About
Why Plain Spain exists
Spain does not hide its immigration rules. It publishes them in Spanish, spread over a ministry site, a statute database and roughly one page per consulate. All of it is public. Very little of it is readable when this is your first application and Spanish is not your language.
This site is the version we wanted to find: the rule, the number, the source it came from, and the date someone last checked it.
Spanish bureaucracy, translated.
Most applications come apart months before the appointment, and usually in the same few places:
- A page you found quotes an income figure with no year attached. The index underneath it lives in a budget law, and budget laws move.
- The consulate’s document list and the ministry’s information sheet do not quite agree. The consulate is the one holding your file.
- Nobody mentions that the apostille is a second errand at a different office, after the certificate you already queued for once.
- The consulate rejects the translation because the translator was not on Spain’s own sworn list.
- And the wait everyone warns you about, getting an appointment at all, is not covered by any of the legal deadlines people quote at you.
None of that is difficult once someone reads the governing rule in the language it was written in and tells you what it means for your case. That is the whole job. We do it in English, we show the source, and we would rather talk you out of an application than take money for a file we can already see failing. The eligibility check is built to do exactly that: six questions, no email address, and an answer that is sometimes no.
What we are, and what we are not
- An independent consultancy
- We prepare visa files. Which documents your case needs, the order to obtain them in, the forms, the sworn translations, the arithmetic behind the income test, and what happens at the appointment. That is a service, not representation.
- Not a law firm
- Nothing on this site is legal advice, and we do not act for you in a court or an administrative appeal. Some cases need a lawyer from the first hour: a refusal you want to challenge, a criminal-record certificate with an entry on it, a custody or family-law question tangled into the move. We say so and hand those to partner immigration lawyers instead of improvising.
- Not part of the Spanish state
- No affiliation with any consulate, with the unit inside Spain that decides the Digital Nomad route, or with any ministry. We cannot jump an appointment queue, speed up a decision, or learn your outcome before you do. Anyone who says they can is selling you that story.
- Not able to promise you a visa
- The decision belongs to the consulate and to the office in Spain. What we can hold ourselves to is a file that goes in complete, built on the rule that actually governs your case, with every figure checked. The process, stage by stage sets out who carries which part.
- Priced before you speak to us
- The fee is written on the pricing page, and it is the whole fee. We pass on translators, apostilles and government charges at cost, itemised. There is no consultation to book and no calendar to open. You write to a person.
How we work
People make irreversible decisions on the strength of a paragraph on a website: they hand in notice at work, they give up a flat. So every legal or numeric claim here has to survive five rules.
- Primary sources, first
- Statute text comes from Spain’s official state gazette, the BOE: Law 14/2013 for the Digital Nomad route, Royal Decree 1155/2024 for the Non-Lucrative one. Document lists and procedure come from the ministry information sheets and the consulates’ own pages. We use law-firm guides to corroborate arithmetic, never as the only source for anything.
- Dated, not timeless
- We keep every figure on this site in one research file, each with the URL it was read from and the day it was read. We re-check the whole set at least once a year, and immediately when a budget law or a new immigration regulation moves something. The index behind the income thresholds sits in a budget law that has been rolled over rather than replaced, which makes it a fact with an expiry date.
- Where it varies, we say it varies
- Consulates apply the same rules with different habits: an extra certificate here, a stricter reading of what counts as income there, appointment waits that are nothing alike. Where the answer genuinely depends on where you apply, you get the range and the reason rather than one office’s practice dressed up as national law.
- Unsourced means unpublished
- A number we cannot tie to a primary source does not go on the page at all. We do not soften it or round it into something that sounds official. We leave it out, and where its absence matters we say plainly what we do not know.
- A plain-English pass, last
- Every page gets one final edit whose only job is to take out the tells of machine-drafted prose: the throat-clearing opening, the paragraph that promises a summary instead of delivering a fact, the tidy three-part flourish, the word no one says aloud. We record the date of that edit with the change, page by page.
What is missing from this page, and why
There is no team photograph here, no count of applications handled, no row of stars, no testimonial. We do not yet have any of it in a form you could check, and an unverifiable trust badge is the exact thing this site exists to argue against. When there is a name and a credential to put on this page, they will go on this page, dated like everything else. Until then the editorial team signs the articles, and each one stands or falls on the sources linked inside it.
Write to us
One address, read by a person: [email protected]. Tell us your citizenship, roughly what you live on and where that money comes from, who is coming with you, and when you want to be in Spain. That is enough for a straight first answer, including “not this visa” or “you do not need us”. We reply within one business day.
The same thing in a form, if you prefer one: the contact page.