For over a decade, a wealthy foreigner could buy a qualifying Spanish property and receive Spanish residence in return. That door has closed. Spain abolished the property-based Golden Visa, and the change matters not only to those who wanted the visa but to the wider story wealthy buyers tell themselves about what a Spanish home delivers. The house still comes with sun, lifestyle and an asset. It no longer comes with a residence permit.
What follows is the scope of the repeal, what the statute says about permits already held, which routes remain open and what each asks, and why none of it alters a foreign owner’s tax position.
What actually ended
The route that ended is the one that granted residence in exchange for a substantial property investment. It was politically contentious, associated in the public debate with housing pressure in the most desirable cities, and it was removed in 2025. Three points decide what that means in practice. Permits already granted remain valid and renewable on their existing terms. Applications filed before the cut-off continue to be processed under the previous rules. And the other routes of the same law, investment in business projects of general interest among them, followed their own path rather than the property route. Owners already holding a permit obtained through property should confirm their renewal position rather than assume it lapsed with the route. Buyers who assumed the purchase and the residence were a single transaction now have to treat them as two separate questions.
Articles 63 to 67 of Ley 14/2013 were left without content by the twenty-first final provision of Organic Law 1/2025 of 2 January, with effect from 3 April 2025, as the consolidated text of Ley 14/2013 records. Those five articles were the whole investor route: the visa, the proof of investment, its effects, the authorisation and its duration. Every investment modality sat inside them, the business project of general interest as much as the property purchase, so none survives. What the same section still offers are the working routes of articles 69 to 74 quinquies, which turn on activity, not capital.
Article 61 still lists investors among the categories Spain facilitates, and the chapter heading survives, which misleads quick readers. Every operative provision beneath is gone. Organic Law 1/2025 took effect three months after its publication of 3 January 2025, so files divide by date of filing, not of decision.
The transitional position, and what it protects
The same final provision inserted two transitional provisions. The first lets investors, and their family members, who lodged an application before it took effect receive the visa or authorisation under the rules in force on the date of filing. The second preserves visas and authorisations valid on 3 April 2025 for the period for which they were issued.
Renewals are processed and resolved under the rules in force when the initial authorisation was granted, so a permit issued in 2021 is renewed against the 2021 text. Old rules mean old conditions, so the holder must still show the investment is maintained and article 62 satisfied, insurance, resources, clean record and fee included.
A permit that had expired before 3 April 2025 was not valid on that date and falls outside both sentences. There is no application window, no grandfathering by nationality, no residual discretion. Anyone who neither held a permit nor filed is an ordinary applicant.
What it does not change
Ending the Golden Visa did not close Spain to wealthy movers. It removed one specific fast track. Other routes to living in Spain remain, from ordinary residence permits to the regimes aimed at remote workers, entrepreneurs and the well-resourced, and the favourable tax treatment of new arrivals under the Beckham law is untouched, as we set out in our note on the Beckham law. The property market is likewise open; foreigners buy Spanish homes freely. What changed is that the home no longer buys the paperwork.
Ownership was never conditioned on immigration status. A non-resident may buy, hold, let and sell Spanish property with a foreigner identification number and the ordinary notarial and registry formalities.
The repeal was narrow inside Ley 14/2013 too. It touched articles 63 to 67 and nothing else, so every other route in that section stands, and the non-lucrative residence most retired buyers use was never in that law at all. It sits in the immigration regulation.
The house used to come with the residence. Now they are two decisions, and treating them as one is the first mistake of the post-Golden-Visa era.
What remains open, and what each file must prove
For a buyer with no Spanish income and no intention to work, the route is non-lucrative temporary residence under the Regulation of Organic Law 4/2000 approved by Real Decreto 1155/2024, in force six months after its publication of 20 November 2024. Article 61 grants authorisation to reside without employment or professional activity on proof of means, health insurance, no threat to public order, security or health, and the fee. Article 62 sets the means at 400 per cent of the IPREM monthly for the applicant and 100 per cent per dependent family member.
The regulation is exacting on evidence. Funds abroad must be documented with the bank’s name and address, full identification of the accounts, the balance at 31 December of the preceding year and the average balance over the last year. Renewal under article 64 of that regulation requires having actually and effectively resided in Spain more than 183 days in the calendar year. The initial authorisation runs one year and the renewal two, and a renewal not resolved within three months of filing is deemed granted.
The surviving routes of Ley 14/2013 suit an active working life: entrepreneurs under article 69, three years renewable for two on an activity certified under article 70; highly qualified professionals under article 71, in Blue Card and national versions; intra-corporate transfer; and international teleworking, where article 74 ter requires a year of real and continuous activity by the foreign employer, three months of existing relationship and written permission to work remotely. Those residence authorisations resolve within twenty days of electronic filing, with silence favouring the applicant.
The ninety day arithmetic that replaced the visa
Strip away the permit and a non-EU owner of a Spanish home is a visitor. Article 6(1) of the Schengen Borders Code, Regulation (EU) 2016/399, sets entry conditions for stays of no more than 90 days in any 180 day period. The window rolls and never resets in January.
The same article requires a travel document valid at least three months beyond the intended departure and issued within the previous ten years. The allowance is Schengen-wide, so days in France or Italy consume the same ninety.
Ten weeks a year in a Spanish house needs only those conditions and an honest running total. Half the year needs a permit, and every route that grants one asks about work, income, qualifications or presence, not the price of the house.
The practical shift for buyers
A wealthy buyer today plans the residence on its own merits, through whichever route fits their situation, and plans the purchase on its own merits, through whichever ownership and finance structure fits, as we discuss in holding a Spanish home and non-resident borrowers in Spain. Coordinated, the two still produce the same outcome the Golden Visa promised, a home and a life in Spain, simply arranged deliberately rather than bundled.
Sequencing matters more than it used to. A residence file turns on evidence about the person: where they have lived, what they earn and from whom, what they will do in Spain. An ownership file turns on tax and succession. The same facts feed both, under different rules.
Timing follows. A non-lucrative application starts at the consular office covering the applicant’s residence, and the initial authorisation is resolved within a month of the consular communication, with silence counting as refusal. A purchase can complete in weeks. Settle the residence route before fixing a completion date.
The tax position, which the repeal did not touch
The Golden Visa never conferred tax status, and none of the repealed articles mentioned taxation. Article 9 of Ley 35/2006 settles residence: more than 183 days of the calendar year in Spain, counting sporadic absences unless tax residence elsewhere is evidenced, or the main nucleus of activities or economic interests there. A non-separated spouse and dependent minor children resident in Spain raise a rebuttable presumption.
A non-resident owning a Spanish home neither let nor used in a business still files. Imputed income is computed under article 85 of the same law at 2 per cent of cadastral value, or 1.1 per cent where the municipality’s values were revised in the tax period or the previous ten, and taxed under the non-resident income tax law at 24 per cent, or 19 per cent for EU and EEA residents with effective exchange of information.
The Beckham regime is where the misunderstanding costs money. Article 93 of Ley 35/2006 is triggered by an employment contract or the start of an employment or statutory relationship with an employer in Spain, a posting ordered by the employer, remote work by exclusive electronic means, becoming a company administrator, an entrepreneurial activity certified under article 70 of Ley 14/2013, or the work of a highly qualified professional serving emerging companies or engaged in research, development and innovation. Buying property was never on that list.
The regime requires five prior years of non-residence, runs for the year of the move and the five following, taxes income at 24 per cent up to 600,000 euros and 47 per cent above, taxes dividends, interest and capital gains on transfers on the savings scale instead, and leaves the taxpayer liable to wealth tax on Spanish assets only. The option must be exercised within six months of the start of activity shown on the social security registration, under article 116 of the income tax regulation.
Where residence-by-investment went
Spain’s move is part of a wider European retreat from selling residence for property, and buyers who specifically wanted a residence-by-investment route now look to the countries that still offer versions of it, which we cover in our note on Golden Visa alternatives in Europe. For most, though, the right response is not to chase the vanished visa elsewhere but to plan a Spanish home and a Spanish residence as the two separate, entirely achievable things they now are.
The retreat is not only political. In April 2025 the Court of Justice held in Commission v Malta that Malta had failed to fulfil its obligations under Article 20 TFEU and Article 4(3) TEU by operating a transactional naturalisation procedure in exchange for predetermined payments or investments, which it called the commercialisation of the grant of nationality and, by extension, of Union citizenship.
That judgment concerns citizenship rather than residence, and the distinction is real. But it sets the tone against which surviving programmes will be read, and anyone choosing one should price in the chance that it does not last.
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.