Spain's golden visa: abolished in April 2025

Official fee

Not applicable: the permit no longer exists. No investment of any amount now produces a Spanish investor visa

Official name

Visado de residencia para inversores (derogado)

Forms

—

Steps

8

Documents required

3

Source: Boletín Oficial del Estado — Ley Orgánica 1/2025, de medidas en materia de eficiencia del Servicio Público de Justicia — disposición final vigesimoprimera. Checked 14 September 2026.

Every immigration fee, with the official Spanish wording

Step by step

1. 1

   The short answer

   Spain has no investor visa. Articles 63 to 67 of Ley 14/2013 — the investor residence visa, how the investment was evidenced, its effects, the investor residence permit and its duration — were all left without content with effect from 3 April 2025, by the twenty-first final provision of Organic Law 1/2025. Buying property in Spain, at any price, no longer produces residence.

2. 2

   What that means for the figures you may have been quoted

   Every threshold associated with the route went with the articles that contained it: the property purchase, the capital transfer, the government debt, the shares, the bank deposit, the business project of general interest. None of them is a route to residence now, because the provision that turned an investment into a permit has no content. An adviser quoting you a figure is quoting a repealed article.

3. 3

   If you applied before 3 April 2025, you are covered

   The first transitional provision says it plainly: investors, or family members of investors, who filed their application before that date may receive the corresponding visa or authorisation under the rules in force on the date the application was filed. A file submitted in time is decided under the old law, not refused because the law has since changed.

4. 4

   If you already hold one, it stays valid

   The second transitional provision protects permits already granted. Investor visas and authorisations valid on 3 April 2025 keep that validity for the whole period they were issued for. Nothing was cancelled, shortened or called in. If your card says it runs to a date, it runs to that date.

5. 5

   And you can still renew, under the old rules

   This is the part most often missed. Where renewal applications are filed, they are processed and decided under the rules in force on the date the initial authorisation was granted. So an existing investor permit does not hit a wall at its first renewal: it continues to be judged by the regime it was granted under, including the investment requirement as it stood then.

6. 6

   What has not changed

   The rest of Ley 14/2013 is untouched. The entrepreneur permit, the highly qualified professional permit and the EU Blue Card, the research and training permit, the intra-company transfer and the international teleworking authorisation all remain in force, and all are still decided by the same central unit in twenty days with silence granting. What was removed was the route that required money rather than an activity.

7. 7

   If residence in Spain is what you actually want

   The honest reframing is that the remaining routes ask what you will do here rather than what you will buy. The entrepreneur permit turns on a favourable ENISA report that the project is innovative or of special economic interest. The highly qualified permit turns on a role and a salary threshold. Non-lucrative residence turns on sufficient means without working. Each has its own page here, and none of them has an equivalent of the investment shortcut.

8. 8

   Be careful who you are reading

   A great deal of English-language material still describes this visa as available, sometimes with current-looking pages and updated dates. The check that settles it takes a minute: open the consolidated text of Ley 14/2013 on the official gazette's site and look at articles 63 to 67. If they read «sin contenido», the route is gone, whatever the page you were reading says.

Common questions