🧳 How to Get Spain’s Digital Nomad Visa

Because being a digital nomad sounds kinda cool — and when you're in Spain, it actually is.

Spain would like to roll out the red (and gold) carpet to you. Photo by Sam Williams on Unsplash

🛂 The Bubble’s Very Practical (and Not Too Long) Guide to Spain’s Digital Nomad Visa

🚨 This is one of The Bubble’s expanded feature articles and guides for paid subscribers. It’s sponsored by our friends at Bureaucracy.es — the people who make Spanish paperwork suck less.

There comes a moment in every remote worker’s life (fine, in most remote workers’ lives) when the phrase “work from anywhere” starts meaning “anywhere but here.” Maybe it’s the third shite winter in London. Maybe it’s your landlord jacking up rent in San Francisco again. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s that colleague who moved to Málaga and now “takes meetings” at the beach chiringuito.

• That’s when, suddenly, you think, “I could live in Spain. I could actually do this.”

And for the first time, you might be right — because the Spanish government has, in a rare moment of future-looking clarity, designed its own Digital Nomad Visa.

• This is Spain’s way of saying, “Come live here. Keep your foreign salary. Just don’t take a local job. Or root for France in the World Cup.”

If you’re a remote employee, a freelancer with clients abroad, or the kind of entrepreneur who says, “As long as I have my laptop and my cellphone, I’m fine,” the Digital Nomad Visa (DNV) is the door you’ve been looking for.

Let’s step through it.

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🇪🇸 What the Digital Nomad Visa Actually Is

Quite simply, the visa and the residence authorization that goes with it offer Digital Nomads — or teletrabajadores de carácter internacional because, after all, we are in Spain — a legal way to live in Spain while working for someone (or several someones) outside of Spain.

You earn abroad, you live here. Spain gets your rent and your supermarket receipts (and your taxes). You get sunshine, healthcare, and an existence that does not revolve around hourlong commutes and ultra-processed foods.

Win-win. 🥳

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Table of Contents

1. Is the Digital Nomad Visa for You?

2. Money: Proving Financial Means

3. Can You Bring Family on the Digital Nomad Visa?

4. The Documents You Need

5. Health Insurance — What You Need and How to Find It

6. How to Prepare Your Paperwork

7. Applying Inside Spain vs. Applying from Your Home Country

8. What a Typical Application Timeline Looks Like

9. A Quick Word About Taxes

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🟦 TL;DR — Can You Get Spain’s Digital Nomad Visa?

(A 20-second checklist before you read 3,000 words)

• ✅ You’re a non-EU/EEA/Swiss citizen.
  If you have an EU passport, congratulations — you’ve already won.

• ✅ You work remotely, either as:

  • An employee of a company outside Spain, or

  • A freelancer/contractor with mostly foreign clients.

• ✅ Your employer or main client has existed for at least 1 year.
  Spain does not want people who work for businesses that LLC’d this morning.

• ✅ You’ve worked with them for at least 3 months.
  DNVs are not for those who think it’d be “fun” to try out freelancing.

• ✅ You earn enough to support yourself without becoming Spain’s problem.
  (See the income table below — it’s straightforward.)

• ✅ You have a university degree OR 3+ years of relevant experience.

• ✅ Your criminal record has been clean for the past 5 years.

• ✅ You have private health insurance valid in Spain. (We’ll show you how to buy this.)

If you can check all of the above without sweating, congratulations: you’re eligible. Eligibility doesn’t guarantee approval — but it means Spain will at least take you seriously.

• If you’re not eligible, Bureaucracy.es can usually tell you in one phone call whether there’s a workaround — or whether you should consider the Non-Lucrative Visa instead.

🚨 WARNING: The UGE (Unidad de Grandes Empresas), the authority that processes DNV applications in Spain, frequently changes how it interprets the law. This means that what is valid today may change at short notice. We will update this guide with the changes as we learn of them.

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👀 Who the DNV Is (and Isn’t) For

Now that you’ve passed the TL;DR sniff test, here’s the super-basic version of what this visa is actually meant for.

The Digital Nomad Visa is for people who already work fully online and wanna do it from a place where life isn’t just Slack → Starbucks → Sleep. If your income arrives digitally, not via a physical office door, you’re in the right place. Welcome.

It’s great for:

• Remote employees whose employer doesn’t care where they sit, as long as the work gets done and the WiFi stays on.

• Freelancers/contractors with foreign clients who won’t suddenly ask you to “pop into the office” (because the office is 7,000 km away).

• Self-employed consultants whose businesses are location-independent and already rolling along nicely.

• People who want a legal, renewable, multi-year residency in Spain without pretending they don’t work (looking at you, Non-Lucrative Visa holders).

It’s not for:

• Anyone whose employer is based in Spain and wants them physically present. (Spain has other visas for that.)

• People hoping to arrive and then figure out how to make money. This visa rewards stability, not improvisation.

• Crypto-day-traders who can “definitely” generate stable income “depending on the market.” Spain likes predictability.

• Influencers planning to shout “What’s up dudes, welcome back to the channel!” from a Barcelona balcony — unless they have actual contracts with non-Spanish companies.

Everything else in this guide is about getting a DNV. Now let’s walk through the process, which you can think of as a simple flowchart:

Gather Docs → Apostille → Translate → Apply → Approval → TIE → Residency

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💶 Money (The Part No One Wants to Hear But Everyone Needs to Know)

Here’s the quick-and-painless version: