Spain's digital nomad visa income requirement, derived from the law

For 2026, a single applicant must show €2,849 a month. That is not a figure we found somewhere and repeated: it is 200% of the Spanish minimum wage, which is what the law asks for, and the minimum wage is published in the official state gazette. Both halves are checkable, and this page shows the working.

Where the number comes from

The visa was created by Ley 28/2022, which added the international teleworker to Ley 14/2013. The Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs states the financial condition in one clause: applicants must show a "cantidad que represente mensualmente el 200% del salario mínimo interprofesional" — an amount representing, monthly, 200% of the minimum interprofessional wage.

So the threshold is not a fixed euro figure at all. It is a multiplier attached to a number that changes every year, which is why any page that prints one euro amount without a year attached is already unreliable.

The minimum wage itself is set by royal decree and published in the BOE:

| Year | Minimum wage (SMI) | Decree | Monthly basis | 200% = requirement | |---|---|---|---|---| | 2025 | €16,576 a year | Real Decreto 87/2025 | €1,381.33 | €2,762.67 | | 2026 | €17,094 a year | Real Decreto 126/2026 | €1,424.50 | €2,849.00 |

The ambiguity that makes everyone disagree

Here is the part no other page seems to address, and it is the reason the published figures conflict.

The Spanish minimum wage is legally expressed two ways at once: as €1,221 a month paid fourteen times a year, and as €17,094 a year. Both describe the same wage. But the law says "monthly", and those two readings give different monthly numbers:

• Using the fourteen-payment monthly figure: €1,221 × 2 = €2,442
• Using the annual figure divided by twelve: €17,094 ÷ 12 × 2 = €2,849

A gap of over €400 a month, from the same law and the same wage. The legal text does not disambiguate it.

The arithmetic settles which reading is applied in practice. The figure that appears on immigration practitioners' pages is €2,849, and €2,849 is exactly €17,094 ÷ 12 × 2 — to the cent, with no rounding. A number that lands exactly on one interpretation and misses the other by €407 is not a coincidence. The annualised reading is the one being used.

We are spelling this out rather than just printing €2,849 because knowing why it is that number is what lets you check next year's figure yourself, instead of trusting whichever page updated last.

Bringing family

The uplifts are also percentages of the same minimum wage, not flat fees. For a household of two the requirement adds 75% of the SMI, and each further person adds 25%.

On the 2026 basis of €1,424.50 a month:

| Household | Share of SMI | Monthly requirement | |---|---|---| | One applicant | 200% | €2,849.00 | | Applicant + one | 275% | €3,917.38 | | Applicant + two | 300% | €4,273.50 | | Each further person | + 25% | + €356.13 |

The percentage column is there so you can check the euro column: each row is simply €1,424.50 multiplied by that share. Beware of adding the rounded euro figures together instead — the 75% and 25% steps both land on half a cent, so accumulating rounded values drifts by a cent against multiplying the total share.

Why the other numbers you have seen look wrong

Search this and you will find €2,849, around €2,700, and €3,800, presented with equal confidence. They are almost all traceable rather than invented, and it is worth being able to tell them apart:

• Figures near €2,700 are the previous year's requirement. On the 2025 minimum wage the single-applicant figure was €2,762.67, and rounding or paraphrasing gets you to "about €2,700". Not wrong when written, just not current.
• €3,800 is a household figure rather than a single one. On the 2025 basis, one applicant plus one family member came to €3,798.67 — which is where "€3,800" comes from. It is being quoted as though it applied to a person applying alone.
• €2,442 appears occasionally and is the fourteen-payment reading discussed above.

None of that is detectable from the numbers themselves. It only becomes visible once you know the formula, which is the argument for publishing the formula rather than the output.

What we are not telling you

This page covers the income condition and nothing else. The visa also has professional requirements — a degree from an institution of recognised standing, or three years of experience in the field — plus criminal record certificates and other conditions, and meeting the income test alone does not get the visa granted.

We also do not know how consulates treat borderline cases, whether savings can substitute for income, or how strictly the documentation is assessed in practice. Those are questions about administrative behaviour, and we do not have a source for them. Anyone claiming to, on a page that also got the threshold year wrong, is worth reading sceptically.

Questions people ask

Can Americans get a digital nomad visa for Spain? Yes — the route is not restricted by nationality. It is designed for people working remotely for employers or clients outside Spain, which is the condition that matters, and applications are normally made at the Spanish consulate in your country of residence. Applicants already legally in Spain can apply directly through the large-enterprises unit instead.

How difficult is it to get a digital nomad visa for Spain? The income test is the part you can assess in advance with certainty, because it is arithmetic: either you can document €2,849 a month or you cannot. The parts that are harder to predict are the professional qualification requirement and the documentation, and we would be guessing if we rated the overall difficulty for you.

Can I move to Spain with no savings? Not on this route as a matter of the income test — it asks you to evidence recurring monthly income at the level above. Whether accumulated savings can stand in for income is exactly one of the administrative questions we said we cannot source, so we are not going to answer it either way.