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What’s the income requirement for Spain’s digital nomad visa and will it go up in 2024?

Spain’s DNV became available for the first time earlier this year, but there's still a lot of confusion about the financial requirements and many media outlets are reporting incorrect amounts. There's also a big chance the threshold will increase in 2024.

What's the income requirement for Spain's digital nomad visa and will it go up in 2024?
What's the income requirement for Spain's digital nomad visa and will it go up in 2024? Photo: Helen Lopes / Pexels

READ FIRST: New 2024 income requirement for Spain’s Digital Nomad Visa confirmed

Spain’s DNV is also referred to as visado de teletrabajador de carácter internacional on most of the official websites in Spain, so this is what you’ll need to search for when researching. 

So, what is the Spanish DNV’s true income requirement, how much do you actually need to earn per month in order to be able to get Spain’s DNV?

Firstly, the UGE (Unidad de Grandes Empresas y Colectivos Estratégicos) the body that deals with these visas and the one you apply to states that you need to prove you have monthly earnings of at least 200 percent of the minimum interprofessional salary (SMI), or minimum wage.

READ ALSO – LISTED: All the documents you need for Spain’s digital nomad visa

Official government sources state that Spain’s minimum wage is currently €1,080.

However, here’s where much of the confusion comes in – this is the amount across 14 payments rather than 12. It is standard for many companies in Spain to pay their employees 14 times a year rather than just once per month or 12 times. 

If you take the minimum wage amount across 12 payments, it equates to €1,260 per month.

This means that you must be able to prove that you will have an income that’s 200 percent of this amount to obtain Spain’s digital nomad visa. This equals €2,520 per month or €30,240 per year.

If you’re applying for yourself and your partner, you will need to prove you earn an extra 75 percent of the SMI. This currently equates to an extra €945 per month on top of the €2,520 just for you.

For each additional family member after this, such as children, you will have to prove you have an extra 25 percent of the SMI, which is an extra €315 per month.

If you are an employee and a remote worker, you should be able to prove this via your contract, which you will submit along with your application.  

If you are self-employed, like many on the DNV will be, it’s likely you won’t have fixed earnings each month and your income will fluctuate. In this case, you can prove this amount either with several job contracts, invoices, bank statements or tax returns.

If you earn different amounts, many nomads have stated that they have submitted invoices for the last three months or more and the authorities have taken the average to check if it’s over €2,520 per month.

READ ALSO: Is Spain’s digital nomad visa still worth it?

Will the monthly requirement for the DNV go up in 2024?

Spain’s SMI is set for another rise in 2024 and experts predict that this will most likely happen from January.

While the exact amount hasn’t been finalised yet and the government still has to approve the rise, the Ministry of Labour has proposed it should be raised by four percent.

This would result in the amount going up to €1,123.20 per month across fourteen payments, compared to the current €1,080.

When split up between the 12 payments that many from other countries are used to, this will equate to €1,310.40 per month. 200 percent of this amount equals €2620.80 per month, which is what those applying for the DNV in 2024 would need if SMI increases.

READ ALSO: What we know so far about Spain’s next minimum wage increase

This would mean that digital nomads applying next year would need to earn an extra €100.80 per month compared with those who applied in 2023. This is equivalent to earnings of €31,449.60 per year.

It would also mean that the amounts for each family member you want to bring with you will  increase. It would be an extra €982.80 for a partner for example and €327.60 for any more after that such as a child. 

While the exact amount you’ll need to earn to be eligible for the DNV in 2024 remains unknown it’s extremely likely that the amount will go up and that you will have to prove you earn more than anyone who applied this year.

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DIGITAL NOMADS IN SPAIN

Cafés in Spain on war footing against remote workers hogging space

Bars and cafés in Valencia, Santiago and Barcelona have started to take action against lingering remote workers and digital nomads by cutting off the Wi-Fi during peak hours, with some even banning remote working on their premises.

Cafés in Spain on war footing against remote workers hogging space

Increasingly in recent years, a trend has emerged: someone arrives in a café, orders a coffee, opens his or her laptop and then spends the whole day working without buying anything else.

For many digital nomads and remote workers, it seems spending a couple of euros on a coffee is a fair price for occupying a table for an entire morning or afternoon.

Some might say they are contributing to the local economy and supporting local businesses, but clearly, for a small business owner this isn’t a profitable arrangement, and many are now fighting back.

In Valencia, posters have appeared at some cafés banning remote working during peak hours: 8.30 to 12.30.

One Valencia café owner told La Vanguardia: “Our place is small and between 10 and 11.30 in the morning it’s impossible, we need all the tables.”

Raquel Llanes, boss at the Departure Café in the Raval area of Barcelona, explained to Barcelona Secreta that the situation has gotten out of control: “We’ve had customers who have ordered an espresso and sat for eight hours, people who have asked us to turn the music down so they could have meetings, customers who took out their Tupperware to eat… At first we adapted the space with sockets and to work, but after two years we realised that the numbers weren’t working out.”

Some have opted for less friendly, but equally effective methods: turning off the Wi-Fi network of the premises during peak hours.

“The owner has got rid of the Wi-Fi to avoid precisely these situations. People sat down and didn’t leave,” one waitress told La Vanguardia.

Similar sentiments have arisen in the Galician city of Santiago, where one café owner told La Voz de Galicia: “We prefer them not to come. If someone comes in and opens a laptop we don’t tell them anything, but if they’ve been there for a long time and we need space for a group, we ask them to please move”. 

When a remote worker in Valencia posted a negative comment about a café where the owner had asked him to leave, their reply went viral, as they stated “we can’t lose regular customers so that you can work”. 

Remote working (teletrabajo in Spanish) has exploded in popularity in Spain in recent years, particularly in the post-pandemic period, and often the people taking advantage of this flexibility are foreign digital nomads and remote workers. Many of them choose to work from local bars and cafés.

It should be said that not all people working remotely in Spain are foreigners. Many Spaniards also have flexible or remote working arrangements and will no doubt occasionally work in a local bar or café. Equally, many digital nomads take advantage of the abundance of ‘co-working’ spaces popping up around Spain, which are exactly for this purpose.

There are even café owners who promote the ‘work friendly’ environment as a means of establishing a loyal customer base.

Other hospitality businesses have preferred to allocate an area for remote working while keeping the bar area and certain tables for regular customers who stop by for a quick bite or coffee. 

READ ALSO: The best co-working spaces for digital nomads in Spain

The row over remote working in traditional Spanish bars and cafés is yet another chapter in the current debate over the influence mass tourism and gentrification is having on Spaniards’ standard of living. 

In the increasingly online, post-pandemic world, the change has been stark in some parts of Spain. Take a stroll through the Raval or L’Eixample neighbourhoods of Barcelona, or the Ruzafa and El Cabanyal areas of Valencia in 2024, and you’re likely to see buildings plastered in Airbnb lockboxes and possibly even hear more fluent, non-native English than you do Spanish in certain parts.

Tourists and wealthy remote workers, the logic goes, visit or move to a trendy city they’ve seen on an international ranking, say Málaga or Valencia, which causes rents to rise because landlords in the area convert their properties into short-term tourist rental accommodation to meet the growing demand, which in turn turfs out locals or shuts down local businesses. 

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