Spain's Digital Nomad Visa: Is There an Official Rejection Rate?

No, and there is a structural reason for it. Spain publishes no approval rate and no refusal rate for the international-teleworker residence permit — teletrabajador de carácter internacional, the permit most people mean by "digital nomad visa". The Observatorio Permanente de la Inmigración (OPI) does not publish one. Neither does the Unidad de Grandes Empresas y Colectivos Estratégicos (UGE), the unit that processes these files — the grant itself corresponds to the Dirección General de Migraciones under art. 76.1 — nor the Ministerio de Inclusión above them. There is no register you can open and read a percentage out of.

This is not a gap we simply failed to find. It follows from how the one official series is built. That series is drawn from the Registro Central de Extranjeros, the central register of foreign nationals kept by the Dirección General de la Policía, and its unit of analysis, in the OPI's own published methodology, is los documentos de residencia concedidos — granted residence documents. A register of documents holds documents that exist. A refused application never produces one, so it never enters the file the statistic is compiled from. The series can count grants and, by construction, nothing else.

Three things follow, and they are the point of this page:

• Any percentage presented as the approval or rejection rate for this permit is not a public figure. It came from somebody's own book of work, however it is framed.
• Official data does exist, and it is more useful than a rate — it just has to be read for what it is.
• The missing data is not secret. It is unpublished, which is a different thing, and there is a route to ask for it.

The relevant official product is the OPI dashboard "Flujo de autorizaciones concedidas con base en la Ley 14/2013", an annual series running 2014–2025, which carries 7 July 2026 in its own Fecha de publicación field inside the dashboard. It ships with a downloadable dataset and a methodology document, so every figure below can be reproduced by anyone: filter figura legal to "Teletrabajador internacional".

"All classes of document" adds modifications and first renewals to the initial grants; for 2025 that is 25,866 initial, 1,563 modifications and 895 first renewals. The dataset also breaks grants down by province of residence, and for a Barcelona practice the 2025 distribution is worth stating plainly: Barcelona recorded 9,063 initial teleworker grants, ahead of Madrid (4,977), Valencia (3,060), and Málaga (3,041). In 2025 the largest single region of nationality among initial grants was the dataset's "Europa sin UE27/AELC" category — non-EU, non-EFTA Europe — with 12,462.

Approval percentages well above 90% circulate widely in this market. Most of them are probably arithmetically true of whoever published them. They are still not comparable — with each other, or with anything official — because the figure depends on four choices the publisher makes and almost never states.

1. Who is in the denominator. Caseloads are self-selected. A firm that declines files it expects to lose reports a higher rate than a firm doing identical work that takes them. The percentage measures intake policy at least as much as it measures competence.
2. What counts as an outcome. A file where the ten-day request for further documents under Ley 39/2015 art. 68.1 goes unanswered is treated as withdrawn, not refused. A file pulled and re-filed is one case or two, depending on who is counting. A file resolved by positive silence under Ley 14/2013 art. 76.1 succeeded without anyone deciding it. Each of these can be booked as a win, as a loss, or excluded entirely.
3. The unit. Person, application, or authorisation? A family of four that succeeds is one success or four, and the official data itself counts them as four.
4. Nothing audits it. No public body verifies these figures, and — as the first section explains — there is no official series to reconcile them against even in principle.

None of that makes a quoted rate dishonest. It makes it a statement about one firm's book of work, defined by that firm, rather than a property of the permit. The useful question is never "is it true". It is "of what, over what period, counted how" — and a publisher who can answer that is telling you something real.

We do not publish one either. Not out of modesty: we would be making the same four choices, and the number would tell you as little.

If you want the data that does not exist publicly, you can ask for it. Ley 19/2013 gives anyone a right of access to information held by the administration, exercised through the Portal de Transparencia request form. A request to the Ministerio de Inclusión — the Dirección General de Migraciones, for the data UGE holds — for applications received and resolutions issued by figura legal, broken down by outcome and year, is the shape of question that would settle this — and if it is ever answered, the answer is public.

Read this section as exactly what it says. What follows describes where files need work, drawn from our own consultancy practice. It is not measured, we publish no counts or percentages from our case files, and none of it should be read as a frequency claim. Its only use is as a checklist of the places where a file goes wrong before anybody reaches the merits.

The first thing worth understanding is that a weak file is usually not refused. It is queried. Under Ley 39/2015 art. 68.1 the authority issues a requerimiento giving ten days to fix the defect — working days, under the art. 30.2 default — and an unanswered requerimiento ends the procedure by withdrawal rather than by a decision on whether the person qualified. That is the most consequential mechanic in the whole process, and it is procedural, not substantive.

Around it, the recurring themes:

• Notifications that expire unread. Communication is electronic. Under Ley 39/2015 art. 43.2 a notification left unopened for ten days is deemed rejected — and here the statute says naturales, calendar days, not working days. A file can run out of time while the applicant is still waiting to hear something.
• Income evidence that does not meet a formula. The income test is arithmetic referenced to the SMI set by Real Decreto 126/2026: €1,221 × 14 ÷ 12 × 2 = €2,849 a month for the main applicant in 2026, plus 75% of SMI for the first family member and 25% for each additional one. Documents showing the right amount in the wrong period, currency, or name are the ordinary failure — not documents showing too little. Our note on the 2026 SMI figures and the income calculator both set out the arithmetic.
• Evidence in the wrong shape for the route. An employee and a self-employed contractor are proving different things about the same working life, and evidence assembled for one does not substitute for the other. The digital nomad guide sets out what each side of that split needs.
• Silence read as bad news. It is an outcome in its own right: art. 76.1 gives 20 days, and past that the authorisation is understood to be granted. We wrote up how positive silence works and how to document it separately.

The honest summary is unglamorous. Files rarely fail because a person was unsuitable for the route. They fail because a document was in the wrong format, a period was miscounted, or a notice sat unopened — which is why a percentage, even a real one, tells you far less than knowing which of those exposures your own file carries.

This is general information about a public procedure, not advice on any individual case. We are a relocation consultancy, not a law firm.