Internships on a Spanish Student Stay

If your placement is part of your course, you do not need a second permit for it. Spain's regulation says so directly: no additional authorisation is required to carry out curricular practice, and such practice is covered by the study authorisation already granted.

That is worth knowing before anybody sends you to look for a work permit, because the usual assumption — placement means employment means permission — does not hold where the placement is genuinely part of your studies.

What makes a placement "curricular"

Three things, and all three matter.

It forms part of the study plan for which your authorisation was granted. Not adjacent to it, not a useful addition — part of it.

It takes place under a collaboration agreement between the host entity, public or private, and your higher-education institution or teaching or scientific centre.

And it is not of a labour nature. This is the condition that does the real work. A placement that is in substance a job, with the features of employment, is not curricular practice however it is labelled.

Where those three are satisfied, the regulation is explicit: external curricular academic placements, and the in-company training phase of a programme, have that character — and their performance is covered by the study authorisation you already hold.

The company counts as your centre

This is the part almost nothing published says, and it has a practical consequence.

The Ministry's criteria state that any activity forming part of the curriculum falls inside the study authorisation even where it is carried out away from the educational centre — giving a company as the example — and that the host entity, company or equivalent has the consideration of an educational or training centre, consistent with sectoral education rules.

So where the authorisation is being sought specifically in order to do this kind of placement, territorial competence for handling the application falls to the Government Delegation or Sub-delegation in the province where the company or entity carrying out the placement is located.

If your placement is in a different province from your institution, that is the detail to get right at the outset, because filing in the wrong province is a procedural problem that costs time rather than one that gets corrected quietly.

Vocational programmes delivered in a company

The regulation deals with this explicitly too. A study authorisation also permits, automatically and without an additional procedure, the carrying out of training activities in a company or equivalent body in accordance with the sectoral legislation's requirements, where these take place within vocational training of the general or intensive regime.

Which fits how vocational programmes actually run, with substantial in-company phases. Student visas for vocational training in Spain covers which vocational category you are in, because that decides a good deal else.

Work that is not part of your course

Keep this separate, because the answers come from different places.

A curricular placement is covered by the authorisation, as above.

Ordinary work alongside your studies is a different permission — and for higher education the authorisation permits work, employed or self-employed, automatically and without a further procedure. So in practice a higher-education student is not blocked from working either way; the two routes simply rest on different provisions.

And there is a consequence worth knowing if you do work and register. Where a student works in those terms and is registered in the corresponding Social Security regime, the study route's health-insurance requirement is treated as satisfied by that registration. Health insurance for a Spanish student visa sets out when that applies and when it does not.

The limit is the familiar one. Working is permitted; the stay becoming only work is a ground for ending it, and the criteria point specifically at a student who has stopped attending while working. Why a Spanish student application is refused covers how that is assessed.

What this page will not tell you

Whether a specific placement is curricular. That turns on your study plan and the agreement behind it, and your institution is the right source.

Whether a particular arrangement is "of a labour nature". That is a characterisation of the actual relationship, not something a guide can settle.

The rules for extracurricular placements. They sit outside the provision quoted here and we have not stated a rule we did not read at source.

Any stipend, fee or timescale. None appears here.

Frequently asked questions

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