You have moved to Madrid, you work for yourself and your clients are mostly abroad. At some point the same question arrives: who can explain the Spanish rules to you, clearly and in English? It is a common search, and in Madrid it is harder to answer than it should be.
Moving to Spain changes more than your address. It changes who taxes you, how you invoice and what you pay to Social Security.
Getting the first year right is far easier than correcting it later.
What changes when you start working in Spain?
Three things, usually at the same time. You become tax resident, so Spain taxes your worldwide income. You need to register your activity, both with the Tax Agency and with Social Security. And your invoices, expenses and bank accounts start to matter in a way they may not have mattered before.
The questions most newcomers ask
In our experience, the same points come up in almost every first conversation:
- Am I already a Spanish tax resident, and since when?
- Do I have to register as autónomo, the Spanish self-employed status?
- Do I charge Spanish VAT to clients outside the EU?
- What do I have to report about my bank accounts and assets back home?
Each of these has a clear answer. What changes from one person to another is how they combine.
Why the first year matters
Most problems we see are not complex. They come from a year in which nobody told the person what applied to them: returns filed only in the home country, an activity never registered, invoices issued without the right wording. Each of those can be regularised, but it is always more work than doing it properly from the start.
A professional arrives in Madrid in the autumn, spends the following year here and keeps filing her tax return only in her home country, as she always has. By then she is already Spanish tax resident. Nothing has gone wrong yet, but there is a year to regularise and a Social Security registration that should have been made months earlier. With an hour of advice at the right moment, the same year would have been simple.
Any questions?
Talk to a Cigarrán expert
First consultation, no commitment.
Where Cigarrán fits in
At Cigarrán Abogados we work in English with foreign professionals who have settled in Madrid. We register the activity, keep the accounts, file the tax returns and handle Social Security, so that you have one adviser for all of it. Over the coming weeks we will publish short guides on each of the questions above: residence, registering as autónomo, VAT, form 720, record-keeping and working for a foreign company.
Start with the right questions
You don´t need to become an expert in Spanish tax. You need to know which rules apply to you, and to have them handled from the start.
If you would like us to review your position, in English and from Madrid, let’s talk it over.
