Spain, without
the guesswork

Almost certainly yes. The NIE is not a residency status — it is the identification number Spanish administration uses for any foreigner who does something official here. Buying property, signing a long-term rental, opening a bank account, insuring a car or paying any Spanish tax all require one, whether or not you live here. Plenty of people hold a NIE while remaining tax resident somewhere else. The moving to Spain section explains how it differs from a TIE, which is the point most people get wrong.

Realistic, but it changes what you should buy and where you should live. Spain has far less on-street residential charging than the Netherlands or the UK, so if you park on the street you will depend on public AC points and the occasional fast charge — noticeably more expensive than charging at home. If you have a space in a communal garage the picture is much better: Spanish law gives you the right to install your own charge point there without the community of owners approving it, which is widely misunderstood. See EV charging.

Because Spanish income tax is only half national. IRPF is the sum of a state scale and a regional scale that each autonomous community sets for itself, and Madrid has consistently set lower regional rates than Catalonia. At higher salaries the difference runs to thousands of euros a year on identical gross pay. It is one of the few genuinely large financial consequences of choosing one Spanish city over another, and job offers rarely mention it. More in calculators.

Roughly 10 to 15 per cent. The biggest item is transfer tax, and which one applies is a hard fork: a resale property attracts ITP, set regionally and therefore variable, while a new build attracts IVA plus stamp duty instead. Notary and land registry fees follow, plus a gestor or lawyer if you use one. One trap worth knowing: the tax is assessed on the higher of your price and the tax authority's own reference value, so buying cheap does not always mean paying less tax.

Usually yes, but treat the money as a rebate arriving much later rather than a discount at the till. MOVES III is funded nationally through IDAE but administered by each autonomous community, so amounts and paperwork differ by region, and some regions exhaust their allocation long before the scheme formally closes. Payment delays of many months have been common, and the grant has generally counted as taxable income in the year you receive it — which catches people out.

Because Spain devolves a great deal to its seventeen autonomous communities. Income tax rates, property transfer tax, EV subsidy administration, health service registration and even what your town hall wants to see for the padrón all vary. This is the single biggest reason English-language advice about Spain misleads people: it describes one city's experience as though it were national. Where a rule is regional, pages on this site say so rather than smoothing it over.

One person — me — and every page carrying a rate, a price or a procedure shows the date I last checked it. Pages with tax bands or contribution brackets get reviewed at least annually and sooner when a change is announced, since most Spanish rate changes land in January. Charging infrastructure figures move faster and get revisited when the quarterly barometers come out. Worth knowing up front: I write from Vietnam, not from Spain, so this is built by reading the official sources closely rather than from living there — what that means. If you find something stale, tell me — corrections come before new pages.