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DIGITAL NOMADS IN SPAIN

CONFIRMED: Spain’s new income requirement for digital nomads in 2024

The financial requirements for Spain’s digital nomad visa (DNV) have increased for 2024. Here's what you need to know if you're considering applying this year.

Published: 14 February 2024 10:53 CET
CONFIRMED: Spain’s new income requirement for digital nomads in 2024
What are the financial requirements for Spain's DNV in 2024? Photo: Ivan Samkov / Pexels

Spain’s minimum wage increased this year meaning so too has the financial requirement for the digital nomad visa or DNV. This means anyone applying in 2024 will have to show they earn more than those who applied in 2023. 

Spain’s DNV is referred to as visado de teletrabajador de carácter internacional on most of the official websites in Spain and became available for the first time at the beginning of 2023. 

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

In January of this year, Spain’s Labour Ministry announced it would raise the minimum wage in 2024 by €54 per month over 14 payments.

This represents a five percent increase, meaning that the minimum interprofessional wage is now €1,134 gross over 14 payments. This works out to 12 monthly payments and two extra ones, as is the norm in Spain. 

In real terms, this means that the minimum wage increase per month for 2024 is €63, and the minimum monthly wage (if seen as 12 payments instead of 14) is €1,323 gross. 

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

Two hundred percent of €1,323 equals €2,646, meaning this is now the monthly amount you must earn in order to be eligible for the DNV. This equates to €31,752 per year. 

In 2023, the monthly amount you had to earn for the DNV was €2,520 per month or €30,240 per year.

This means that the amounts have also gone up for anyone accompanying you on the visa, such as a partner and children. 

If you’re applying for yourself and your partner, you will need to prove you earn an extra 75 percent of the minimum wage. This currently equates to an extra €1,984.50 per month on top of the €2,646 just for you, so a total of €4,630.50 per month. 

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 €661.50 per month.

In total, if you’re applying for a family of two adults and two children, you will need to prove you earn a total of €5,953.50 per month or €71,442 per year. 

If you’re applying as an employee and a remote worker, you should be able to prove your monthly income via your contract, which you will submit along with your application.  

If you are self-employed, like many applying for the DNV, it’s likely you won’t have fixed earnings and your income will fluctuate every month. In this case, the authorities will take your average earnings over the last three to six months for example, so you’ll have to make sure this average is over the threshold. 

Self-employed workers can prove their monthly earnings with several job contracts, invoices, bank statements and tax returns.

Even with the increase to €1,323 per month (over 12 months), Spain’s minimum wage is still considerably lower than France’s (€1,747), Germany’s (€1,997) or Ireland’s (€1,909).

Because of this, Labour Minister Yolanda Díaz says she plans to raise Spain’s minimum wage again in 2025.

This means that if the financial requirements are already a stretch for you and you’re planning on waiting until next year to apply, you may want to speed up your move, so you don’t have to prove you earn more in the future. 

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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.

Published: 10 May 2024 11:02 CEST
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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