Question
I’m planning to move from England to Spain on a Spain Non Lucrative Visa. Currently, I’m self-employed and employed, I’m trying to work out a timeline of when I need to close the business and quit the job, and what paperwork do I need to acquire from HMRC to apply for the NLV?
Do I need to have achieved this before application or just before the Embassy appointment? I’d like to work for as long as possible as I need the money.
Answers
These are the answers of Spainguru’s Spanish Non Lucrative Visa group members:
“There’s no such thing as an Embassy appointment in the UK. It’s in some other countries but get slowly replaced with the BLS visa centres.
You get one appointment at the BLS visa centre in London, Manchester, or Edinburgh, depending on where you live, you can’t choose the city – you will need to produce proof of address. BLS will check the docs briefly (like you are the post office counter), they may ask for extra docs if anything is missing, they collect your papers, take a payment, and send it all to the Embassy. That’s it.
The next step – you hear ‘resuelto’ on the visa tracker and your passports are in the post back to you. If the embassy has questions, or missing docs – you get an email directly from them.”
You generally can book BSL UK appointments almost the next day, but they only update/release the appointments schedule at the end of the month for a month. So on the 29th you only can see 2 days appointments but comes the 31st – a whole month is available. Usually, plenty of appointment slots to choose from all through the month.
Your acro police certificate can only be 6 months old for the application date, Doctors certificate- 3 months old. Renewed marriage certificate (don’t know for sure the time for that, we went as an unmarried couple. Think it is 3 months too.) hence you can’t get the docs too early ahead of the app time.
After you got your acro, medical – you send it to be apostilled, post the originals to be legalised (on the gov site) – that’s a couple of weeks wait. Then depending on how you choose to translate the 3 above docs – translation time. We did it online within 24h.
Bank statements stamped, 22 months, at the bank (not sure if this is a must but we did it to be safe) – close to the appointment date.
Health insurance (we did it last), if you aren’t of retirement age – you can gather the quotes, choose the one you go for very close to the appointment date. We had ASSSA, they turned around the paperwork in 24h but we sat on the quote for a month. Purchased the policy 3 days before the appointment with 2 months delayed policy start date (you can ask for the delay of the start date but max 2 months).
As self-employed- you will need to request from HMRC an official letter confirming you ceased to operate (you can cease business online yourself but only 7 days before the date itself) Plus- your employment history.
To show you weren’t employed elsewhere… You need ideally to produce a P45 with your application (unfortunately) – we didn’t do it for my partner at the appointment time and we received a request from the Embassy to provide P45, that took a month as you can only get P45 at the payroll time, i.e., the end of the month).
Some people mentioned that the Embassy asked for an official HMRC post letter about ceasing self-employment! (we didn’t need it) but we printed employment history ourselves and it was sufficient with P45. HMRC post can take 2-3 weeks.
Conclusion
Navigating the Spain non lucrative visa application process in the UK involves several critical steps, from securing up-to-date personal documents to managing business closure timelines.
Key to a smooth application is timely preparation and understanding of BLS and Embassy requirements. It’s advisable to plan document acquisition and business closure well in advance to align with the visa application schedule, ensuring all requirements are met without jeopardizing financial stability before the move.
Join our community!
Make sure to join our dedicated Spanish Non Lucrative Visa group here!
