What the UGE actually asks for
The Ministry’s document list for in-country Digital Nomad Visa filings describes the financial proof in two parts. First, your payslips or invoices for the three months before the application. Second, a certificate from your bank, issued in your name and stamped or signed by the bank, covering the same three months, in which the movements that show those payments arriving are expressly marked, one by one.
Read that again and notice what it is not. It is not a statement. A statement is a list of everything that happened in the account. A certificate is the bank saying, on its letterhead and under its stamp, that this account belongs to you and that these specific credits came in on these dates. The officer reading your file does not want to hunt through Amazon refunds and coffee purchases for your salary. They want the bank to point at it.
Why statements alone get files stuck
A statement printed at home carries no signature, no stamp and nothing that tells a Spanish civil servant it was not edited before printing. That is the practical reason. The formal reason is simpler: the list says certificate, and the UGE reads its own list literally. A file that arrives with statements instead of a certificate is not refused on the spot. It gets a requerimiento, a request for the missing document, and the clock stops while you go back to your bank. If the bank takes two weeks and the translator another, you have lost a month for a piece of paper you could have ordered on day one.
How to get it from a U.S. bank
American banks do not issue this document as a product. You have to ask for it in words a branch understands. What has worked, in practice, is to request a signed account verification letter or bank reference letter on letterhead that states your full name as it appears on your passport, the account number, the date the account was opened, and the current balance, and then to attach to it the three monthly statements with the salary credits highlighted and each highlighted line initialled and stamped by the bank officer. Some banks will print the letter in the branch the same day. Online-only banks are harder; most will produce a signed letter on request through secure messaging, and a few will not sign anything, which is worth finding out before you file, not after.
Three details matter more than they look.
- The name must match your passport. A middle initial missing on the letter and present on the passport is exactly the kind of thing that draws a question.
- The dates must match your payslips. If your March payslip shows a net figure of $6,214.30, the certificate needs a credit of $6,214.30 on or around the same date. Where the two do not line up, for example because part of your pay goes to a second account, get the certificate from the account that receives the salary.
- Gross, not net, is what the threshold measures. The bank shows what landed after tax. The payslip shows gross. The officer compares the gross figure on the payslip against the threshold and uses the bank movement to confirm the salary is real. Both documents together do the work; neither does it alone.
Contractors and business owners
If you invoice clients instead of receiving a salary, the same logic applies with invoices in place of payslips. Three months of invoices, and a bank certificate showing those invoices being paid, each payment marked. Irregular timing is fine as long as the total is there and traceable. What causes trouble is money arriving through a platform or a payment processor under a name that is not your client’s, so the officer cannot connect the invoice to the credit. A short explanatory note in the file solves most of that, and the guide to multiple income sources goes into the harder combinations.
Owners of their own company who cannot show three months of anything can fall back on the previous year’s tax return, according to the Ministry’s list. That is a fallback, not the standard route, and it invites questions about whether the income is recurring.
When the income is short
The threshold for a single applicant in 2026 is €2,849 a month gross, and it rises with every family member. The Ministry’s list allows updated bank certificates showing savings or other liquid income that cover the difference, but for the entire validity of the authorisation. For an in-country filing that is three years. A shortfall of €300 a month is €10,800 in savings that must be visible and stay visible. The income checker runs those numbers for your family size.
Translation, and what you do not need
The certificate is a private document, so it needs no apostille. It does need a sworn translation into Spanish by a translator on the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs register, because everything the officer reads has to be in Spanish. Order the translation once you have the final certificate, not before, since a certificate dated three months before filing is a certificate you may have to reissue if the filing slips. The income requirements guide sets out the full arithmetic, and the document checklist shows where this certificate sits in the sequence.
The bottom line
Ask your bank for a signed, stamped letter, not a download. Make it cover the same three months as your payslips. Have every salary credit marked. Get it translated by a sworn translator. It is one of the cheapest documents in the file and one of the most common reasons a file stops.
Source: Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration, “Solicitudes iniciales de autorización para teletrabajadores de carácter internacional”, document list for the UGE-CE. Last updated: 3 October 2026.