Sending a US Employee to Madrid: The Permit Questions HR Should Ask First

ByBNW Staff

A US company decides to send an engineer, a sales lead or a country manager to Madrid. The business case is ready, the apartment search has started, and then someone in HR asks the question that should have come first: which permit will this person live and work under? In Spain the answer depends less on the job title than on who pays the salary and from where.

Start with who employs the person

Spanish immigration law offers different routes depending on the structure of the assignment, and choosing the wrong one is the most common source of delay:

  • The employee keeps working for the US company, fully remote. This is the territory of the international telework permit, often called the digital nomad visa.
  • The employee moves to a Spanish entity of the group or is hired locally. Here the options include the highly qualified professional permit, the EU Blue Card and the intra-company transfer.
  • The employee is launching a new business or a research project. Law 14/2013 also has routes for entrepreneurs and researchers.

All of these permits belong to the same family: they are regulated by Law 14/2013 and processed by a specialized unit of the Spanish administration, the Large Companies and Strategic Groups Unit (UGE). The residence-by-investment route, the so-called golden visa, stopped accepting applications in April 2025 and is no longer an option for a new move.

How the UGE procedure works

The UGE procedure is designed for companies, and it has features that the general immigration system does not:

  • A short legal deadline. The law gives the administration twenty days from electronic filing to decide. If it does not answer in time, the application is deemed approved.
  • A different appeal. Against a refusal, the remedy is an administrative appeal to a higher body (recurso de alzada), not the reconsideration request used in most immigration cases.
  • Protection while waiting. Filing the application extends the employee’s current stay or residence until the decision. An employee who files during a lawful stay does not fall out of status just because the decision takes longer than expected.

These features only help when the file is complete and the route is the right one. That is why companies relocating staff often ask an immigration lawyer in Madrid to confirm the route before the employee books a one-way flight: moving the application from one permit to another halfway through costs more time than choosing well at the start.

The first months on the ground

Two practical points tend to catch HR teams off guard.

Social Security can start before the paperwork is finished. For the permits regulated by this section of Law 14/2013, the passport is enough to register the employee with Spanish Social Security during the first six months of their stay or residence, even if they do not yet have a foreigner’s identification number.

The identity card is a separate step. When a residence permit lasts more than six months, the holder has to apply in person for the foreign national identity card (TIE) within one month. The card does not grant the right to live in Spain. It proves a right the employee already has, and banks, landlords and employers ask to see it constantly.

Keeping the permit alive

The permit is not a one-off formality. Under Law 14/2013, these residence permits are renewed for two-year periods as long as the conditions that justified them still hold. Filing for renewal before the permit expires keeps it valid until the decision. A renewal filed within ninety days after expiry is still accepted, but the administration may open a sanction proceeding, so it should be the exception, never the plan.

For HR, that means three habits:

  1. Track the expiry date of every relocated employee as carefully as the end date of their contract.
  2. Report changes. A change of employer, salary or role may affect the permit, and some routes require reporting those changes to the UGE.
  3. Keep the file. The documents that justified the first application are the starting point for the renewal.

One decision, made early

Relocating an employee to Madrid is mostly logistics, but the immigration piece decides the calendar. Asking who employs the person, from where and for how long, before anything else is the simplest way to keep the move on schedule.