The Beckham Law in Spain: who qualifies and how to apply

Relocating to Spain brings up an immediate concern: what your tax bill will look like. For a lot of expats, the answer depends on a single regime — the special expat tax regime, commonly called the Beckham Law.

The mechanism is simple: instead of being taxed as a Spanish resident on your worldwide income, you are taxed like a non-resident on the income you earn in Spain, at a flat rate of 24 percent on the first 600,000 euros and 47% above that. If your salary is significant, the saving can be considerable.

Not everyone qualifies. As a general rule, you must not have been a Spanish tax resident in the five years before the move, your relocation must be linked to an employment contract or a director role, and the work must be carried out mainly in Spain. Recent reforms have widened the scope to remote workers and certain entrepreneurs.

Timing is the part people get wrong. You have to apply within six months of registering with Spanish social security. Miss it and you cannot recover it later. The benefit then runs for the year of arrival and the following five.

It does not suit every case. Where a large part of your wealth sits abroad, the interaction with wealth tax and reporting web duties needs to be modelled first. Running the numbers in advance is usually time well spent.