Spain’s decision to abolish its property Golden Visa did not happen in isolation. Across Europe, residence-by-investment programmes have been closing, narrowing or moving away from real estate, under pressure from the European institutions and from domestic housing politics. A wealthy family that wants European residence tied to an investment now navigates a shrinking and shifting map, and the right route depends far more on their goals than on any league table of programmes.
The direction of travel
The clear trend is away from granting residence simply for buying property. Some countries have ended their programmes, others have removed the real-estate route while keeping investment or fund options, and the European level continues to press against citizenship-for-sale in particular. Any family planning around these routes has to assume they will keep tightening, not loosen, and should avoid building a plan around a programme that may not exist in its current form next year.
In Spain the change went wider than the property headline. Articles 63 to 67 of the investor chapter of Ley 14/2013, which created the investor visa and residence authorisation, were left without content by disposición final vigesimoprimera of Ley Orgánica 1/2025, de 2 de enero, with effect from 3 April 2025. Every investor route went, not only the home purchase. Applications already filed are still decided under the old law, and existing permits run to term under the rules that granted them. They do not vanish; they run down, which is not the same as stable.
European pressure is sharper on citizenship than on residence. In its judgment of 29 April 2025 in Case C-181/23, Commission v Malta, the Court of Justice held that a Member State cannot grant its nationality, and with it Union citizenship, in direct exchange for predetermined investments or payments. Residence schemes were not before the Court, and the Commission’s reasoned opinion on the Maltese scheme drew the same line: its recommendation of 28 March 2022 told Member States to end citizenship schemes at once, and asked only for strong checks on residence schemes.
What still exists, broadly
Versions of residence-by-investment persist in parts of Europe, typically now oriented toward funds, business investment or job creation rather than a simple home purchase, and often with genuine physical-presence or activity expectations attached. The headline that a passport or permit can be bought cheaply is mostly out of date; what remains tends to ask for real capital deployed in defined ways, and sometimes real presence.
The era of buying a flat and getting a permit is closing across Europe. What remains asks for real capital, real activity, and often real presence.
Portugal illustrates it: the regime was rebuilt, not closed. The routes the Agência para a Integração, Migrações e Asilo lists today are ten jobs created, 500,000 euros into research inside the national scientific system, 250,000 euros into artistic production or cultural heritage, 500,000 euros into units of non-real-estate collective investment undertakings formed under Portuguese law, or 500,000 euros to incorporate or recapitalise a Portuguese company with permanent jobs. No property option appears.
Malta moves the same way. Residency Malta Agency lists a family office residency beside its residence and visa, nomad and start-up programmes. It grants three-year renewable permits to qualifying ultimate beneficial owners, senior employees and dependants, where the entity is authorised by the Malta Financial Services Authority and part of a family office structure.
Residence by investment and residence by activity are different tests
An investment permit asks whether a defined sum sits in a defined asset. An activity permit asks whether a business exists, whether it will work, and who will run it. The first is answered with a deed and a bank certificate. The second cannot be answered with money.
Article 70 of Ley 14/2013 shows the second test in official hands. Entrepreneurial activity means activity that is innovative or of special economic interest to Spain, and a favourable ENISA report is mandatory. The Unidad de Grandes Empresas y Colectivos Estratégicos requests it and ENISA has ten working days, weighing the applicant’s profile, the business plan and the added value claimed for Spain.
The authorisation runs three years under article 69, renews for two and opens permanent residence at five. The failure mode is not financial: a plan written to pass a filing draws an unfavourable report, which no cheque cures. Article 62 carries the rest, requiring criminal record certificates from every country of residence in the last two years plus a declaration covering five, insurance authorised in Spain, and the anti-money-laundering duties of Ley 10/2010.
The question behind the question
Most families who ask about Golden Visa alternatives do not actually want a visa; they want the thing the visa was a proxy for, whether that is the freedom to spend time in Europe, a base for the family, a tax position, or a hedge. Once the real goal is named, the answer is often not a residence-by-investment programme at all but a residence route plus a structure, which is usually more durable and less exposed to political reversal.
Each of the four needs a different instrument. Time in Europe is about Schengen mobility and the presence a permit requires. A family base is about schooling, succession and where assets sit. A tax position is about domestic residence tests and treaty tie-breakers. A hedge is about what survives when one jurisdiction changes its mind.
The mismatch runs in one direction: a family buys a permit for optionality and finds it constrains them: presence conditions tie them to a country chosen on price, the holding entity was formed for an immigration officer and is wrong for succession, and the tax regime assumed to come with it never did.
A residence permit and a tax residence are different things
The confusion costs money. A residence permit is an immigration title: it says a person is lawfully present and may work. Tax residence is a separate test, in a separate statute, applied by a separate authority, and it never asks whether a permit exists.
Article 9 of Ley 35/2006, del Impuesto sobre la Renta de las Personas Físicas, sets out what the Agencia Tributaria looks at. A person is resident on spending more than 183 days of the calendar year in Spain, counting sporadic absences unless tax residence elsewhere is proved, or where the main nucleus of their economic interests is in Spain, directly or indirectly. A rebuttable presumption applies if the spouse and dependent minor children habitually live there.
Article 93 of the same law makes the gap concrete. Someone who becomes Spanish tax resident by moving there may elect to be taxed under the non-resident rules for the year of the move and the five following tax periods, if they were not resident in the five preceding ones. The scale in force charges 24 per cent up to 600,000 euros of taxable base and 47 per cent above, but article 93.2.e) takes out of it the dividends, interest and gains on transfers of assets referred to in article 25.1.f) of the Ley del Impuesto sobre la Renta de no Residentes, which go to a savings scale of 19 to 30 per cent. A family living on investment income is not taxed at 24. The triggers are an employment contract, a directorship, an entrepreneurial activity certified under the article 70 procedure, or economic activity by a highly qualified professional serving start-ups as defined in article 3 of Ley 28/2022, or doing training, research, development and innovation work, where that work brings in more than 40 per cent of their total business, professional and employment income. Property is not among them, so the regime most associated with the Golden Visa was never reachable through it.
Renewal, presence and the five-year count
Presence is where these plans fail quietly, because three clocks run at once and none measures the same thing: renewal of the permit, permanent or long-term residence, and tax residence. Spain shows how loose the first could be: disposición adicional sexta of Ley 14/2013 allowed renewal even where absences exceeded six months in the year, for investor permits and for employees of companies operating abroad whose base of operations is in Spain.
The same provision preserves, without qualification, the need to prove continuity of residence for long-term residence or Spanish nationality. The permit could be kept by a near-absentee; the status it led to could not. Portugal states the point as a number, and that number sold the programme: the Agência para a Integração, Migrações e Asilo sets the minimum at seven days in the first year and fourteen in the years after.
The permanent statuses ask more. As the European Commission sets out on the Long-Term Residents Directive, that status rests on having lived legally in an EU country for an uninterrupted period of five years, with a stable and regular source of income, health insurance and, where the State requires it, compliance with integration measures.
Build the base, not the shortcut
For a family whose real aim is a European foothold with a sensible tax and succession position, the better plan is frequently an ordinary residence in a chosen country combined with a proper holding and estate structure, of the kind we describe across our work on family office structuring and cross-border succession. Spain remains entirely open to living and investing, as we set out in our note on Spain ending the Golden Visa; it simply asks, like the rest of Europe now, that the base be built deliberately rather than bought as a shortcut.
Deliberately means the commercial side comes first. A family wanting a lasting European position builds an operating or holding presence in the Union, then takes the route that presence opens. A Dutch holding is a common choice for the structural half, not because it produces a permit but because it does work a permit never would: it holds the participations, receives and on-pays income inside a treaty network, and answers to the substance expectations the anti-tax-avoidance directives brought.
The halves still have to be kept distinct. Incorporating a Dutch company gives a family a European base of operations; it gives nobody a residence permit. Residence comes from an immigration route, and the work residence permits the Immigratie- en Naturalisatiedienst lists are for highly skilled migrants, European blue card holders, intra-corporate transferees under Directive 2014/66/EU, researchers, employees in paid employment, self-employed people and start-up founders. Remote work for a foreign employer is not on that list. The Dutch start-up residence permit is characteristic: a maximum of one year, and an approved facilitator must take the business on before the state will.
An immigration authority asks whether the activity is genuine and who runs it; a tax authority asks the same from the other side, and the answers should match. Where a structure exists only to support a permit they diverge, and that is what gets examined. Europe has not closed itself to wealthy families. It has stopped selling what it used to sell, and now asks the question it once let a purchase price answer.
Montclare advises international individuals and families on buying, holding and moving to Spain: the structure, the tax, the residence and the succession, handled as one plan. Our services are set out on our services page.
This article is informational and does not constitute tax, legal or immigration advice. Spanish regimes vary by region and change frequently, and treatment depends on personal circumstances. Each engagement is subject to scope and applicable regulation.