The Spanish Golden Visa as international buyers knew it for a decade no longer exists in its classic form. The real-estate route — €500,000 of property in exchange for residency — was formally eliminated in April 2025 after a parliamentary process that began with Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez's announcement a year earlier. As of 2026, applications based on a Marbella villa purchase are no longer accepted at Spanish consulates.
What remains is a narrower but still functional set of investment-based residency routes under Ley 14/2013 — government bonds, bank deposits, equity stakes in Spanish companies, and "strategic" business projects. For HNW buyers committed to the Costa del Sol regardless of the visa, two alternative pathways have grown in importance: the Non-Lucrative Visa for passive-income residents and the Digital Nomad Visa introduced by the 2022 Startups Law. The tax framework — particularly the Beckham Law and Andalucía's quasi-zero wealth and inheritance regime — remains intact and arguably more relevant than the visa itself.
This is the current state of the law as of late 2026, with the caveat that immigration and tax positions should always be confirmed with a qualified Spanish lawyer before commitment.
Spain introduced the Golden Visa in September 2013 through Ley 14/2013, on support for entrepreneurs and their internationalisation. The headline provision was elegant: a non-EU national who acquired Spanish real estate valued at €500,000 or more — debt-free on that amount — qualified for a renewable residence permit. Family members travelled on the same authorisation. There was no obligation to live in Spain, and the route became one of the most popular in Europe, channelling an estimated 14,000-15,000 main-applicant approvals between 2013 and 2024, the majority Chinese, Russian, British, American and Latin American buyers.
In April 2024, Pedro Sánchez announced the government's intention to abolish the real-estate route. The official rationale was housing affordability: ministers argued that foreign investment visas were inflating prices in Madrid, Barcelona, Málaga and the Balearics. Critics — including the PP opposition and most of the property sector — countered that Golden Visa volumes were a fraction of total transactions in those markets, and that the structural housing shortage was a planning-and-supply problem rather than a demand problem.
The legislative process ran through the second half of 2024. The relevant amendment to Ley 14/2013 was approved by Congress as part of the Ley Orgánica on judicial efficiency in late 2024, with a delayed-effect clause: real-estate applications filed before 3 April 2025 would still be processed under the old rules, but new applications based on property purchases would not be accepted from that date onwards.
In 2026, the position is settled. Property purchase no longer grants residency. The four non-real-estate investment routes survive, with their original thresholds intact.
Under the surviving Ley 14/2013 framework, four investment categories qualify for the investor residence permit (often still called the Golden Visa, though the real-estate route is closed):