Spain's two highly qualified routes now ask the same salary

Spain has two ways to get a residence permit as a highly qualified professional, and they sit under the same law: the EU Blue Card, and the national authorisation. Most comparisons of the two lead with the salary, because that is what people are usually stuck on.

As of the ministry's June 2026 update, the salary is no longer a difference. Both routes ask for €41,356.36 a year. What separates them is that one of them can go lower and the other cannot.

The two figures

The gap between having a reduction and not having one is €8,271.27 a year. For anyone who fits either of the two reduction cases, that is the whole decision.

Where the number comes from, and why no law contains it

Neither figure appears in Spanish law. The order that governs this — Orden PJC/44/2026, published in the state gazette on 30 January 2026 — sets the bar as a multiple, not an amount: 1.4 times the average gross annual earnings per worker as measured by the national statistics institute, with a coefficient of 0.8 where a reduction applies.

So the arithmetic is the source of the number, and you can do it yourself:

• The statistics institute published the 2024 average on 28 May 2026: €29,540.26.
• 29,540.26 × 1.4 = €41,356.36 — the standard threshold.
• 41,356.36 × 0.8 = €33,085.09 — the reduced one, for the Blue Card only.

The ministry itself published exactly these results in a two-page update dated June 2026, and that document is where the national route's figure comes from too.

The part that catches people out: the bar moves without the rule changing

Because the threshold is defined against a statistical series, it changes every time that series is republished — with no amendment, no announcement, and no new law to notice.

Two consequences follow, and both are practical:

• The date that matters is not the date the statistics appear. The order says a new threshold applies to applications filed from one month after the new edition is published. An application filed inside that month is still judged against the old figure.
• Any page quoting a euro amount without a date attached is unreliable, including this one if you read it a year from now. This figure is correct against the edition published on 28 May 2026 and will be superseded by the next one.

We can say that with some feeling, because we got it wrong ourselves: this site carried the previous figure, €39,269.92, for three months after it stopped being true. It was 1.4 times the 2023 average — right when we published it, and quietly expired by the May 2026 release.

Why the national route looked like it had no threshold at all

If you search for the national authorisation's salary requirement, you can easily conclude that no figure has been published. The government's own information sheet for that authorisation leaves the salary section blank and says it will be completed once the governing instruction is published. That sheet is still blank today.

The number exists anyway, in a PDF from the same ministry, reachable in one click from a neighbouring page under a heading about other information of interest. A department can run an up-to-date internal document and a stale public page at the same time. If a page you would expect to answer this question does not, the answer may simply be filed somewhere else on the same site.

Figures you will see elsewhere

€54,142 and €40,077 both circulate widely in advisers' write-ups as thresholds for these routes. Neither matches the ministry's current publication, and the pages printing them do not cite the order or the update. We are naming the discrepancy rather than guessing at its cause — they may be older methodologies, or a different reference series.

So which route

Not on price, because the price is the same. The questions that decide it:

• Can you reach the reduction? A shortage occupation in groups 1–2 of the national classification, or a qualification obtained within the last three years. If yes, the Blue Card asks €8,271.27 a year less than the national route can ever ask.
• Do you want to move within the EU later? The Blue Card carries intra-EU mobility rights the national authorisation does not. This page compares the salary condition only; it does not claim the two permissions are otherwise equivalent.

If neither applies to you, the salary condition gives you no reason to prefer one over the other — which is a more useful answer than a comparison table implying it does.