About this site

Who writes this

I am Chu Van Ngoc, and I write and maintain every page on this site myself. There is no editorial team, no panel of experts and no agency behind it, and I would rather say that plainly than dress a personal project up as an institution.

Where I am writing from

I am based in Phú Thọ, Vietnam, not in Spain. I am not Spanish and I do not live there. You should know that before you decide how much weight to give anything here.

So what is this site worth, coming from someone outside the country? Not lived experience — I will not pretend to tell you what the queue at a particular comisaría feels like, and where a page needs that kind of knowledge I say so instead of inventing it. What I can do is the part that most English-language writing about Spain skips: read the primary sources properly, in Spanish, and set out what they actually say.

That means the rules as published by the Agencia Tributaria, IDAE, Seguridad Social and the ministries — not a summary of a summary, and not a relocation agency's sales page. Working from documents rather than anecdote has one real advantage: it does not quietly generalise one person's experience in one province into a rule for the whole country, which is the single most common failure mode of expat advice about Spain.

It also has a clear limit, and I would rather state it than have you discover it: for anything that turns on your own circumstances, a gestor or abogado in the relevant province will beat this site every time. This is a reference, not a substitute for advice.

I started it because of the gap between the two kinds of English-language writing about Spain that actually exist. On one side, tourist content about tapas and cathedrals. On the other, relocation agencies whose guides are lead generation for their own services. Almost nothing in between simply explains how a thing works, with the source attached and a date on it.

How information is sourced and checked

The working rule is that a figure is only worth publishing if you can say where it came from and when you looked.

• Primary sources only. Rates, procedures and eligibility rules come from the body that sets them — the Agencia Tributaria, IDAE, Seguridad Social, the relevant ministry or your Ayuntamiento — not from another site quoting them. Where a page cites a source, it links to that source directly.
• Everything carries a date. Any page stating a price, a rate or a procedure shows when I last checked it. Spanish administrative rules change often enough that undated information is close to worthless.
• Regional variation is stated, not smoothed over. A great deal of what matters here — IRPF rates, ITP, MOVES amounts, empadronamiento requirements — differs by autonomous community. Where that is true, the page says so instead of presenting one region's rules as national.
• Uncertainty is admitted. If a figure moves quarterly, I round it and say it moves rather than quoting a precise number that will be stale in three months.

How often it is updated

Pages carrying tax bands, contribution brackets or subsidy terms are reviewed at least annually, and sooner when a change is announced — the start of the calendar year is the busiest point, since most Spanish rate changes land there. Charging infrastructure figures move faster and are revisited when the quarterly barometers are published.

When a page is substantively revised, the "last checked" date changes. When only a typo is fixed, it does not — the date is meant to tell you something about the accuracy of the content, not about file modification times.

Independence

There are no sponsored articles on this site, no paid placements in any comparison, and no links bought by anyone. No gestor, insurer, energy company or charging network has paid to appear here or to be recommended.

If that ever changes — if I use affiliate links, or accept advertising — it will be disclosed on the page where it happens, not buried in a policy document. Any comparison that contains a commercial relationship will say so at the point of comparison.

No tracking runs before you consent to it. The calculators run entirely in your browser and send nothing anywhere. Both of those are described in detail in the privacy policy.

What this site is not

Worth being explicit, because the subject matter invites the opposite assumption. I am not a lawyer, a gestor, a tax adviser or an immigration consultant, I hold no professional qualification in any of these fields, and I am not a resident of Spain. Nothing here is legal, tax or immigration advice, and it cannot take account of your particular circumstances.

Nor is it a first-hand account. Where a page describes what a procedure involves, that comes from the official documentation for it, not from having stood in the queue. Anything on this site that reads like personal experience of Spanish bureaucracy would be invented, so you will not find it here.

What this site can usefully do is tell you how a process is structured, what the terms mean, what order things happen in, and where the official source is — so that when you do speak to a professional, or turn up at an appointment, you know what you are looking at. For anything binding, the official body or a qualified professional is the authority, not me.

Reporting an error

I will get things wrong. Procedures change, regions differ, and some of this is genuinely hard to pin down. If you find a mistake — or if a procedure worked differently for you than described — please tell me via the contact page.

What happens then:

• Factual errors are corrected as a priority, ahead of new content.
• Corrections are dated. Where a correction is substantive rather than cosmetic, the page notes what changed.
• Reports that a procedure differs in a particular province are especially useful. Writing from outside Spain, I can read what a regional government publishes but I cannot see how its offices behave in practice — so if your experience diverged from the documentation, that is information I have no other way of getting.

Getting in touch

Email is hello@spainpulse.com, and the contact page explains what I can and cannot help with. The short version: happy to fix errors and hear how things went for you, not able to advise on individual cases.