For eleven years, the fastest way into Spain was blunt: spend €500,000 on property and collect a residence card. That route closed on 3 April 2025, when Organic Law 1/2025 came into force and struck the investor residence scheme from the books. The politics behind it were domestic. Housing costs in Madrid, Barcelona, Palma and Málaga had become an election issue, and foreign investors buying flats for permits made a convenient target, fairly or not.
Here's what the headlines mostly missed. Nothing stops a foreigner from buying Spanish property in 2026. The purchase process, the taxes, the registry, all of it works exactly as it did before. What changed is narrower than people assume: the deed no longer comes with residence rights attached. If you want to live in Spain now, you apply on the strength of your income, your job or your business plan, and your property plays a supporting role instead of the lead.
Three routes carry almost all of that traffic today. This guide takes each in turn, then covers the part most articles skip: how owning a home in Spain quietly strengthens every one of these applications.
What ended on 3 April 2025, and what didn't
The golden visa dated back to Law 14/2013, a crisis-era measure designed to pull foreign capital into a collapsed property market. It worked. Too well, in the government's telling: by the 2020s most golden visa applications were tied to real estate in the same handful of cities where locals were being priced out of renting, let alone buying. Organic Law 1/2025 shut the scheme to new applicants from 3 April 2025.
Two things survived. Investors who already held permits kept them, and renewals have continued under the old rules, so anyone who got in before the deadline is safe. And Spain's other residence routes, the ones that never depended on investment, all stayed open. They ask a different question. Not "how much did you spend?" but "how will you support yourself?"
If residence-by-investment specifically is what you want, it still exists elsewhere. Greece, the UAE and several other countries run active programmes, and we compare them in our guide to golden visa countries in 2026. For Spain itself, the menu now looks like this.
The non-lucrative visa: living on income you already have
The non-lucrative visa (NLV) is Spain's classic retirement and passive-income route, and since April 2025 it has absorbed a large share of former golden visa demand. The deal is simple. Spain lets you live in the country full time, and in exchange you promise not to work there and prove you don't need to.
The no-work rule deserves respect, because consulates enforce it literally. No Spanish employer, no freelancing for Spanish clients, and many consulates treat even remote work for a foreign company as disqualifying. If your income comes from a job, skip ahead to the digital nomad visa, which was built for exactly that situation. The NLV is for pensions, rental income, dividends, interest and savings.
How much money? The threshold is pegged to a Spanish index called IPREM: the main applicant needs 400% of it per month, with an extra 100% for each family member who comes along. Because IPREM gets revised, the euro figure moves, but roughly €2,400 a month for the main applicant is the number commonly cited in 2026, plus about €600 per dependant. Consulates want to see that income as fact, not forecast: twelve months of bank statements, pension award letters, dividend records. A large savings balance can stand in for monthly income if it covers a full year at the required rate.
You apply at the Spanish consulate covering your place of residence, with a clean criminal record certificate, a medical certificate and private health insurance that covers you in Spain without co-payments. The first card runs one year. Renewals then come in two-year blocks, so the pattern is 1+2+2, which lands you at the five-year mark where permanent residence opens up. One catch worth planning for: renewals require real presence, in practice more than 183 days a year in Spain, and that same threshold makes you a Spanish tax resident. Get tax advice before you apply, not after.
The digital nomad visa: keep the job, change the country
Spain's telework visa arrived in 2023 under the Startup Law and has become the busiest route for working-age movers. It covers two profiles: employees of companies outside Spain whose job can be done remotely, and self-employed people whose client base sits mostly abroad. Spanish-sourced work is tolerated only as a sliver of a freelancer's income, commonly capped around 20%.
The paperwork tests whether the arrangement is real. You'll show that your employer or main clients have been operating for at least a year, that your relationship with them predates the application by a few months, and that the work genuinely travels, usually via a letter confirming remote arrangements. On qualifications, Spain wants either a university degree or around three years of relevant professional experience.
The income bar is tied to Spain's minimum wage, the SMI, rather than IPREM: 200% of it for the main applicant, with smaller add-ons for family members. The SMI has risen year after year, so treat any fixed figure with suspicion, but applicants in 2026 commonly work to a bar of roughly €2,800 a month. For most tech and professional salaries, that's comfortably clear.
Two application paths exist, and the difference matters. Apply through a consulate and you get a one-year visa, which you later convert in Spain. Enter as a tourist and apply from within the country instead, through the UGE, the immigration unit that handles Startup Law cases, and you can receive a three-year permit straight away, renewable for two more. Either way you reach five years, and permanent residence, on the same clock.
Then there's tax. Some nomad visa holders qualify for Spain's special inbound-worker regime, built on the framework people still call the Beckham law, which taxes Spanish employment income at a flat 24% up to €600,000 instead of progressive rates that climb far higher. The conditions are narrow: broadly, the regime favours employees over freelancers, and you must not have been a Spanish tax resident in the years before the move. Some applicants qualify, many don't, and the difference is worth thousands a year, so put this question to a Spanish tax adviser with your file in front of them rather than settling it from a blog.
The entrepreneur visa: residence for a business Spain wants
The third route comes from the same 2013 law that created the golden visa, and it's the part Spain kept on purpose. The entrepreneur visa grants residence to people launching an innovative business of economic interest to the country. The word doing the work in that sentence is innovative. A bar in Alicante or a small property-management agency won't pass; evaluators look for scalable projects with a technology or knowledge component, job creation and some prospect of attracting investment.
The gatekeeper is ENISA, Spain's state innovation company, which assesses your business plan and issues the favourable report the application depends on. A serious plan covers the product, the market, your financing and what Spain gets out of it. There's no statutory minimum investment, which surprises people. What you need instead is a credible plan and enough money to live on while you execute it.
Processing runs faster than most Spanish immigration procedures, with timelines measured in weeks, and under the startup framework the initial permit can run up to three years. Family members apply alongside you. Five years of residence opens permanent residence, same as the other routes. For founders who saw the golden visa as a fallback, this is the honest replacement: it costs effort instead of €500,000.
What owning a Spanish home does for you now
Here's the part that gets lost in the "golden visa is dead" coverage. Property no longer grants residence, but it still helps you get it, in ways that are practical rather than legal.
Every visa application asks where you'll live. An owned home answers that better than anything else: no landlord to persuade, no lease contingent on a visa that's contingent on a lease. Consular officers also read ownership as evidence of ties and seriousness, the difference between someone testing an idea and someone who has committed. After arrival, your address underpins the empadronamiento, the town-hall registration that nearly every Spanish process touches, from healthcare access to school places.
For the non-lucrative visa the effect is more direct. Rental income from property, in Spain or elsewhere, is passive income, and it counts toward the IPREM threshold. A paid-off home also shrinks your monthly outgoings, which makes the same income stretch further in the eyes of the officer reviewing your file. None of this is a loophole. It's simply what a strong application looks like.
The buying process itself hasn't changed: NIE number, reservation contract, notary, land registry. We walk through the full sequence, including the tax differences between new-build and resale, in our guide on how to buy property in Spain, and you can browse current listings across Spain on HomeNSearch to get a feel for prices by region.
Bringing your family along
All three routes let spouses or registered partners, dependent children and, in some cases, dependent parents apply with you or join later. The cost shows up in the income test. Each dependant on the NLV adds 100% of IPREM, the €600 a month mentioned above, to the bar. The nomad visa uses smaller add-ons, commonly cited at 75% of the SMI for the first family member and 25% for each one after that. Children get access to Spanish state schools once you're registered locally, which for many families beats paying international school fees, though the big cities also offer British, American, French and German curricula if continuity matters more to you.
Healthcare is the other question people ask late and should ask early. Visa applicants need private cover from day one, and Spanish private insurance is cheap by North American standards, often somewhere between €50 and €150 a month per adult depending on age. Once you're working and paying into the system, or once you reach permanent residence, public healthcare enters the picture, and UK or EU pensioners can register through S1 arrangements instead. None of this affects whether your visa is approved. It affects whether year two in Spain feels settled or improvised.
The long game: permanent residence and citizenship
All three visas run on the same track. Five years of continuous legal residence earns long-term residence, which ends the renewal treadmill and the income checks. Continuity has rules of its own: keep absences under six months in any single year and under ten months across the five, or the clock resets.
Citizenship takes ten years of residence for most nationalities, plus a language exam and a civics test. There's one large exception, and it's stable law rather than a scheme that might close next spring: nationals of Ibero-American countries, along with a few others such as the Philippines and Andorra, can apply after just two years of legal residence. That makes Spain one of the quickest passports in Europe for Latin American applicants. Weigh one more factor before you plan around it: Spain generally expects naturalising citizens to renounce their previous nationality, with the Ibero-American group again exempted, so dual citizenship isn't on the table for everyone.
Don't want to live there? The 90/180 rule
Plenty of buyers never wanted residency. They wanted summers. For them, nothing about April 2025 matters at all. Citizens of visa-exempt countries can spend 90 days in any rolling 180-day period in the Schengen area, no paperwork beyond a passport. Structured well, that's most of June through August plus a long autumn or winter stay, every year, indefinitely, while the property earns rent the rest of the time.
Two cautions. The count is rolling, not calendar-based, so track your days with a Schengen calculator rather than by feel. And the EU's new Entry/Exit System records border crossings biometrically, which turns the old blind eye toward small overstays into an automatic flag. If 90 days per half-year genuinely isn't enough for you, that's your signal to pick one of the three visas above.
Which route fits you
Strip away the paperwork and the choice usually makes itself.
- Your money comes from pensions, rentals or investments, and you've stopped working: non-lucrative visa. The simplest file to build, but no right to work and a firm 183-day presence expectation.
- You earn a salary or freelance income from outside Spain: digital nomad visa. You keep working legally, the income bar is modest for professional salaries, and the possible flat-tax regime sweetens it.
- You're building a company and can make an innovation case: entrepreneur visa. The hardest to get, the most flexible once granted, and the only route where Spain actively wants you to succeed.
- You want a holiday home and nothing more: skip visas entirely and plan around 90/180.
On money, the routes sit closer together than they look: roughly €2,400 a month for the NLV against roughly €2,800 for the nomad visa, with the entrepreneur route judged on the plan rather than a payslip. The real fork is work. The NLV forbids it in Spain, the nomad visa requires it for foreign payers, and the entrepreneur visa localises it. Timelines are identical across all three: five years to permanent residence, ten to citizenship, two if you hold an Ibero-American passport.
One honest caveat to finish. Consulates differ in practice, rules get revised, and the SMI and IPREM figures behind the income tests move most years. Treat the numbers here as the shape of the requirement, confirm current figures with the consulate handling your file, and settle the tax questions before you commit to a moving date. The door marked "buy a flat, get a permit" is closed. The building has three others, and for most people who would have used the golden visa, at least one of them fits.
FAQ: moving to Spain in 2026
Can I still get Spanish residency by buying property?
No. The golden visa closed to new applicants on 3 April 2025 under Organic Law 1/2025, and no purchase at any price grants residence on its own anymore. Buying remains fully open to foreigners, and an owned home strengthens a visa application as proof of accommodation and ties, but the permit itself now comes through the non-lucrative, digital nomad or entrepreneur routes.
How much income do I need for the non-lucrative visa?
The requirement is set at 400% of the IPREM index for the main applicant plus 100% per dependant, which in 2026 is commonly cited as roughly €2,400 a month plus about €600 per family member. The income must be passive: pensions, rents, dividends or substantial savings. Check the exact current figure with your consulate, since IPREM is revised periodically.
Can I work remotely for a foreign company on the non-lucrative visa?
Officially the NLV excludes work, and many consulates read that to include remote work for foreign employers. Since the digital nomad visa exists precisely for that profile, with a permit of up to three years and possible tax advantages, applying for the NLV while planning to work remotely is a risk with no upside. Match the visa to the truth of your situation.
How long until I can apply for Spanish citizenship?
Ten years of legal residence for most nationalities, with a language and civics exam at the end. Nationals of Ibero-American countries and a few others qualify after two years, one of the fastest naturalisation timelines in Europe. Permanent residence, which removes renewals and income checks, arrives at five years on any of the three visas.
What happened to people who already held a Spanish golden visa?
They kept it. The 2025 law closed the scheme to new applicants but preserved existing permits, and holders have continued renewing under the previous rules. If you hold one, keep the qualifying investment in place until each renewal is granted, and confirm current renewal practice with an immigration lawyer, since transitional details are where requirements tend to shift.