Spain’s new Digital Nomad Visa (DNV) has taken the visa market by storm! Fancy working remotely from a beach in Spain, sipping a mojito with 21 degrees in good company paying almost no tax (*)? The DNV has you covered! The DNV has you covered!
The DNV offers unique tax advantages that no other Spanish visa can hope to match, not even a coveted Golden Visa. Its main outlier, and what distinguishes it from other available visas, is precisely the wide array of tax benefits it offers. The DNV has been purposely devised so successful applicants pay few taxes in Spain; the purpose is to incentivize overachievers to relocate and work (remotely) in Spain.
The DNV is modelled after Beckham’s Law, enacted in 2015, and which applies to EU nationals which in turn was inspired by the UK’s wildly popular Non-Domiciled taxpayer scheme. The DNV applies to non-EU nationals and offers basically the same tax advantages as Beckham’s Law.
It’s a legal fiction whereby a non-EU taxpayer is treated as a non-fiscal resident in Spain, but for administrative purposes, they are regarded as fully resident in Spain. The tax significance of this nuance simply cannot be understated enough and opens the door to a slew of tax benefits I collate below.
(*) Precisely because of its huge tax advantages, the law time-gates them to a maximum of five years plus one.
Needless to say, a DNV makes you tax resident in Spain (that’s precisely the whole point!).
Because of its nature (to attract talented individuals), and similar to Golden Visas, all DNV applications are fast-tracked. In under 3 weeks you know if your application has been successful.
In a nutshell, the DNV is all about paying (very) low income tax, or none at all (as assets & interests held abroad Spain go untaxed!).
Source: Larraín Nesbitt Abogados (LNA) Marbella
