The Spain Golden Visa Has Ended: What Property Buyers Do Now

For twelve years the answer to “how do I get residency in Spain?” was simple if you had the money: buy a home for €500,000 and the permit came with it. That answer is gone. The Spain golden visa closed to new applicants on 3 April 2025, and the phone calls we get have changed with it.

The good news is that the two things people actually want, a home on the coast and the right to live in it, are still available. They are just two separate processes now. This guide explains what the law changed, what it means if you already hold a permit, and which routes buyers use in 2026 — written from Estepona, where we walk clients through both halves every week.

What exactly changed with the Spain golden visa

Organic Law 1/2025 of 2 January abolished the investor visa, and the abolition took effect on 3 April 2025. It removed all three investment routes at once, not only the property one:

What the scheme was

The Spain golden visa, officially the investor visa, arrived in 2013, in the years after the financial crisis, when Spain wanted foreign capital badly enough to trade residence for it. The deal was straightforward: invest, and you and your family received a residence permit that could be renewed as long as the investment stayed in place, with almost no requirement to actually live here. Property was the route nearly everyone took, and a permit that did not demand physical presence is exactly what made it attractive to buyers who wanted Schengen access rather than a Spanish life.

Why it ended

The reasoning given was housing: the government argued that buying residency had pushed prices in the places where Spaniards were already struggling to find homes. Whether the programme really moved the market is still argued about; what matters for you is that the door is shut and no replacement is planned.

If you already hold a golden visa

Nothing is taken away from you. The official position is clear: authorisations already granted keep their validity until the expiry date stated in the original decision, and renewals are decided under the rules that applied when the permit was granted. Applications that were filed before 3 April 2025 continue to be processed under the old law.

In practice that means your path to long-term residence after five years and to citizenship after ten is unchanged, as long as you keep meeting the conditions of your own permit. If your renewal is coming up, get it in early and take advice on the conditions in your original resolution rather than on what a forum says the rules used to be.

The dates that matter

1. 2 January 2025 Organic Law 1/2025 is approved, with the abolition written into its final provisions.
2. 3 January 2025 Publication in the official gazette starts a three-month countdown.
3. 3 April 2025 The investor visa closes. No new applications from this day.
4. From then on Existing permits stay valid, earlier applications and renewals follow the old rules.

Can non-EU citizens still buy property in Spain?

Yes, and this is the part that gets confused most often. Buying a home in Spain has never required a residence permit and still does not. Americans, Britons, Canadians and everyone else can buy, own, rent out and sell exactly as before. What disappeared is only the link between the purchase and the permit.

Two practical consequences follow. Without a permit you are a visitor, so you can use the home for up to 90 days in any 180-day period. And you are a non-resident for tax, which means 24% Spanish non-resident income tax on rental income and on the notional income Spain charges for a home you use yourself, declared on form 210, against the 19% that applies to EU residents.

You may also have read about a proposed tax of up to 100% on homes bought by non-EU residents. A bill went to parliament in May 2025 and has never been debated or voted on, so it is not law and there is no date for it. We follow it and update this guide when something actually happens.

Letting the home out while you are away

Short-term holiday letting in Andalusia needs the property to be registered in the regional tourism register, and communities of owners can restrict it in their statutes, so check both before you count on that income. A national registration scheme introduced in July 2025 was later annulled by the Supreme Court, which ruled that the state had stepped on regional competences, so the regional rules are what apply. Long-term letting has none of that friction, and for a non-resident owner both are taxed at 24% on the gross rent, without the deduction of expenses that EU residents may claim.

The routes that work in 2026

There is no direct replacement for the Spain golden visa, and anyone selling you one is selling something else. The government itself points to two permits, and in practice buyers use four.

The non-lucrative visa: for retirees and passive income

The most common route among our buyers. You show that you can support yourself without working in Spain: €2,400 a month (€28,800 a year) for the main applicant, plus €600 a month for each family member, together with private health insurance and a clean criminal record. The first permit runs for a year, then renews for four. Pensions, rental income, dividends and savings all count, but consulates look closely at how stable and how accessible the money is.

The digital nomad visa: for remote workers

If you still work, but for companies outside Spain, this is the route. It asks for 200% of the Spanish minimum wage, which in 2026 means €2,849 a month, and it allows freelancers to earn up to 20% of their work from Spanish clients. It also opens the door to the special tax regime for new arrivals, the Beckham law, which taxes employment income at a flat 24% up to €600,000 a year for six tax years.

The entrepreneur visa: for a business, not a purchase

This is one of the two routes the government names in place of the investor visa. It is not a money-in, permit-out scheme: your project has to be innovative or of special economic interest to Spain, ENISA assesses the business plan, and the application goes to the Large Companies Unit. If you were planning to invest in Spain rather than simply to live here, this is where that ambition now belongs.

The highly qualified professional visa: for employment

The second route the government names. It runs through a Spanish employer or a company posting you here, is decided by the same specialist unit, and is quicker than the ordinary work permit process. Family members are included from the start.

Route	Who it suits	Money you must show
Non-lucrative	Retirees, passive income	€2,400/month + €600 per family member
Digital nomad	Remote employees, freelancers	€2,849/month
Entrepreneur	Founders with an innovative project	Business plan, ENISA report
Highly qualified	Employees with a Spanish contract	Set by the contract

How long each route takes

Timing decides more than most buyers expect. The two routes run by the Large Companies Unit, the digital nomad and entrepreneur permits, are filed online and must be decided within twenty working days; if the unit does not answer in time, the law treats the application as approved. The consulate routes work differently: you need an appointment first, and in busy months that is the real bottleneck, not the decision itself. Add the weeks for the ACRO certificate, the apostille and the sworn translation, and a realistic plan for a non-lucrative visa starts four to six months before the date you want to land.

What this means for buying on the Costa del Sol

Since the purchase no longer buys the permit, the two processes run side by side, and that changes the order in which sensible buyers do things. You no longer need to reach a threshold to qualify for anything, which means the €500,000 that used to be the magic number is simply not a rule any more. Buy the home that fits you, and choose the visa that fits how you earn.

Why a new build fits this better than a resale

The visa side takes months: appointments, apostilles, sworn translations, then the residence card after you arrive. A home under construction takes months too, and those two clocks run happily in parallel. You use the waiting time productively, you choose the floor and the aspect while the building goes up, and you arrive to a finished home instead of a renovation you have to manage from abroad.

Why our buyers land in Estepona

Estepona sits next to Marbella, with the same coast and the same golf, and it still works as a town in February: around 67,000 residents, a restored old town where the alleys are hung with flowers, 21 kilometres of coastline, Málaga airport 84 kilometres away and Gibraltar 45. On our own market analysis, resale asking prices here stood at about €5,000 per m² in August 2026 after a rise of roughly 98% in five years, and in September 2026 new builds were asking only about 3% more per m² than resales in the same town. That last number is why so many buyers who arrive planning to renovate end up buying new.

New homes in Estepona

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Estepona

Royal Park

31 Apartments/Penthouses · € 799,000

Estepona

Palm Luxury Gardens

31 Townhouses/Semi-Detached · € 785,000

Estepona

Villas Monte Palatino

5 Exclusive Villas · € 1,590,000

Estepona

Apron Estepona

23 Semi-Detached Villas · € 834,000

Estepona

Velaya Estepona Apartment

2-Bedroom Apartment · € 1,595,000

Estepona

Attire Estepona

40 Semi-Detached Homes · € 606,000

Buying from abroad, before you have a permit

Almost every purchase we handle for an overseas buyer starts long before the residence file does, and it works because none of the steps needs residency. You need an NIE, which you can apply for at a Spanish consulate in your own country or at a police station here. You need a Spanish bank account, which non-residents can open with a certificate of non-residency the bank arranges. And you need a lawyer of your own choosing, independent of the seller and of us.

If you cannot keep flying over for every signature, a power of attorney granted to your lawyer lets the purchase run without you: it is signed before a notary, either here or at a consulate, and it is standard practice rather than a sign that something is unusual. What we would never advise is buying without seeing the location at least once. Photographs do not tell you where the afternoon sun lands or how loud the road above is.

What the purchase itself costs

With the €500,000 threshold gone, the only numbers that matter are the real ones. In Andalusia a resale is taxed at 7% transfer tax, while a new build carries 10% VAT plus 1.2% stamp duty, and on top come notary, land registry and legal fees. Then there is the running side: the annual IBI property tax, community fees for pools, gardens and lifts, home insurance and, if you are not resident, the non-resident tax return each year.

Our advice to every buyer is the same: ask for the community fee of the specific home in writing before you make an offer. It is the number that quietly decides whether a place feels comfortable or expensive three years later.

Four things buyers still get wrong

• “I need to spend €500,000.” You do not. That figure was a visa threshold, and the visa is gone. Buy what suits you.
• “Buying gets me residency.” Even with the Spain golden visa it was the investment, not the deeds, that carried the permit, and now the link is gone entirely. The permit comes from your income or your work, not from the deeds.
• “I will just stay a few months longer.” Entries and exits are now logged biometrically at the border, so the 90 days in any 180-day period are counted automatically and exactly.
• “I can decide the tax side later.” The day count that makes you a Spanish tax resident starts the moment you arrive, whatever your plans were.

If your goal was the investment, not the move

Some of the people who called us about the Spain golden visa never wanted to live here. They wanted an asset in the sun with a European permit attached. The permit is gone; the asset still behaves the way it did, and we can show you what it has actually done rather than what a brochure promises.

On our own market analysis, long-term rents in Estepona averaged about €21 per m² a month in August 2026, which put gross yields in the town at roughly 5% before costs, taxes and vacancy. Resale asking prices stood at about €5,000 per m² after a rise of roughly 98% over five years. Those are past figures and an average across a whole town, not a forecast and not a promise for one apartment, but they are measured rather than claimed.

Two caveats we would rather say ourselves than have you discover later. Gross is not net: community fees, IBI, management, maintenance and empty weeks all come off. And as a non-resident you pay 24% on the gross rent without deducting expenses, which is exactly why the tax question belongs at the start of an investment plan, not the end.

What about Portugal, Greece and the others?

If the permit matters more than the place, other countries still run investment programmes, but the picture has moved everywhere. Portugal removed the property route from its programme in October 2023 and now points investors at funds and other qualifying investments. Greece kept property but raised the bar from 1 September 2024 to €800,000 in prime areas and €400,000 elsewhere.

Worth saying plainly, because it is the honest version: chasing a permit into a country you did not want to live in is usually the more expensive mistake. If your life is heading for the Costa del Sol, the cheaper path is the right Spanish visa, not a fund in a country you will visit twice a year.

Tax once you live here

The moment you spend more than 183 days in Spain in a calendar year, or move the centre of your life here, you become a Spanish tax resident and are taxed on your worldwide income. Double taxation treaties decide which country taxes what, and residents must also report assets held abroad on form 720 when a category passes €50,000.

Plan the tax year before you plan the move. Arriving in July or in January is not the same decision.

Your next steps

1. Work out which route fits your income, not which property fits a threshold. That threshold no longer exists.
2. Check the money you can evidence over a full year, in documents a consulate will accept.
3. Talk to a Spanish tax adviser before you set your arrival date, especially if you will keep income or property abroad.
4. Choose the home and let its completion date carry the visa timeline, rather than rushing both.
5. Apply at the consulate for your region, up to 90 days before you plan to enter Spain, and book the residence card appointment as soon as you land.