EU Residency in Spain: How Registration Works

If you hold EU, EEA or Swiss citizenship, you are not applying for a visa. There is no Spanish visa for you to be refused, because the right to come is already yours. What Spain asks instead is that you register once you intend to stay beyond three months — and what registration requires depends almost entirely on one question: are you working?

That single fork decides more than anything else on this page.

The first fork: are you working?

RD 240/2007 does not ask everyone for the same thing. Its article 7 sets out the conditions for staying beyond three months, and it separates people by what they are doing here.

If you are employed or self-employed in Spain, your economic activity is the basis of your residence. The regulation does not attach a separate insurance condition to that situation — working in Spain brings you into the Spanish system through the route that working creates.

If you are economically inactive — retired, living on savings, accompanying someone, not working here — article 7.1(b) asks for two things together: sufficient resources for yourself and your family, and health insurance covering all risks in Spain.

If you are studying, the regulation treats you separately again.

Getting this fork wrong is the commonest reason someone reads a requirement that was never theirs. Health insurance for EU residency takes the insurance condition apart properly.

"Covering all risks in Spain" — what that phrase is and isn't

The regulation's words are un seguro de enfermedad que cubra todos los riesgos en España. It is a scope requirement. It says the cover must be comprehensive and must work here. It does not name a product, a price, an insurer or a policy feature.

What the regulation does not say is as important as what it does. We searched the consolidated text: the words for copayment and waiting period do not appear in RD 240/2007 at all. If you have read that an EU registration requires a policy with no copayments and no waiting periods, that condition exists — but it was written for a different route under a different regulation, and it was not written about you. What Spanish law actually requires sets the regimes side by side.

The word trap: permanent residence is not long-term residence

These are two different statuses, and Spain uses two different names for them.

Residencia permanente is the EU-regime status and appears seventeen times in RD 240/2007. Residencia de larga duración is the general-regime status and appears over two hundred times in RD 1155/2024 — and zero times in the EU regulation. Neither word appears in the other instrument.

They are reached differently, they are governed differently, and advice written about one is not advice about the other. Long-term residence is the general-regime page; what an EU citizen reaches after five years is the permanent residence of their own regime.

Your family members may not be EU citizens

The regulation covers family members of a citizen exercising free movement, whatever passport they hold. That is one of the things the EU regime does that the general regime does not, and it is why "family visa" means four different things in Spain depending on who is sponsoring whom.

A non-EU family member of an EU citizen is in the EU regime, not the general one — which changes the conditions, the paperwork and the vocabulary. Family routes separates the frameworks, and health insurance for an EU family member covers the cover question specifically.

Where to go next

If you are economically inactive and working out the insurance condition — the requirements page.

If you are retired and hold an S1 — S1 or private insurance explains why that document changes the question rather than answering it.

If you have met the phrase "comprehensive sickness insurance" — what that term means here, and why it travelled from somewhere else.

If you are not working and not retired — the economically inactive case is the one the regulation writes about most directly.

If you are not an EU citizen at all — this page is not yours. Which route lets you live in Spain starts from the right place.

One thing that is true for everyone

Registration is an obligation, not an option, once you intend to stay. The right to be here is yours; the administrative step is still required, and the NIE you will need for almost everything else is a separate thing again. NIE and TIE, untangled is worth five minutes before you start.

Frequently asked questions

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