Retiring in Spain
Retiring to Spain looks simple from the outside. Sun, a lower cost of living, a slower week. The paperwork behind it is where people get caught: whether you need a visa at all, how you get into the public health system, whether the years you worked at home still count, and which country ends up taxing the pension you spent forty years building. This page walks through all four, and points you to the deeper reads on each.
Do you need a visa to retire in Spain?
The first fork in the road is your passport. If you hold the nationality of an EU or EEA country or Switzerland, there is no visa. You move, you register on the padrón, and you apply for your EU registration certificate once you intend to stay longer than three months. You will still be asked to show that you have enough income and healthcare cover so that you do not become a burden on the Spanish system, but this is a registration, not an application that can be refused on discretion. We cover the sequence on our EU residency page.
If you hold a non EU passport, the usual route for a retiree is the non lucrative visa, the NLV. It is designed for people who can live in Spain without working, which describes a pensioner exactly. The income rule is set as a multiple of the IPREM, the Spanish reference income indicator. The IPREM has been frozen at 600 euros a month since 2023 because no new state budget has been approved, and it is still 600 euros a month in 2026. The NLV asks for 400 percent of that, so 2,400 euros a month or 28,800 euros a year for the main applicant, plus 100 percent of IPREM, another 600 euros a month, for each family member you bring. Our NLV module takes you through it.
Healthcare when you retire in Spain
Healthcare is the question that keeps people awake, and it has a cleaner answer than most expect. If you draw a state pension from another EU or EEA country and you have no Spanish pension of your own, that country stays responsible for your healthcare. It issues an S1 document, you register it with the Instituto Nacional de la Seguridad Social, and you are then treated inside the Spanish public system on the same terms as a Spanish pensioner. Your home country settles the bill behind the scenes. The detail sits in our blog on the S1 form and your healthcare rights.
If you do not qualify for an S1, because you are not yet at state pension age, or because you come from outside the EU, there are two other doors. Private insurance is the one most people use in the first years, and it is mandatory for an NLV application anyway. The other is the convenio especial, a paid subscription to the public system run by the regions. It has no age limit and no exclusion for pre existing conditions, which makes it valuable for people private insurers will not touch. We compare the options in our piece on the convenio especial.
Do your foreign pension years still count?
They do, and this is the part people underestimate. A Spanish contributory pension normally requires at least 15 years of contributions, with at least two of them falling inside the 15 years before you claim. In 2026 the ordinary retirement age is 66 years and 8 months, dropping to 65 for anyone with at least 38 years and 3 months of contributions. Fifteen years earns you 50 percent of your base reguladora, and the percentage climbs from there to a full 100 percent at around 36 years and 6 months.
Very few people who move to Spain in their fifties or sixties will ever hit 15 Spanish years. Under EU Regulations 883/2004 and 987/2009 they do not have to. Insured years in any other member state count towards the Spanish threshold, a mechanism called totalisation. Once you clear the threshold, each country pays its own pro rata share for the years insured there. The practical result is that many retirees in Spain end up with two or three modest pensions arriving from different countries rather than one large one. That is normal, not a mistake.
How Spain taxes a foreign pension
Once you are a Spanish tax resident, Spain taxes your worldwide income, and a foreign pension is income. In the annual Renta it is declared as rendimiento del trabajo, employment income, which means it lands in the general base and is taxed on the progressive scale where the autonomous community sets half the rate. Our income tax pillar explains that scale.
What changes the answer is the double taxation treaty between Spain and the country paying the pension. As a broad rule, private and company pensions are taxed where you live, so in Spain. Government and civil service pensions, the clases pasivas category, are usually taxed only by the state that pays them. State social security pensions sit in between and depend entirely on the specific treaty, which is why a German and a Dutch retiree living on the same street can get different answers. The treaty always wins over the general rule, and the Agencia Tributaria expects you to apply it correctly. We break the mechanics down in our blog on double taxation treaties.
Reporting what you hold abroad
Tax residency also brings a reporting duty that has nothing to do with paying tax. The Modelo 720 is an informational declaration of assets held outside Spain, filed by 31 March for the previous year, split into three independent blocks with a 50,000 euro threshold each. Foreign pension pots often sit inside the second block, alongside securities and life insurance, and that catches retirees off guard. Our Modelo 720 page sets out who has to file.
Where to go next
- Combining your insured years across borders, in our blog on totalisation
- Which country taxes which type of pension, in our blog on foreign pension taxation
- Why the year you take a lump sum matters more than the amount
- Which pension products fall inside the Modelo 720 and which do not
- The Seguridad Social pensioner module for the registration itself
- Our healthcare pillar for how the system works day to day
Frequently asked questions
Sort your Spanish retirement paperwork
Step by step modules that take you from arrival to registered pensioner.
The S1 registration, your NUSS and your padrón, in the right order and without a gestor.
