Last Updated on March 18, 2026 by Bruno Bianchi
Houston Consulate – non lucrative Spain visa
Here is a timeline of our non lucrative Spain visa process through the Houston Spanish consulate.
- Feb. 23 2023 – Overnighted the non lucrative Spain visa application to the consulate.
- March 14 2023 – We received an email asking for additional documents (new medical certificates, a health insurance document and proof of retirement or “not working”. My husband had started drawing his pension in January so he sent a statement. I got a letter from my former principal (I was a teacher) that I had resigned and no longer worked in the district. March 14 2023 became the official “application date”.
- March 22 2023- Overnighted extra documents – received by the Houston consulate on March 23
- March 27 2023- Received email that our health insurance would not be accepted because he excluded pre-existing conditions and given a deadline of April 3 2023 to rectify.
- March 30 2023- Overnighted new insurance policy documents along with letter from our visa attorney.
- April 4 2023- Email acknowledging that document was complete and that our application was in process. We were provided with a number to use in order to check the status online.
- April 12 2023 – Email from consulate that we had been approved and asking for our appproximate date of arrival in Spain.
- April 14 2023 – Visas IN HAND via overnight return envelope.
So – for the Houston consulate – don’t cut it close with your medical certs. Ours were issued Dec. 14 and we had to redo them because they opened the application on March. 14.
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Once they had everything they asked for the process went MUCH faster than we expected. It is such a great feeling to be on the other side of the ordeal and hopefully this timeline might be helpful to others using the Houston office.
Q&As
Did you already have a rental apartment in Spain, for how long was the contract, and did you travel to Spain first to secure it, or did it through a Spanish realtor online?
We have an apartment. We secured it all online although we had visited the rental agency in person on our last vacation to Girona. We stayed in one of their short term vacation rentals and popped in to the office to ask about longer term properties. They also referred us to the Visa attorney we used. Selection of the apartment and all the lease paperwork etc was done via email once we were back in the US. We have a one year lease. We expected to be moving last summer but our initial application was denied. At that point we went to Spain and stayed the allowed 90 days. Then in December we came back to the states and reapplied. We have had the apartment since August of last year but it’s been unoccupied for all but 3 months.
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Author: Julie Pollard
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