What the rule actually says

The qualification requirement has two alternative branches, and they are genuinely alternative: (a) you are a graduate or postgraduate of a recognized university, professional training program, or business school of recognized prestige — or (b) you have a minimum of three years of professional experience in functions analogous to the work you’ll perform remotely. One or the other. Nobody adds them up, and nobody prefers the first over the second — a file is either qualified or it isn’t.

The internet’s summary of this rule — “you need a degree” — is not a simplification. It’s just wrong, and it costs people Spain.

Who this door was built for

Look at who actually works remotely for U.S. companies in 2026: engineers who learned at a bootcamp or on YouTube and have been shipping production code for six years. Marketers who grew from an internship into running paid acquisition. Designers, copywriters, customer-success leads, ops managers — careers built by doing, not by sitting in lecture halls. The Startup Law was written to attract exactly this workforce, which is why the experience branch exists.

And here’s the counterintuitive part: a bootcamper with five years as a senior engineer often presents a cleaner case than a history graduate writing code. The experience route ties your qualification directly to the activity your visa is based on — five years of engineering letters proving you’re qualified to engineer. A degree in an unrelated field works through branch (a), yes, but it says nothing about your actual work; your employment evidence has to carry that story anyway. Experience-route files tell one coherent story from the first page.

What “proves” three years of experience

The UGE reviews paper, not GitHub. The evidence that works, roughly in order of weight:

  • Experience letters from current and former employers or clients (the formula below).
  • Employment contracts and offer letters covering the period.
  • Payroll history — W-2s, payslips, or 1099s spanning three-plus years.
  • Client contracts and invoices, for freelancers — the same paper trail your contractor file already needs.
  • Supporting texture: a clean CV, LinkedIn consistent with the letters, professional certificates if you have them (helpful, never required).

Three years means three years of the relevant function — they can span multiple employers and include freelance periods, and they don’t need to be consecutive to the month. What matters is that the documents, laid end to end, cover the span without asking the reviewer to take anything on faith.

The experience letter formula

The whole route rises or falls on the letters, and the failing ones all fail the same way: “X worked here and did a great job.” Charming, useless. A letter the UGE accepts states, on company letterhead, signed by someone identifiable:

  1. Who is signing — name, role, company, contact.
  2. Exact dates — “from March 2019 to June 2022,” not “several years.”
  3. Your role and duties — described so they visibly match the work you’ll do from Spain. If you’ll be a backend engineer from Valencia, the letter says you built and maintained backend systems, not that you “contributed to technology initiatives.”
  4. The nature of the work — ideally noting it was performed remotely or is performable remotely.

I draft these templates for my clients and their employers adapt them — a former boss will happily sign a good letter, but almost none will write one from scratch. Then the letters get sworn-translated like everything else in the file.

Edge cases worth naming

  • An unfinished degree counts for nothing by itself — but the years you’ve worked since count fully. Route (b), no apologies.
  • Bootcamp certificates aren’t university titles, but they’re decent supporting texture on top of the experience evidence — include, don’t rely.
  • A defunct former employer — company dissolved, boss unreachable — is survivable: contracts, payslips and tax records can cover the period a letter can’t.
  • Just under three years? Then the honest answer is the calendar: keep working, and file when the math works. The refile-after-rejection guide explains why forcing it early is the expensive path.

Don’t self-disqualify — that’s my job, and I rarely do it

The saddest emails I get start with “I assumed I couldn’t apply because I never finished college.” Three years of real work is a low bar for anyone senior enough to hold the remote job that qualifies for this visa in the first place — if your employer trusts you to work from another continent, you almost certainly clear it. The free two-minute assessment asks about exactly this (degree or experience), and my written follow-up will tell you which branch your file should use and which letters to collect. Don’t close the tab. Take the quiz.

Sources: Ley 28/2022 (BOE) · Ministerio de Inclusión — UGE / PRIE. This guide is general information, not legal advice. Last updated: July 2026.