How 247 Expat Works

Most of this site is free guidance that asks nothing of you. Some of it leads to a service you can pay for. This page explains which is which, who actually provides the paid services, and why some pages end with a recommendation and others deliberately do not.

What 247 Expat is

247 Expat publishes English-language guidance on moving to and living in Spain — visas and residency, healthcare, property, retirement and the practical business of arriving.

The guides are editorial. They are written to answer the question, not to reach a sale, and most of them end without offering you anything. They are general information rather than legal, tax, immigration or financial advice, and reading one does not create a professional relationship.

Some journeys do lead somewhere commercial. Where you are ready to act rather than read, the site can connect you with a visa application service or with health insurance. Those are paid services provided by named companies, set out below. You always leave this website to buy anything; nothing is sold on it.

Visa services

Visa application services offered through 247 Expat are provided and invoiced by:

Retail Consulting UK Ltd Company number 06711242 211 Manchester New Road, Manchester M24 1JT, United Kingdom

Retail Consulting UK Ltd provides administrative and processing assistance with an application: preparing it, assembling the documents a consulate or immigration office expects, and submitting it. It does not provide legal representation before courts, or before authorities exercising discretionary decision-making powers. Every immigration decision rests with the relevant government authority, and no outcome, processing time or approval is guaranteed by anyone.

Our service pages show the fee and the payment stages before you commit. When you start an application you leave this website and continue in an online portal, under that operator's own terms and privacy policy.

One thing to expect before you click. Our online visa application portal currently uses Platinum Legal Spain branding. Visa services offered through 247 Expat are provided and invoiced by Retail Consulting UK Ltd; the portal is the online system used to manage the application process. If you arrive at a page that looks like a different brand, that is why — and it does not change who you are contracting with.

Health insurance and our commercial relationships

Where a page deals with health cover, it may route you to one of two specialist insurance services in the same group: Spanish Health Insurance or 247 Expat Insurance.

Which one you are sent to depends on the page and on what you are trying to work out — the route you are applying on, whether you are comparing policies or checking a requirement, and which service has material that actually answers that question. Neither is the exclusive home of any product line, and the choice is editorial rather than fixed.

Both are insurance services rather than insurers. Where a health-insurance journey involves regulated insurance distribution, the relevant regulated identity and DGSFP registration are disclosed on that journey and in our legal notice.

One thing we will not do here. This site does not tell you that a policy satisfies a legal or visa requirement because it is sold for that purpose. What a route requires is a question about the rules; what a policy covers is a question about the product. The guides keep those apart, and so does any recommendation.

How we decide when to recommend a service

The answer comes first. The recommendation, if there is one, comes after it — and sometimes there isn't one.

Every page is written to resolve its own question before anything commercial appears. Once it has, a page may do one of three things:

• offer the visa service, where you have worked out your route and want it handled;
• route you to health insurance, where cover is genuinely part of what you have to arrange;
• recommend that you buy nothing at all.

The third case is real and it is common. If you hold an S1, if you are registered with Spanish Social Security, if an A1 certificate covers you, if you qualify for public healthcare, or if your route simply does not require private cover, then the honest answer is that you do not need to buy a policy — and the page says so instead of selling you one. Several of our health pages exist specifically to establish whether you are already covered. Those pages carry no insurance recommendation, because the work they do is to tell you when you can stop looking.

Commercial relationships do not change the underlying answer. The services we route to are part of the same group as this site. That is exactly why a recommendation is placed after the reasoning rather than before it, why it never appears on a page whose honest conclusion is "no purchase needed", and why every commercial block on the site states the relationship at the point you see it rather than in small print somewhere else.

How our information is researched and updated

Spanish immigration, healthcare and tax rules change, and a confidently written page can be wrong because it was written two years ago rather than because anyone was careless.

We work from primary and official sources for anything that changes — the legislation itself as published in the Boletín Oficial del Estado, the route-specific criteria issued by the responsible ministries, and the published guidance of the relevant authority. Where a page relies on a statute, we check the consolidated text, because that version records its own amendments and annulments; a correct report of a new rule can be overtaken within days.

Pages that carry a load get an internal subject-matter approval, and that approval is tied to the exact version of the page that was approved. If the page is materially changed afterwards, the approval no longer describes what is published, and it has to be rechecked before that page goes out again. The approval is an internal editorial control. It is recorded against the page, not published as a person's name, and nobody's byline appears on this site as a credential.

We also say what we do not know. Where a figure is change-prone and we cannot stand it up, the page names the mechanism and refuses the number rather than printing one that might be stale.

Who provides the paid services

Table 1

You can always tell which one you are in. A free guide asks nothing of you and links onward for free. A commercial page shows a price, names the provider, and states the relationship. If a page is offering you something, it says so on the page.

Questions about a recommendation?

If you want to know why a particular page recommended something — or why it recommended nothing — write to info@247expat.com and we will tell you.

Written by [author], reviewed by [name], editor · Last updated: October 2026.