Where the right comes from
The Digital Nomad Visa lives inside Law 14/2013, the law on support for entrepreneurs and their internationalisation, as amended by the Startup Law in 2022. That law has a provision, the Fourth Additional Provision, that applies to every residence category it creates, investors, entrepreneurs, highly qualified professionals, researchers and international teleworkers alike. It says that the family members admitted alongside the holder are authorised to work, as employees or on their own account, without any further procedure.
The Ministry’s own guidance for teleworker files repeats it in plain words: family members may work in Spain without restrictions, employed or self-employed. There is no separate work permit to request, no quota, no labour market test. The family residence card that arrives after approval already carries the right.
What “without restriction” means in practice
The main applicant lives with a real limit. An employee on this permit may work in Spain for no one but the foreign company on the application, not even another foreign employer, and a self-employed applicant may take at most 20% of their work from Spanish clients, and only as a professional relationship. That limit is what makes the permit an international telework permit rather than a general one.
None of it reaches the spouse. Your partner can be hired by a company in Madrid on a Spanish contract, open a business in Valencia, freelance for clients anywhere, or keep a remote job with a U.S. employer. They can change jobs without telling immigration. They can earn more than you. The only thing they cannot do is become the basis of the family’s permit, because the permit belongs to the teleworker, and that is the part to keep in view.
What your spouse needs to be included
The financial test is yours, not theirs. The Ministry’s list sets the family threshold on the main applicant’s income: 200% of the Spanish minimum wage for you, plus 75% for the first family member and 25% for each one after that. With the 2026 figures that is €2,849 a month for you, €1,068 more for your spouse, and €356 for each child, all gross. Your spouse’s salary is not counted toward it and does not need to exist.
What your spouse does need is their own file. Each family member submits a separate application with its own form and its own €73.26 fee, plus the documents that prove who they are and how they are related to you: passport, marriage certificate or proof of the partnership with its apostille and sworn translation, private health insurance from an insurer authorised in Spain, and, for anyone over eighteen, criminal record certificates from the countries they lived in over the last two years. Children under eighteen need no criminal certificate at all.
Filing the family together with you is the cheap way to do it, and not only in fees. When the applications go in at the same time, your income proof covers everyone. If a spouse applies later, the income proof has to be rebuilt for that application, contract, three months of payslips and a stamped bank certificate included. The family apostille guide sets out how to line up the certificates so nothing expires while the slowest one arrives.
Social Security for a working spouse
A spouse who takes a job in Spain is enrolled by the employer in the general scheme, as any employee would be. A spouse who freelances registers as autónomo. A spouse who keeps a remote U.S. job is in the same position the main applicant is in, and the same two routes apply: a Certificate of Coverage from the SSA if the employer will request one, or Spanish registration if not. None of this is a condition of the family permit. It is the ordinary rule that anyone working from Spanish soil is covered here, and it matters because your own permit depends on the household staying on the right side of that rule. The Social Security guide explains what late registration can cost the whole family.
Taxes, briefly
A spouse who lives in Spain more than 183 days a year is a Spanish tax resident, whether or not they work. Income from a Spanish job is taxed here in the normal way. A spouse with foreign income may or may not fit the Beckham regime; the regime extends to a spouse who moves with the holder under certain conditions, and whether it helps depends on what they earn and where. This is the one point where a conversation with a tax adviser before the move pays for itself many times over.
Two things that survive renewal
- Insurance that stays valid. Each family member needs their own qualifying health policy at renewal, unless they are by then covered by Spanish Social Security through a job. A spouse who has been employed in Spain since approval has usually solved this without noticing.
- The link to your permit. The family permit renews with yours and on the strength of yours. If your own situation changes, a job lost, a threshold no longer met, the family’s renewal is exposed too. A spouse’s Spanish job does not rescue it, because the permit is the teleworker’s. Plan the household around that asymmetry.
Unmarried partners
The law admits a partner in a relationship equivalent to marriage. A registered domestic partnership, a pareja de hecho in Spain or its equivalent abroad, is the straightforward proof. Without one, Spain looks for evidence of a stable relationship, and the standard is higher than couples expect. The unmarried couples guide covers what has worked and what has not.
The bottom line
Your spouse can work in Spain, fully, from approval. You prove the family’s income once, each family member files their own application, and the family’s permit rests on yours. Get the insurance and the timing right, and the rest is ordinary life. The family guide has the full picture, and the free assessment will tell you in two minutes whether your household clears the bar.
Sources: Law 14/2013, Fourth Additional Provision · Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration, “Preguntas frecuentes. Autorizaciones de residencia y trabajo de teletrabajadores internacionales” and the document list for family members of international teleworkers. Last updated: 3 October 2026.