Spain's Beckham regime: the 24% rate if you move from Italy

If you move to Spain and have not been a Spanish tax resident in the previous five years, you can ask to be taxed at 24% on the first 600,000 euros of salary, and at 47% on anything above that, for the year of the move and the five that follow. This is the regime in article 93 of the Spanish personal income tax act, the one the press named the ley Beckham. You claim it with form 149, and you have six months to file, counted from the activity start date shown on your Spanish social security registration. That deadline cannot be extended or cured.

For an Italian with a contract in Madrid or Barcelona the arithmetic usually works, and the flat rate is only part of it. While the regime lasts, foreign-source income that is not salary stays out of the Spanish return, Spanish wealth tax reaches only assets located in Spain, and there is no modelo 720 to file. In exchange, two things rarely make it into the summaries: all of your salary counts as Spanish, including any part still paid by an Italian company, and the tax residence certificate the Spanish authorities issue is not valid for the treaty with Italy.

The article 93 conditions

All three have to hold at once.

No Spanish tax residence in the five tax periods before the move. Until 2022 it was ten years. Ley 28/2022 cut it to five, and that single change reopened the regime to plenty of people who had already spent a stretch in Spain.

One of the listed reasons for the move, arising either in the first year the regime applies or in the year before. The list covers an employment contract with an employer in Spain, a posting ordered by the employer with a carta de desplazamiento, remote employed work using only IT and telecoms means (the international teleworking visa serves as evidence), appointment as a company director, an entrepreneurial activity with the favourable report under article 70 of Ley 14/2013, and services as a highly qualified professional to start-ups or in research and development work where that pay is more than 40% of total income. Where the company being directed is a holding company, the shareholding cannot be large enough to make it a related party under article 18 of the Spanish corporate income tax act.

No income through a permanent establishment in Spain, except in the last two cases on that list.

Professional athletes were excluded in 2015, which is its own kind of joke for a rule everyone still names after a footballer.

A spouse and children under 25, or of any age where there is a disability, can join too, subject to a condition that gets missed: the sum of their taxable bases has to be lower than the main taxpayer's. If the larger salary belongs to the spouse, the order of the applications changes.

The six months on form 149

The clock runs from the activity start date shown on the Spanish social security registration. If you keep Italian social security cover with an A1 certificate, the date on that paperwork counts; if registration was not compulsory, the date on a supporting document does.

Six months sounds generous and disappears on its own: the file needs an NIE, the contract, the registration and the employer's paperwork, and none of those pieces arrives on the same day. Miss the deadline and the option is lost for the whole posting, not only for the first year. Inside the regime, the annual return is form 151.

What you actually pay

Employment income and other non-savings income is taxed at 24% up to 600,000 euros and at 47% from 600,000.01. Here is the small print that surprises people most: article 93 says that all employment income earned during the regime is deemed to arise in Spanish territory. If you keep part of an Italian payroll, that amount lands in the Spanish base anyway. There is relief for international double taxation on that foreign salary, capped at 30% of the share of tax attributable to it, so double taxation is softened rather than removed.

Spanish-source dividends, interest and capital gains follow the savings scale: 19% up to 6,000 euros, 21% from 6,000 to 50,000, 23% from 50,000 to 200,000, 27% from 200,000 to 300,000 and 30% above 300,000. That top rate went from 28% to 30% with effect from 1 January 2025.

What stays outside is the rest of your foreign-source income. Rent from the flat in Milan, dividends from an Italian srl, the sale of land in Puglia: none of it enters the Spanish return while the regime runs, and it remains taxable in Italy as the source state.

In exchange you are taxed under the Spanish non-resident income tax rules, and those strip out the personal and family allowances and almost every deduction of ordinary IRPF. That is why the flat 24% does not always win: the progressive scale starts below that rate and does apply allowances. Where the crossover sits depends on your autonomous community and your family situation, and it is a calculation rather than a rule of thumb.

Wealth tax and modelo 720

Article 93 itself says that anyone who opts in is subject to Spanish wealth tax on a limited basis: only assets located in Spain, or exercisable in Spanish territory, as at 31 December. The house in Verona and the portfolio at a Milan bank fall outside, and the same holds for the solidarity tax on large fortunes. The Spanish tax agency confirms in its modelo 720 guidance that people inside the regime do not file that information return, because they are not taxed on their worldwide income. Watch the family here: a member who did not join the regime and holds more than 50,000 euros in Italian accounts, securities or property does have to file it.

The certificate that does not work for the treaty

Inside the regime you are a Spanish tax resident, and the Spanish authorities will issue the certificate that says so, the one in annex 9 of Orden HAC/3626/2003. What article 120 of the IRPF regulation does not grant automatically is the certificate confirming residence for treaty purposes: the rule says the Ministry may designate, on a reciprocity basis, the cases in which it will be issued, and until it does that certificate is not on the table.

The Spain-Italy treaty of 8 September 1977 shows why this matters. Article 4.1 defines a resident of a contracting state and then adds that the term «no incluye a las personas que estén sujetas a imposición en este Estado exclusivamente por la renta que obtengan procedente de fuentes situadas en el citado Estado», meaning it does not cover someone taxed in that state only on income arising there. An article 93 taxpayer fits that sentence rather well. If Italy decides you are still resident there, the tie-breaker in paragraph 2 is the familiar order: permanent home, centre of vital interests, habitual abode, nationality.

The Italian side: registering with AIRE settles nothing

Since 1 January 2024, article 2 of the Italian income tax code, rewritten by legislative decree 209/2023, works on alternative tests. You are resident in Italy if, for most of the tax period (183 days, or 184 in a leap year, counting part days too), you have civil-law residence in Italy, your domicilio there, or simply physical presence. And domicilio is no longer measured by economic interests: the rule puts it where personal and family relationships mainly take place.

Registration in the resident population register dropped from an absolute to a rebuttable presumption, and that cuts both ways. Someone who forgot to deregister can now prove they were living abroad. And in reverse: signing up with AIRE, which has to happen within 90 days of the move, solves nothing on its own if the family stays in Italy and you fly back every weekend.

When it is worth it

It is worth it on a high salary with wealth outside Spain. It is worth less on a middle salary with dependants, because the allowances go, and less still if nearly all the income is Spanish-source already.

And there is an effect nobody looks at in year one: six years pass. In the seventh you are back in ordinary IRPF with worldwide income and the modelo 720 on top. Unrealised gains in an Italian portfolio are better examined at the start than at the end.

If you have any doubts, Riondato & Partners is here to help

We have spent over 45 years working between Italy and Spain, with people who move from one country to the other and end up with two tax administrations asking the same question about the same income. If you are looking at contract and registration dates and want to know what suits you before the six months run out, write to us and we will go through it with you.

Sources

• Article 93 of Ley 35/2006 on personal income tax, consolidated text, BOE
• Article 120 of the IRPF regulation, tax residence certificate, BOE
• Ley 28/2022 on promoting the start-up ecosystem, BOE
• Agencia Tributaria, content of the special regime and applicable scales
• Agencia Tributaria, deadline for opting into the special regime
• Agencia Tributaria, form 149 for notifying the option
• Agencia Tributaria, modelo 720 FAQ: taxpayers required to file
• Spain-Italy double taxation treaty of 8 September 1977, BOE
• Agenzia delle Entrate, circolare no. 20/E of 4 November 2024 on tax residence