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Does Spain have the best digital nomad visa in the world?

Several dozen countries around the world offer digital nomad visas to entice foreign talent. How does Spain and the conditions of its visa for remote workers and freelancers compare to its closest competitors?

Published: 29 November 2023 11:45 CET
Updated: 2 December 2023 08:16 CET

Does Spain have the best digital nomad visa in the world? Photo: Tima Miroschinicher / Pexels

There have been reports from certain media outlets claiming that Spain has the best digital nomad visa in the world.

As we’ve covered Spain’s visado para nómadas digitales in so much depth over the past two years, we’ve decided to carry out our own assessment.

Other than Spain, countries in Europe that offer DNVs are Portugal, Malta, Greece, Georgia, North Macedonia, Hungary, Romania, Iceland, Latvia, Croatia, Cyprus, Estonia and Norway.

Then there a number of Caribbean Islands, Latin American countries such as Colombia, Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil, as well as the UAE in the Middle East, Thailand and Malaysia in Asia and even some African nations like Mauritius and Namibia that are offering favourable conditions to foreign talent who want to live and work from their country.

Estimates vary between 40 and 60 digital nomad visas in total, new ones are added every year and some are cancelled or have their perks reduced, as in the recent case of Portugal.

In this article, our main focus will be on comparing Spain and its DNV with countries in Europe or those that offer a similar life experience.

So, is Spain’s digital nomad visa the best in the world?

The income requirement is quite low compared to other European countries

To be eligible for the Spanish DNV, you need to prove monthly earnings of at least 200 percent of the minimum interprofessional salary (SMI). The minimum wage in Spain is currently €1,260 per month, which means that you must be able to prove that you will have an income of at least €2,520 per month or €30,240 per year.

This is much lower than some other European countries including Greece which requires you to earn at least €3,500 per month after tax, Portugal which requires you to earn €3,040 and Estonia where you have to earn at least €3,504 gross per month.

Iceland has one of the most expensive requirements for monthly earnings at around €6,644 per month.

But of course, it’s not the lowest amount in the world. Brazil’s DNV only asks for minimum earnings of €1,366.19 per month and for Colombia it’s just €798.82 at the current exchange rate.

It’s not as favourable when it comes to tax breaks

Many countries entice digital nomads with tax breaks and lower tax rates than normal. It was initially thought that Spain would be offering some too, but as of yet, this hasn’t materialised.

The 24 percent flat income tax rate on earnings of up to €600,000 was initially promised to digital nomads (part of the Beckham Law) within the first six months of being in the country, but as of yet, it’s not yet possible to apply for this and standard income tax applies to them. On top of this, any nomads who have to register as self-employed rather than working remotely as a contract worker are not eligible for it.

Conversely, Greece has introduced a 50 percent reduction in taxes for digital nomads who stay in the country for more than six months.

In Croatia, nomads who are considered Croatian tax residents are exempt from income tax on remote work income but must pay tax on other worldwide income, such as rent from a property abroad.

The Portuguese digital nomad visa for example allows for people to apply for Non Habitual Residence status and benefit from a tax exemption on their foreign-sourced income, as well as a reduced rate of 20 percent tax on Portuguese income. In October, however, the country announced that the current NHR regime will be closed for new applications from 2024, so it remains to be seen whether Porgutal will still be better.

You have to pay high social security contributions in Spain

If you have come to Spain on the DNV and are self-employed, you will generally have to sign up to the autónomo system. This will require you to pay monthly social security payments to cover healthcare and other benefits, which is on top of tax. Spain’s social security payments are one of the highest in Europe, meaning this could be a dealbreaker for some.

For example, anyone earning enough for the DNV will have to shell out at least €340 per month in social security fees in 2024. And if you earn above €2,760 per month, you’ll have to pay even more.

Spain offers a good quality of life for many digital nomds. Photo: Helena Lopes / Pexels

Spain has a relatively low cost of living

If you compare Spain to some other European countries that offer DNVs, it has a relatively low cost of living, especially when looking at prices in Norway, Malta and Iceland for example. According to the cost of living comparison site Expatistan, Malta is 24 percent more expensive than Spain and Norway is 49 percent more.

But when comparing Spain to other southern European countries with the visa – Croatia, Greece, Portugal and Cyprus, you’ll find it’s slightly more expensive.

Of course, the cost of living will greatly depend on where in Spain you choose to base yourself. Living in Madrid, Barcelona or San Sebastián will be much more expensive than if you choose Vigo, Oviedo, Córdoba or Granada. Expatistan states that Granada is 23 percent cheaper than Madrid, while Vigo is 11 percent cheaper than Barcelona.

It goes without saying if you’re comparing Spain with Latin America, Asian or some Caribbean countries that offer the DNV, it’s more expensive. For example, you would generally pay much less in Colombia, Ecuador and Mexico than you would in Spain. Expatistan states that the cost of living is 53 percent less in Colombia than in Spain.

Spain offers a good quality of life and high overall standards

Three Spanish cities – Málaga, Alicante and Valencia – recently claimed all three top places as the best cities for foreign residents in the 2023 InterNations Survey, which goes to show that Spain’s quality of life is vastly appreciated.

Weather, nature, food, friendliness of locals, culture, high welfare standards, good for families, the list of compliments Spain is showered in is abundant, especially among foreigners who don’t have to deal with the dire work market and low wages.

Foreigners who qualify for Spain’s digital nomad visa and have enough to support their families can get free access to Spain’s public education system for their kids. The Hungarian Digital Nomad Visa for example doesn’t even allow for any extra family members.

In the latest World Population Review education rankings, Spain comes in 17th in the world, in front of all other countries offering digital nomad visas in the world, with the exception of Norway.

When it comes to healthcare, whether you have private or public insurance, in Spain it’s generally very good. Those who are self-employed and are registered as autónomo paying into the social security system will be eligible for public healthcare. Most DNV countries on the other hand require you to have private health insurance, while Spain does offer the option for self-employed to be covered by the public scheme.

According to CEOWorld Magazine‘s Health Care Index 2023, Spain has the eighth best healthcare system in the world, beating all other countries in the world that offer DNVs.

In terms of safety, Spain is of course considerably safer than Latin American countries with DNVs but on a par with competitors in Europe and Asia.

It offers a pathway to citizenship or permanent residency

The Spanish DNV offers holders the chance to apply for permanent residency or citizenship in the future if they want to settle down. Visas are initially valid for one year, but enable you to apply for a three-year residence permit, which can be renewed for two further years.

Once you’ve been in Spain a total of five years you can get permanent residency and for most people after 10 years, they can apply for citizenship (this depends on where you’re from and is different for those from Latin American countries and the Philippines).

Greece and Hungary allow digital nomads to stay for one year and extend the residence permit for another 12 months, while Croatia allows you to stay up to one year. Brazil also allows for an initial one-year period, which may be extended for another year.

Verdict

Assessing each and every pro and con of all the DNVs available around the world in order to produce a global ranking is near impossible, not least because it’s subject to personal preferences.

However, Spain’s digital nomad visa is certainly a good choice for budding remote workers on a median income who are primarily seeking a better quality of life with a relatively low cost of living.

On the other hand, Spain’s relatively high tax burden and burdensome bureaucracy might not make it the best choice for everyone, especially high foreign earners.

Is Spain’s the best digital nomad visa in the world? If you factor in all the benefits life in Spain brings – weather, safety, healthcare, nature, cities, food, people, culture – it’s the country itself which might make its digital nomad visa the best available.

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Good tourist, bad tourist: How to travel responsibly in Spain

Barcelona resident David Mar doesn’t travel, but he thinks about tourism every day.

Tourists crowd the buses — essential for movement in a hilly neighbourhood like his. They leave trash for residents to discover in the morning. They shout and sing at night and wander drunkenly through the residential streets, ambling into backyards and pulling down laundry on clotheslines.

“It’s a disturbance that goes from when you wake up in the morning until you go to bed at night,” he told The Local Spain. “You don’t feel welcome in your own neighbourhood.”

Mar lives in Turó de la Rovira, on a 262-metre hill that towers over the city.

A viewpoint atop the hill called Los Bunkers de Carmel has gone viral on TikTok for its sweeping city views, bringing hordes of tourists to come drink wine, watch the sunset, and sometimes party into the early morning.

But for the residents of the surrounding Carmel neighbourhood — among Barcelona’s poorest — the consequences of this tourist explosion have been severe.

Mar was involved in a physical altercation with a group of four Australians, after he confronted them for tipping over parked motorcycles.

And last June a 76 year-old man was assaulted by a group of seven English-speaking youths after he tried to stop them from jumping a fence that had been put up around the Bunkers.

Such events are commonplace in Carmel, Mar says, with the post-pandemic massification of tourism provoking an unstoppable flow of Instagram-like-hungry travellers, fuelled by an increasingly lucrative industry whose interests often conflict with those of local residents.

“It collides directly with the most basic rights of those who live here,” Mar says. “Our right to housing, our right to transportation, our right to rest peacefully.”

With some 1.3 billion international arrivals globally in 2023, more people are travelling for pleasure than ever before in human history.

But as excessive crowds stress infrastructure and locals find themselves pushed out of their own communities, prevailing attitudes towards travel must be reconsidered if global tourism is to continue growing sustainably.

“Tourism isn’t a right, it’s a decision that you make,” Mar says. “And if you do it, you must be aware of the consequences it can generate.”

A couple uses a selfie stick to take a picture next to a banner warning tourists on drought alert in Catalonia, near Sagrada Familia basilica in Barcelona. (Photo by PAU BARRENA / AFP)

Empathy abroad

Bartolomé Deyá Tortella, a researcher and the Dean of Tourism Faculty at the University of the Balearic Islands, says few tourists consider such consequences.

Instead, they embrace their inner hedonist and focus their vacation time on maximum pleasure for minimum price. This mindset might cause a tourist to forget their values and do things they’d never do at home.

“We all become capitalists when we practice tourism,” Deyá told The Local. “You think, ‘I paid for this, I’m on vacation, I’m having my moment of pleasure, I worked the whole year for it.”

Such thinking could explain why someone might respect quiet hours in their own neighbourhoods, but shout drunkenly in the streets late at night while on vacation.

Or why on a trip to Mallorca, where Deyá lives and works, a tourist might feel compelled to take a 10-minute shower — despite the water-stressed Mediterranean island’s near-drought conditions — while residents routinely shower in a minute or less.

Failure to consider saving water or respecting quiet hours comes down to lack of empathy, Deyá says, and our tendency to other the people whose communities we enter while traveling.

“Act as if you were in your own home,” he says. “If when you’re in your own city you don’t shout in the street because you know your neighbours are sleeping, why do it when you’re traveling?”

Social sustainability

Much has been said about environmental sustainability, but it’s easy to forget the social impacts of travel; how our interactions with local people and economies can change that society.

“When every one of us travels, it implies that the places where we came from are transformed, the places we pass through are transformed, and obviously, so are the places we arrive to,” Manuel de la Calle Vaquero, Vicedean of the Faculty of Commerce and Tourism at Complutense University of Madrid, told The Local Spain.

With this in mind, the most sustainable way to travel is by using one’s presence to positively impact the local community.

Or in other words, to leave a place better than you found it.

“When you jump on a plane, it’s important to make sure that trip counts for something positive,” says Justin Francis, founder of Responsible Travel, a holiday company that collaborates with local partners to plan socially and environmentally sustainable vacations.

“I advise people to fly less, keep short trips flight-free – and, when you do fly, stay in a place longer and travel in a way that does as much good as possible,” Francis says.

Anti-gentrification banners addressing were already hanging from balconies in Barcelona back in 2017. (Photo by Josep LAGO / AFP)

Neighbourhood colonisers

One of the most significant ways in which tourism can alter the social landscape is through accommodation.

Not long ago, tourists and residents in Spain did not typically mix, with tourists sticking near their hotels, rarely straying into residential zones, Deyá says.

But today’s tourist has matured, and now expects novelty; an “authentic” experience that they can convince themselves distinguishes them from the thousands of other tourists expecting the same.

Nowadays they live among residents, in apartments instead of hotels, utilizing short-term rental platforms like Airbnb, which has led to the dissolution of boundaries between a city’s tourist and local zones.

Vaquero describes this new kind of tourist as the “anti-tourism” tourist, in the sense that they’re not interested in the sort of tourism promoted by governments and travel agencies, but instead consider themselves the explorers of new “authentic” destinations outside the typical tourist sphere.

“The one who wants to leave the traditional tourist circuit and supposedly goes looking for ‘authentic’ neighbourhoods — that tourist is obviously the coloniser,” Vaquero says.

The boom in short-term vacation rentals has led to what’s been dubbed the “Airbnb effect” in neighbourhoods worldwide, in which residents are slowly replaced by a constant flux of tourists. For landlords, vacation rentals can be far more lucrative than renting to residents, thus incentivizing them to evict long-term tenants in order to list their properties on Airbnb.

This is exactly what happened to Emanuele Dal Carlo. His landlord didn’t want to renew the lease on his small Venice apartment because they could make more renting it out on Airbnb. Like so many other Venetians, Dal Carlo had to move to the mainland.

To better understand the cultural erosion he saw happening to his city as a result of Airbnb, Dal Carlo enlisted the help of researchers to conduct a study, through which he discovered only 2,000 of the 3,300 Airbnbs in the city were registered with the government, and many were rented by foreign hosts with zero connection to Venice.

This means that much of the money tourists spend on accommodation never lands on the ground, thus eliminating any potential benefit to the local economy.

“What’s wrong is that the money available from tourism is not fairly distributed between workers and residents,” Dal Carlo says.

Dal Carlo now runs Fairbnb, an ethical Airbnb alternative which promotes “community-powered tourism.” Hosts are certified local, and the platform fees are put directly towards a social project in the local community, like food redistribution or sustainable energy initiatives.

As a tourist, the best way to avoid feeding the problem is by avoiding short term rentals when possible, Dal Carlo says, and instead booking accommodations with local businesses, like small independent hotels or traditional bed and breakfasts.

And if you absolutely must use Airbnb, Dal Carlo suggests booking with local hosts.

“If you’re traveling to Venice and your host is from Finland, ask yourself some questions,” he says.

An elderly local man on crutches waits to cross as a group of tourists using Segways squeeze by and into the narrow streets of Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter. (Photo by PAU BARRENA / AFP)

Whose fault?

In Spain, anti-tourism protests have crescendoed in recent weeks. The travel industry, it seems, has grown beyond its means, and locals are taking note.

To some degree, the problem can be traced to poor planning on the part of local governments and the unchecked expansion of algorithmic platforms like Airbnb.

Deyá points out that many government entities in Spain have welcomed tourist money, pursuing marketing campaigns without investing in adequate preparation.

“Tourism is the typical sector where many governments say, ‘ok, let’s leave it, because this works. Don’t touch it,’” Deyá says. “But there’s been no planning, there’s been no strategy.”

Back in Barcelona, the city’s public transport authority was involved in the promotion of the Carmel bunkers through its Bus Turistic webpage, encouraging tourists to come see the “spectacular views over Barcelona.”

The promotion was taken down on April 16th after continued anti-tourism protests from the Turó de la Rovira neighbourhood council, of which Mar is a member.

But as is the case with so many industries in a crowded world full of contradictions, the individual cannot be absolved of all responsibility, as one’s choice to participate in harmful systems enables their continuation.

No law or tourist tax will compel tourists to act with empathy, and the absence of such regulations should not be used to justify one’s bad behaviour abroad.

“The problem is that we’re hypocrites, and we think that it’s someone else who has to solve the problem,” Deyá says.

Mar, who’s never been much of a traveller himself, is no longer interested in traveling internationally after seeing what tourism has done to his city.

“So much of my city has become inhospitable for residents,” he says. “Because we’re truly suffering from it here in Barcelona, the concept of tourism disgusts me more and more.”

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