/25% split directly to the 14-payment SMI figure, which gives lower numbers — about €916 and €305. Both are defensible readings of the same rule; this article uses the 12-month-equivalent basis throughout, for consistency with the headline threshold above.

Because this is pegged to the minimum wage, it moves whenever the SMI is revised — always check the current figure before budgeting for an application, rather than relying on last year’s numbers.

Duration: up to 1 year if applied for from a Spanish consulate in the UK before moving, or up to 3 years if applied for from within Spain (for those eligible for visa-free entry). It renews in further 2-year blocks and — like the NLV — time on a DNV counts fully toward the 5-year threshold for permanent residency, provided you spend at least 183 days a year in Spain.

Tax note: many DNV holders qualify for Spain’s “Beckham Law” regime, taxing Spanish-sourced employment income at a flat 24% (up to €600,000) rather than progressive rates that can reach 47–48%, for up to six tax years. Eligibility rules are specific and this is a tax decision, not an immigration one — take advice from a Spanish tax adviser before assuming it applies to you.

Citizenship: neither the NLV nor the DNV leads to citizenship on its own. Both count toward the standard 10-year legal residence requirement for Spanish citizenship that applies to UK nationals (a small group of nationalities, mostly Latin American, qualify after just 2 years — the UK is not among them).

NIE vs residency: buyers conflate these constantly

This trips up more buyers than anything else in this guide: an NIE is not residency, and residency doesn’t require you to buy property.

The NIE (Número de Identidad de Extranjero) is a tax and identification number. You need one to buy a property, open a Spanish bank account, register utilities, or pay Spanish taxes — every buyer needs one, whether they’re a full-time resident or a holiday-home owner who visits twice a year. It costs €9.84 (paid via Modelo 790, código 012), and is obtained either in Spain via a pre-booked cita previa appointment, through the Spanish consulate in the UK, or via an accredited lawyer with power of attorney. In busy provinces — Alicante very much included — appointment slots can run four to eight weeks out in peak season, so book well ahead of any completion date.

Residency is an entirely separate legal status, granted through a specific route like the NLV or DNV (or family reunification, work permits, etc.), and it’s what actually lets you live in Spain beyond the 90/180-day limit. You can hold an NIE for decades as a non-resident owner and never apply for residency at all — most Costa Blanca second-home owners fall into exactly this category.

Which route actually fits you?

Your situation	What you need
Holiday-home owner visiting under 90 days per 180-day period	No visa. Just an NIE to complete the purchase.
Retiree or financially independent buyer wanting to live in Spain full-time	Non-Lucrative Visa
Remote employee or freelancer with income from outside Spain	Digital Nomad Visa
Wants residency purely by buying property	No longer available — the Golden Visa route closed in April 2025

Related reading

• Buying process, arras contracts and completion — see the companion buying-in-Spain guide (pillar in production)
• Non-resident property tax, ITP, plusvalía and IBI — see the companion costs-and-taxes guide (pillar in production)

Not legal advice

This article is for general information only and does not constitute legal, immigration or tax advice. Visa rules, income thresholds, IPREM and SMI figures are reviewed annually (and sometimes mid-year) by the Spanish government and can change without much notice. Always confirm current requirements with a qualified immigration lawyer or your local Spanish consulate before relying on any figure in this piece, including for a pending application. Facts in this piece current as of 7 July 2026.

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