Article 93 of the Spanish income tax act lets people who move to Spain be taxed under non-resident rules for six tax years, at 24 % up to €600,000. Here is how it works when you are not an employee.

It is an income tax regime, nothing more

It does not remove VAT, social security or the formal obligations of your activity. That sentence looks obvious written down and is behind half the problems we see.

Can a self-employed person use it?

Only in specific cases opened up by the 2022 Startups Act:

• Entrepreneurial activity, evidenced by a favourable ENISA report.
• Highly qualified professionals providing services to start-ups, or carrying out training, research, development and innovation.
• International teleworkers, although those are usually employees of a foreign company.

An ordinary freelancer with Spanish clients still cannot use it.

The six ways in, and the conditions common to all of them

Article 93 is not one door but six, and which one you come through decides what evidence you need and how fragile your position is afterwards.

Route	What it requires
1. An employment contract	Moving to Spain because of a contract with a Spanish employer, or being posted here by a foreign one with a posting letter. The ordinary route, and the sturdiest.
2. Becoming a director	Appointment as a director of a company. Where that company is an asset-holding vehicle rather than a trading one, a limit on your shareholding applies.
3. Entrepreneurial activity	An activity classified as entrepreneurial, evidenced by a favourable report. It is a substantive assessment of the project, not a formality, and it takes time.
4. Highly qualified professional	Services provided to emerging companies, or training, research, development and innovation work, subject to a statutory threshold on how much of your total income comes from it.
5. International teleworking	Working remotely for a foreign employer or clients, using exclusively remote means, under the immigration authorisation for that purpose.
6. Accompanying family	Spouse, children under a certain age and, where there is no spouse, a parent, who move with you and apply alongside you. Their combined tax base has to stay below yours, and their regime is tied to yours: if you fall out, so do they.

On top of whichever route applies, the same conditions run through all of them: you must not have been tax resident in Spain during the five tax years before the move, the move must be linked to the cause you rely on, and the regime lasts the year you acquire residence plus the following five — six tax years in total, after which you drop into ordinary Spanish taxation with no transition and no extension.

What is inside the regime and what is outside

This is the part that is most often described wrongly, including by people selling the regime. You are taxed under non-resident rules, but not on Spanish source income alone.

Income	How it is treated
Employment income, wherever in the world it is earned	Inside. All of it is treated as obtained in Spain while you are in the regime. There is no exemption for the days you worked abroad
Income from the entrepreneurial or highly qualified activity that let you in	Inside, on the same logic
Foreign dividends, interest and capital gains	Outside, provided they are genuinely foreign source. This is the real attraction of the regime and the reason it suits people with investment income abroad
Spanish dividends, interest and capital gains	Inside, taxed at the separate scale for that kind of income, which is progressive and is not the 24 %
Spanish property income	Inside

The headline rate applies to the general base: 24 % up to €600,000 and 47 % on the excess. The threshold is a cliff for the part above it, not an allowance, and it is one figure for the year rather than one per source of income. Deductions and personal allowances that an ordinary Spanish taxpayer relies on are, with narrow exceptions, not available: the trade-off for a flat rate is the loss of nearly everything that reduces a progressive one, which is why the regime is not automatically better and why it should be modelled before it is chosen.

Two further effects matter more than they look. Wealth tax applies to you on a real basis, that is, on Spanish assets only rather than worldwide, and the reporting return on assets held abroad does not apply while you are in the regime. And whether the other country will accept you as a Spanish resident for treaty purposes is a question that has to be read treaty by treaty: some of them contain provisions aimed precisely at persons taxed on a limited basis. We look at that before the move where we can, because it is very hard to fix afterwards.

How the regime is lost

Three ways, and they do not have the same consequences.

• It expires. Six tax years and it ends by itself. From the seventh you are an ordinary Spanish resident, taxed on worldwide income and inside the foreign-asset reporting regime. Plenty of decisions — when to realise a gain, when to sell shares — belong to the sixth year rather than the seventh.
• You waive it. A waiver is filed in November or December of the year before it is to take effect, and it is a one-way door: having waived, you cannot opt back in.
• You are excluded. If a condition stops being met, you must notify it within one month, and the exclusion takes effect for the tax year in which the breach occurred — not from the date you notice it. That retroactive effect within the year is what makes an exclusion expensive, because the return already filed for that year was filed on the wrong basis.

Getting back the regime you lost is not, in practice, an option. That is the argument for having the conditions checked before something that looks harmless — a change of employer, a new client, a restructured role, a move of your family — turns into a breach.

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What applies to your Beckham regime, in two minutes

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The forms

Form	Purpose	When
149	Opting in, waiving or notifying exclusion	Within six months of registering with social security
151	The annual return under the regime; replaces Modelo 100	Same window as the ordinary tax return
303 and 390	Your VAT, if you are in business for VAT purposes	Quarterly and annually

The open question: Modelo 130

The regime applies non-resident income tax rules, and that tax has no quarterly payments on account. That is the reasoning most firms follow. It is also the point where we see most disagreement between advisers, so it is worth settling in writing before your first quarter rather than after.

Form 151, and what a year under the regime looks like

Form 151 replaces the ordinary income tax return for as long as you are in the regime, and it is filed in the same window as the ordinary campaign. It is a different return with a different logic: it starts from the premise that you are taxed under non-resident rules, so it separates the general base from investment income, applies the flat rate to the first, and gives you far fewer boxes in which to reduce anything.

Around it, if you are self-employed, the ordinary machinery of your activity carries on untouched: your VAT returns and annual summary, form 349 if you invoice businesses elsewhere in the EU, withholding returns if you pay professionals or rent business premises, and your social security contributions. The regime changes how your income is taxed. It changes nothing about the fact that you run an activity.

Is it actually worth it?

Sometimes clearly yes, sometimes clearly no, and the answer is arithmetic rather than opinion. The regime tends to win where income is high, where a large part of your wealth produces income outside Spain, and where you have few of the family and housing circumstances that reduce an ordinary Spanish bill. It tends to lose where income is moderate, where the personal and family allowances of ordinary taxation are worth more than the difference in rate, and where nearly everything you earn is Spanish anyway.

What we will do is run both, on your numbers, and tell you which is better and by how much — including the years after the regime ends, because a decision that wins for six years and creates a problem in the seventh is not a good decision. What we will not do is tell you the application is certain to succeed. Several of these routes involve an assessment by someone other than us, and anyone promising you an outcome on those is selling rather than advising.