Hiring a carer in Spain: the visa says you may not work, not that you may not employ

This page is about the moment care stops being theoretical. Somebody has had a fall, or a diagnosis, or has simply reached the stage where the stairs and the shopping have become a two-person job. A neighbour recommends a woman who is wonderful with her mother. She can start on Monday. She is asking twelve euros an hour, cash.

Everything about that sentence is normal in Spain, and about half of it is a problem — a bigger problem for you, holding a residence permit, than it would be for the Spanish family next door.

We have written separately about who pays for long-term care in Spain, which is a question about money and about the five-year residence wall in the dependency system. This page is the other half, and it is a question of law rather than of financing: what you become when you take someone on, and what that costs you to do correctly.

“Clients ask me whether hiring a carer breaches the non-lucrative visa. It does not. Then they ask whether they can pay her in cash, because everyone does. That one I answer differently, because the sanction for employing a person without work authorisation is written in the same statute that governs their own residence, and it names expulsion of the foreign employer as an alternative to the fine.”

The short answer

You may employ. You must register. Register the worker with social security before her first day, put the contract in writing, pay through a bank, and check that she herself has the right to work in Spain. A full-time carer at around the statutory minimum costs a household roughly a quarter more than the gross salary once contributions are added, and ending the relationship has required a stated, defensible reason since September 2022. If any of that is more administration than you want, contract a home care company and be a client instead of an employer.

Why employing someone is not the work your visa forbids

The non-lucrative residence authorisation is defined by what it excludes: residence in Spain without carrying out a work or professional activity. That is why the page on remote work on a non-lucrative visa exists, and why the answer there is uncomfortable. The prohibition attaches to your personal exertion for reward. It is a rule about the labour market: you are not to compete in it.

Buying someone else's labour is the opposite transaction. You are not entering the labour market as a supplier; you are entering it as a consumer, which is exactly what a Spanish pensioner does when she hires a cleaner. Nothing in the residence regime asks whether a foreign resident may spend money in Spain, and the entire economic logic of the non-lucrative visa — that you arrive with means and spend them here — would collapse if it did.

There is a genuine nuance, and it is worth stating plainly rather than pretending it away. Registering as a household employer creates a record of you in the Spanish social security system, with your foreigner identity number attached to it, in the files of the same ministry that handles your renewal. That record is a good thing when it is clean. It shows a person living genuinely in Spain, which is what the renewal is trying to establish anyway. It is only a problem if what it shows is an infringement.

The line to keep in view is different from the one people worry about. Do not drift into being paid. If your carer's husband asks you to help with his accounts, if you start managing the rental of a neighbour's flat, if the arrangement becomes reciprocal in ways that involve money coming towards you, you have crossed from consumption into activity. That is the boundary the visa polices, and the route across it is a modification to a work authorisation, not a private understanding.

A special employment relationship, not a favour

Spanish law does not treat domestic work as an informal arrangement that has grown legs. It is a named special employment relationship, regulated by Royal Decree 1620/2011 on the special employment relationship of family household service, and substantially reformed by Royal Decree-Law 16/2022 of 6 September, which improved working and social security conditions for people working in the home.

Three features of that framework matter for a foreign household:

The employer is a person, not a business. You do not need a company, a Spanish tax identification number for a business, or an accountant. You register as the titular del hogar familiar — the holder of the family household. Your foreigner identity number, obtained when you got your card, is what identifies you.

Care is inside the definition. The relationship covers services rendered in the family home, which expressly include the care or attention of the members of the family, not merely cleaning and cooking. A carer who helps someone dress, eat, remember medication and get to appointments is a domestic employee in Spanish law, not a medical professional and not a self-employed contractor invoicing you.

The 2022 reform closed the gaps. Domestic workers now have unemployment cover and access to the wage guarantee fund, and their contributions are the employer's obligation in full — the old route by which a worker doing fewer than sixty hours a month for a household could register and pay for herself was withdrawn in 2023. Protection against occupational risks in the home was brought into scope. In short, the regime that used to be the outlier is now close to the ordinary one, and the household is the one that carries it.

What you must actually do, in order

The sequence is short, and its most important feature is that most of it happens before anyone starts work.

1. Check her right to work. This comes first because everything else is wasted if it fails. An EU or EEA national needs a foreigner identity number and registration. A non-EU national needs a residence and work authorisation in force. Look at the physical card, look at the expiry date, and keep a copy in the same folder as the contract. “She told me she had papers” is not a defence.

2. Register yourself as a household employer. Registration is made with the Treasury of the Social Security using the household employer form, and you are assigned a contribution account code for the household. You will need both identity numbers, both social security numbers, an IBAN for the monthly direct debit, the address where the work is done, and the terms: start date, weekly hours, gross salary, any salary in kind, and the schedule.

3. Register her, before the first day. The alta must be effective before services begin; it can be filed in advance. This is the single obligation that, if you get it right, removes most of your exposure. Late registration is the infringement; there is no grace period that starts when someone notices.

4. Put the contract in writing. Hours, rest, whether the post is live-in, and how salary in kind is valued — board and lodging may form part of the remuneration but only up to a capped share of it, and never in a way that brings the cash element below the statutory floor. Live-in posts also raise tiempos de presencia, agreed time when the carer is present and available without working, which is remunerated separately and is where badly drafted live-in arrangements come apart.

5. Pay by transfer, and issue a payslip. Traceability is the cheapest insurance available to you. It also matters for a reason that has nothing to do with employment law: your Spanish account activity is part of the picture the administration forms of your life here, and it should be legible. See the tax calendar for new residents for the rest of that picture.

What it costs in 2026, with the contributions added

The floor is the statutory minimum wage, which for 2026 is set at 1,221 euros gross per month in fourteen payments — 1,424.50 euros if paid in twelve. For domestic workers paid by the hour, the minimum is 9.55 euros per hour actually worked, and that figure already includes the proportional share of extra payments and paid holidays, so it is not a rate to which you then add extras.

On top of the salary sit the contributions. For 2026 the rates for common contingencies mirror the general regime at 28.30 per cent, split 23.60 per cent to the employer and 4.70 per cent to the worker, on a base determined by the monthly remuneration including the pro-rata of extra payments, with a monthly ceiling of 5,101.20 euros. To that add professional contingencies, unemployment, the wage guarantee fund, and the intergenerational equity mechanism, which for 2026 stands at 0.90 per cent, of which 0.75 falls on the employer. A 20 per cent reduction applies to the employer's common contingency contribution, with larger reductions available to households in defined situations, including large families.

The worker's share is deducted from her salary; the household pays the whole sum over. As a planning figure, budget an all-in cost of roughly a quarter above gross salary for a household at or near the minimum, and remember that the market rate for an experienced live-in carer on the Costa del Sol sits comfortably above the statutory floor. Add holiday cover: thirty calendar days a year, which somebody has to work.

Set this against the comparison every American client makes privately. A home health aide in the United States is commonly quoted around thirty dollars an hour, and a full-time arrangement runs into six thousand dollars a month or more. The equivalent care in Spain, done entirely correctly with contributions paid, is a fraction of that. This is one of the few places where the honest answer to “is Spain cheaper?” is emphatically yes — which is precisely why it is worth doing legally rather than saving the last fifteen per cent. Our page on the cost of living for American retirees sets the rest of the household budget around it.

The cash arrangement, and why it is worse for a foreigner

Here is the part that distinguishes your position from your Spanish neighbour's.

Failing to register an employee is a labour and social security infringement. It carries a fine, and it carries the contributions that should have been paid, calculated backwards from the day services began to the day they are found. That exposure exists for everybody, and it does not require anybody to complain: an inspection can begin from a hospital admission, a workplace accident in the home, or the worker's own later application for a benefit that requires a contribution record.

The second exposure is the one written into your own statute. If the person you engage is a non-EU national without authorisation to work, employing her is classified by article 54.1.d of Organic Law 4/2000 as a very serious immigration infringement. It is sanctioned per worker, in a band running from 10,001 to 100,000 euros, and the amount is increased by the social security contributions that should have been paid from the start of the services. Among the accessory and alternative measures the statute contemplates is expulsion from Spanish territory where the infringing employer is himself a foreign national.

Read that sentence again with your own file in mind. You are a foreign national holding a temporary residence authorisation which you must renew, in a process where compliance with your obligations is part of what is assessed. The cash arrangement that saves a Spanish family a few hundred euros a month is, for you, an immigration offence recorded against the identity number printed on the card you are about to hand across a counter.

There is a quieter version of the same risk, and it catches decent people. A carer who has been in Spain for years, has a foreigner identity number, speaks about her papers with confidence and has worked for three families on your street may still hold a residence authorisation that does not include work, or one that expired. The number is not the permission. Ask to see the card, note the type and the expiry, and diarise the renewal date next to your own.

Ending it is no longer free

Until September 2022, a household in Spain could simply withdraw from a domestic employment relationship without giving any reason at all — the figure of desistimiento — on payment of twelve days' salary per year of service. It was the single most distinctive feature of the regime, and it is gone. Royal Decree-Law 16/2022 abolished it, following the finding that excluding domestic workers from ordinary protection produced indirect discrimination against a workforce that is overwhelmingly female.

What replaced it is narrower than dismissal in a company but far narrower than nothing. Termination now rests on the general grounds of article 49.1 of the Workers' Statute, so far as they are compatible with the particularities of a family home, plus three defined grounds which the household must state and be able to sustain:

a substantial reduction in the household's income or increase in its expenses arising from an unforeseen circumstance; a substantial change in the needs or circumstances of the household that justified the hiring; or conduct by the worker that reasonably and proportionately founds a loss of trust.

The decision must be communicated in writing, must express the ground relied on, and requires notice — twenty days where the relationship has lasted more than one year, seven days otherwise. Compensation follows the ground: the twelve days per year of service, capped at six monthly payments, attaches to the withdrawal-type grounds; disciplinary dismissal that is found unjustified carries the ordinary consequences, which are materially more expensive. Reinstatement sits awkwardly with a private home, which is why the practical outcome is almost always money.

Two situations catch families specifically. The first is the one nobody wants to plan for: the person being cared for dies, or moves permanently into a residential home. The need has ended, but the employment has not ended itself — it is terminated, on a stated ground, by whoever now stands in the household's shoes, and the estate is where the liability lands. If you have made a Spanish will, this belongs in the same conversation. The second is incapacity: if you can no longer take employment decisions, somebody must be able to take them for you, which is what a Spanish power of attorney for incapacity is for, and why it should name the household as well as the bank.

The other door: contract a company instead

Direct employment is not the only structure, and for a meaningful share of our clients it is not the right one. If you contract a home care company, the carer is the company's employee, not yours. The company registers her, pays her contributions, arranges cover when she is ill or on holiday, replaces her if the fit is wrong, and carries the dismissal risk. You receive an invoice with value added tax on it and you are a client.

You pay for that, in two currencies. In money, the hourly rate is materially higher than the equivalent direct cost. In continuity, you may get a rota rather than a person — and for a client with dementia, or simply for a client who has spent eighty years being private, the difference between one familiar face and four rotating ones is not a detail.

Our rule of thumb: households needing extensive, personal, continuous care tend to be better served by direct employment, because the relationship is the service. Households needing a limited number of hours, or spending long periods outside Spain, are usually better served by an agency, because you cannot suspend a payroll for three months while you are in Florida but you can stop booking hours.

The United States side: no Schedule H

American clients arrive braced for the household employment rules they know at home — the so-called nanny tax, the Schedule H filed with the personal return, the withholding thresholds. Those rules attach to services performed in the United States. A carer who is not a US person, working in a home in Spain, is not in employment covered by the US social security system, and the arrangement does not generate a Schedule H or a federal employment tax liability for you.

Two footnotes. The totalization agreement between the United States and Spain governs which system covers a worker who moves between the two; it does not create US coverage for a Spanish worker who has never left Spain. And the wages are a personal expense: they are not deductible on your US return, and there is no medical-expense route to deduct ordinary companion care that is not medically prescribed. If your care costs are large enough that you are asking, the question worth asking instead is whether they are deductible in Spain, which turns on the recognised degree of dependency and belongs in the same review as your Spanish filings.

Finally, what the Spanish state contributes. The dependency system created by Law 39/2006 does pay for care, including a benefit for care in the family environment and one for personal assistance, but access is conditional on a recognised degree of dependency and on a residence history that most recent arrivals do not have. That analysis, including the five-year wall, is set out in full on our page on long-term care and assisted living, and the healthcare side on the convenio especial. Plan on the assumption that in your first years here, the payer is you.

Three ways to arrange care, compared

Useful next reads

If care is the reason you are reading this: who pays for long-term care in Spain, the convenio especial for public healthcare, and advance healthcare directives. If you have just arrived: the first ninety days checklist, empadronamiento, and registering for healthcare. If someone in the family may need to act for you: a power of attorney for incapacity, and bringing a dependent relative to Spain.

Sources reviewed August 2026: Royal Decree 1620/2011 of 14 November regulating the special employment relationship of family household service, including the scope of services rendered in the family home and the care or attention of members of the family, as amended by Royal Decree-Law 16/2022 of 6 September for the improvement of the working and social security conditions of persons working in the household, which abolished termination by employer withdrawal with effect from 9 September 2022 and substituted termination on the general grounds of article 49.1 of the Workers' Statute so far as compatible with the family home together with three defined grounds, with written communication, statement of the ground and notice of twenty days where service exceeds one year and seven days otherwise; Royal Decree 126/2026 of 18 February fixing the minimum interprofessional wage for 2026 at 1,221 euros gross per month in fourteen payments and, for household employees paid by the hour, 9.55 euros per hour actually worked inclusive of the proportional part of extra payments and holidays; Ministerial Order PJC/297/2026 on contribution bases and rates for the special system for household employees applicable from 1 January 2026, with common contingency rates of 28.30 per cent split 23.60 per cent employer and 4.70 per cent worker, a monthly contribution ceiling of 5,101.20 euros, an intergenerational equity mechanism of 0.90 per cent of which 0.75 falls on the employer, and a 20 per cent reduction in the employer's common contingency contribution; the registration of the household employer with the Treasury of the Social Security and the assignment of a contribution account code, with registration of the worker required to be effective before services begin; article 54.1.d of Organic Law 4/2000 of 11 January on the rights and freedoms of foreigners in Spain, classifying as a very serious infringement the engagement of foreign workers without authorisation to work, sanctioned per worker in a band of 10,001 to 100,000 euros increased by the social security contributions payable from the commencement of services, with expulsion available as an alternative sanction where the employer is a foreign national; and Law 39/2006 of 14 December on the promotion of personal autonomy and care for persons in a situation of dependency. Figures and administrative practice change; this page is general information and not advice on any individual household.