Family Reunification in Spain: Who You Can Actually Bring, and What It Takes
Expatronus Team26 August 20268 min read
Bringing your partner, children or parents to Spain runs on its own rules: a year of residence first, an income test tied to the IPREM, a housing report, and five deadlines in a row.
Moving to Spain by yourself is one project. Bringing your partner, your children or your parents over afterwards is a second one, with its own rules, its own income test and its own queue. This guide covers reagrupación familiar under the general regime: the route used by non-EU nationals who already hold a Spanish residence card and want their family to join them. If the person doing the sponsoring is a Spanish or EU citizen, a different and more generous set of rules applies, and confusing the two is the single most expensive mistake you can make before you file anything.
What changed in May 2025
Spain replaced its immigration regulation last year. Royal Decree 1155/2024 came into force on 20 May 2025 and took over from the 2011 text, and family reunification now sits in its own chapter, at articles 65 to 71. Most of the architecture survived. You sponsor from inside Spain, the immigration office of your province decides, and then your relative applies for a visa at the Spanish consulate that covers where they live. What moved is worth knowing. Spouses now have a stated minimum age of eighteen. The list of who counts as a reunifiable relative was tightened and spelled out more explicitly. And the residence card your relative receives now carries the right to work on its own, which under the old rules was a separate fight entirely.
The year you spend before you can sponsor anybody
Reunification is not available from your first day in Spain. Under current rules the sponsor typically needs at least one year of legal residence behind them, and needs to hold or to have applied for an authorisation covering at least one more year on top of that. In practice this means you file the reunification application alongside your first renewal, or just after it. The grant to your family member is tied to that renewal going through, so a shaky renewal file quietly delays both at once. Sponsoring parents is stricter again: that generally calls for long-term resident status, which has its own five-year clock behind it, so it is rarely something a recent arrival can do no matter how genuine the need.
Who qualifies under the general regime
- Your spouse, provided you are not separated in fact or in law, and provided they are at least eighteen. Only one spouse can be reunified.
- Your unmarried partner, where you can document either a registered partnership or roughly twelve continuous months of living together, or where you have children in common.
- Children under eighteen on the date the application is filed, whether yours, your spouse's or your partner's, provided they are unmarried and dependent on you.
- Adult children whose disability or health situation means they cannot support themselves.
- Parents and parents-in-law aged sixty-five or over who genuinely depend on you and lack family support at home, and only where you hold long-term residence. Under sixty-five is treated as an exception on humanitarian grounds, not as an option.
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The age limit you have probably read is the wrong one. A lot of current guidance says children up to twenty-six can be reunified. That figure belongs to the separate regime for relatives of Spanish and EU citizens, which was overhauled at the same time and now runs on its own application form. Under the general regime described here, the ministry's own information sheet still puts the ordinary limit at under eighteen on the day you apply. If you are a non-EU resident and your child is nineteen, that is a different conversation, not a smaller one.
The income test: 150% of IPREM, then 50% a head
Spain measures the sponsor's means against the IPREM, the reference index it uses for almost every threshold in the system. The IPREM has now been frozen for a fourth consecutive year because no new state budget has been passed, so the 2026 figure is the same €600 a month it has been since 2023, or €7,200 across twelve payments. Reunification asks for 150% of that for a household of two, plus 50% for every additional person. What the office wants to see is income that is stable and foreseeable rather than one good quarter, and it typically looks back across the twelve months before your application. Employment income, self-employment earnings and some steady passive income all count towards it.
- You plus one relative: 150% of IPREM, roughly €900 a month.
- You plus two: add another 50%, so roughly €1,200 a month.
- You plus three: roughly €1,500 a month, and about €300 more for each person after that.
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If there are children in the household, there is a second way to pass. The regulation allows a household that includes minors to be measured instead against 110% of the guaranteed annual amount of the Ingreso Mínimo Vital for a unit of two with one child, plus 10% for each additional child. For a lot of families that lands lower than the IPREM calculation. It is rarely mentioned in general guides, so it is worth asking about specifically before you conclude that you do not earn enough.
Adequate housing is checked separately from income, through a report issued by your autonomous community, sometimes via your town hall. Someone assesses whether the property has enough space and the right conditions for the number of people who will actually live in it, measured against local standards rather than a single national one. It is usually the slowest document in the whole file, because it involves an inspection and a queue whose length varies enormously by region, and it typically has to be recent, within about six months, on the day you file. Start it well before you think you need it. A tenancy that is short, informal, or not in your own name is where this step most often stalls.
Five deadlines in a row, and none of them wait for you
- You file the sponsorship application on form EX-02 at the immigration office of your province, and pay the fee under model 790, code 052.
- The office typically has two months to decide. In this procedure silence counts as a refusal rather than an approval, so no answer is itself an answer.
- Once it is approved, your relative typically has two months to appear in person at the Spanish consulate covering where they live and apply for the visa.
- The consulate is generally expected to decide within about a month, and the visa is collected in person rather than posted.
- After landing, your relative typically has a month to apply for the TIE, the physical residence card.
What the card is worth the day they land
This is the part of the reform that changes daily life the most. The residence card issued through family reunification now allows work, employed or self-employed, anywhere in Spain and in any sector, with no separate authorisation to chase. A reunified spouse can accept a job offer the week they arrive. A reunified teenager can work once they reach Spain's minimum working age of sixteen, without anyone going back to the immigration office for permission first. Under the previous regulation this was a separate application, and it left plenty of partners sitting at home for a year waiting on it. The authorisation itself is generally aligned to the sponsor's own card and runs to the same expiry date, with a minimum of one year, which is precisely why the timing of your renewal matters as much as it does.
Where families actually get stuck
- The housing report was started too late, and other documents in the file went stale while everyone waited for it.
- Income was evidenced for the wrong window. The office looks backwards across twelve months, so a raise last month does not repair a thin year.
- Relationship evidence was thin. Registered partnerships and long cohabitation both need real paper, and a shared address on its own is rarely enough.
- Foreign civil documents arrived without an apostille or a sworn translation, which sends the file back to the end of the queue.
- The sponsor's own renewal slipped, and took the family application down with it.
None of this is unusually difficult. It is simply long, and it tends to fail on sequencing rather than on eligibility: the year of residence, then the income window, then the housing report, then two months, then two months again. Families who map the dates backwards from when they want everyone in the same country generally get there. Families who file when they feel emotionally ready generally discover that something has expired. If you want a second pair of eyes on which relatives qualify in your situation and what your file is still missing, you can start a free relocation assessment.
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Disclaimer: The information in this article is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, tax, or financial advice. Laws and regulations change frequently — always verify with official sources and consult a qualified professional before making any decisions. Contact our specialists or start your free assessment for personalised guidance.
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