Spain · Residency by investment
Investor Residence Visa (Visado de residencia para inversores)
Abolished. Organic Law 1/2025 of 2 January 2025, published in the BOE on 3 January 2025, repealed Articles 63–67 of Law 14/2013. No new applications have been accepted since 3 April 2025. Nothing replaced it. Spain deliberately chose not to create a successor investment route.
Spain's decision to end its programme is the clearest signal in Europe that passive-capital residency is politically finished in the large EU states. It was killed for reasons of housing affordability, not security, and no replacement was offered. The government's stated view is that Spain wants productive investment, not asset purchases. Existing permits survive, but the route itself is a dead letter.
Qualifying routes
Closed 3 April 2025. This route was the political target.
Closed 3 April 2025
Closed 3 April 2025
Closed 3 April 2025
Closed 3 April 2025
The facts
- Minimum investment
- €500k
- Total landed cost
- Not applicable. The programme has been abolished.
- Route type
- Residency by investment
- Physical presence
- The rule required one visit per year to maintain the permit. There was no minimum stay.
- Permanent residency
- For existing holders, 5 years
- Citizenship
- For existing holders, the requirement is 10 years of legal residence (2 years for nationals of Ibero-American countries, Andorra, the Philippines, Equatorial Guinea, Portugal and Sephardic Jews). Golden Visa years count toward this only if the holder was actually resident.
- Language test
- The DELE A2 language exam, plus the CCSE test on constitutional and sociocultural knowledge.
- Dual citizenship
- Not permitted. You would have to renounce.
- The programme is gone. Any 2026 marketing that still offers a Spain Golden Visa for EUR 500,000 is fraudulent or negligent. This is the single most common piece of stale information in the sector.
- Transitional protection is real, but limited. Applications filed before 3 April 2025 are processed under the old rules. Permits already granted remain valid until their stated expiry and are renewable under the framework in force when they were first granted. They are not portable to new family members indefinitely. Take advice before assuming a renewal.
- The Golden Visa never delivered citizenship efficiently anyway. Spain requires 10 years of actual residence for most nationalities and does not permit dual citizenship for them, so naturalisation meant renouncing the original passport.
- Anyone who bought Spanish property for the visa still owns the property. They now own it inside a wealth-tax and solidarity-tax net, with no immigration benefit attached.