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 Organic Law 1/2025 of 2 January 2025 (published in the BOE on 3 January 2025) repealed Articles 63–67 of Law 14/2013.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 did not create a successor investment route.
Spain's abolition is the cleanest signal in Europe that passive-capital residency is politically finished in the large EU states. It was killed for housing-affordability reasons, not security reasons, 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 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 — programme abolished
- Physical presence
- was one visit per year to maintain the permit; no minimum stay
- Permanent residency
- existing holders: 5 years
- Citizenship
- existing holders: 10 years of legal residence (2 years for nationals of Ibero-American countries, Andorra, the Philippines, Equatorial Guinea, Portugal and Sephardic Jews) — but Golden Visa years count only if actually resident
- Language test
- DELE A2 plus the CCSE constitutional and sociocultural knowledge test
- Dual citizenship
- Not permitted — you would have to renounce
- The programme is gone. Any 2026 marketing offering 'Spain Golden Visa 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, and permits already granted remain valid to their stated expiry and renewable under the framework in force when 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 — and now owns it inside a wealth-tax and solidarity-tax net with no immigration benefit.