Spain has received around 900,000 applications under its extraordinary regularization program, nearly double the 500,000 the government anticipated when the window opened in April. The Migration Ministry reported the figure on June 15, and the application period closes on June 30.
Royal Decree 316/2026 appeared in the Official State Gazette (BOE) on April 15 and took effect the following day. It grants a one-year, renewable residence and work permit to undocumented migrants who were in Spain before January 1, 2026, can show five months of continuous residence, hold a clean criminal record, and pay a €38.28 fee.
Two new provisions sit at the core of the decree. One covers applicants for international protection who filed before the start of 2026; the other creates a route called arraigo extraordinario, or extraordinary residence by roots, reachable through a job, family ties, or proven vulnerability. Applicants may begin working the moment their file enters processing, a change the decree makes permanent for all future roots-based applications.
Madrid has issued about 360,000 temporary work permits since April, roughly 40% of the requests received. Pilar Cancela, secretary of state for migration, has said the state can process up to one million applications across the April-to-June window, while conceding that requests will outrun what it can grant.
The Spanish Commission for Refugee Aid (CEAR) expects the total to climb past one million before the deadline. Its director has pressed the government to pair the one-off measure with permanent routes, so that migrants do not spend years on the margins.
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has called the regularization “an act of justice and a necessity,” arguing that people already living and working in Spain should do so on equal terms and pay into the system. His Socialist government points to an aging population, falling unemployment, and labor shortages across hospitality, agriculture, construction, and care work.
Pulling a large informal workforce into the tax and social-security net is part of the calculation. The think tank Funcas estimates that roughly 840,000 undocumented migrants have spent years in Spain, many of them working off the books.
“When most of Europe is leaning toward nationalism, Spain is the outlier with such measures,” says Jeremy Savory of Savory & Partners. Where golden visa peers chase foreign capital, he argues, Spain “has chosen to directly support the hospitality industry with a larger supply of workers thereby bringing costs down.”
A Program With Deep Spanish Roots
This is Spain’s first general regularization in more than two decades. Its last comparable round, in 2005 under the Socialist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, drew 691,655 applications, most of which succeeded.
Neither end of the political spectrum owns the practice. The conservative Popular Party (PP) government of José María Aznar carried out two of its own, in 2000 and 2001.
“Mass regularization in Spain is not a left-wing experiment,” says Adam Juchniewicz of Bitcitizen LLC. “The People’s Party ran two of them. The openness has survived governments of both stripes.”
That openness runs against the prevailing mood across Europe, where governments have leaned toward tighter borders, faster deportations, and deals with third countries. Madrid is betting that legal inclusion beats removal, and the bet has cover. The OECD found Spain outpaced its European peers for growth in 2025.
The Investment Migration Market Weighs In
This regularization lands a little over a year after Spain closed its golden visa to new investors, and the advisers who watched that door shut have been quick to draw the contrast. Spain signaled the twin-track instinct, capital out and labor in, two years ago.
As Juchniewicz frames it, “Madrid does not want your capital. It wants your presence, your contribution, and your tax file. That is the citizen, not tourist, principle, written into Spanish law.”
“Investment migrants are not who the headlines may suggest,” says Elena Ruda, co-founder and managing partner of Immigrant Invest, who grants that the regularization “reflects a real labor shortage, and it is easy to understand the reasoning.”
Harder to explain, she argues, is why investment migrants face the “sharper political scrutiny” when their due diligence “is not self-reported” and “runs through multiple independent institutions before a government ever sees the file.”
Her own book of clients looks nothing like the stereotype. The “largest single group (around 30%) are IT professionals,” she explains, people who “bring income earned abroad, spend it in their new country, and do not take jobs from local workers.” About 20% are entrepreneurs “who set up companies, open accounts, and hire locally,” with financiers and direct investors making up another 10%.
Philippe May, CEO of EC Holdings, sees “a vicious circle,” one in which the regularization “will incentivize more illegal immigrants to move to Spain.” “Eventually Spain will naturalize these people,” he argues; “it rewards illegal immigration and blocks wealth migration,” which he brands “typical woke policies” that leave “the whole Schengen area” less attractive to wealthy immigrants.
“Wealthy foreigners will increasingly avoid the country, not only for tax but also for security reasons,” May says, and “even wealthy Spaniards will move abroad.” Within a generation, he predicts, “countries like Uruguay, El Salvador and Paraguay can be more attractive for wealthy immigrants than legacy destination Spain.”
In Savory’s telling, the Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) is “not satisfied with proposing a 100% tax on foreigners buying property and closing their golden visa program,” and is doubling down on a “two-tier immigration policy.”
He reads a move on the cash economy too, citing anyone who “has tried in vain to pay for something in Spain with a €200 note,” part of folding “the shadow employment economy into a taxable labor force.”
On politics, Savory believes “skeptics may see this as also creating 1 million PSOE voters,” though he doubts the electoral upside. Retirees and digital nomads, the other big inflows, “rarely naturalize nor do they vote as they have little ‘skin in the game.'”
“Multiple data sources show Portugal and Spain have a higher percentage of returning emigres than its European peers,” he adds, which to his mind makes “the need for rebalancing declining birthrates also less pressing.” Either way, he says, “Spain’s urban centers will look and feel very different by the next decade.”
Savory highlights growing crime in some areas of the country. “Time will tell,” he adds, whether “an influx of close to 1 million undocumented migrants into cities with a light touch attitude toward petty crime will pay off.”
For all his reservations, Savory expects Spain to keep outperforming, as it did in 2025. Regularization applications are still arriving, and the final stretch before the window closes on June 30 will decide whether the program reaches the one million its backers expect.
