Spain's Beckham Law vs the UK's FIG regime: comparing the first four years

Two countries, two time-limited deals for people who've recently moved. The UK's version — the Foreign Income and Gains regime, in force since 6 April 2025 — rewards people arriving in the UK. Spain's version — the régimen especial de impatriados, universally known as the Beckham Law after the footballer who used an earlier form of it — rewards people arriving in Spain. If you're a UK leaver heading to Barcelona, Madrid or the coast, you won't personally hold both at once, but understanding the shape of each matters: it tells you what you're walking away from on the UK side and what you can actually expect on the Spanish side, and the two work nothing like each other.

What the UK's FIG regime gives you

FIG relief is for a qualifying new resident: someone who becomes UK tax resident after at least ten consecutive tax years of non-UK residence. For your first four UK tax years of residence, you can claim full relief from UK tax on foreign income and foreign gains — claimed separately each year on your Self Assessment return, never automatically. You can claim in year one, skip year two, claim again in year three; each year stands alone.

The price is the same every time you claim: you give up your personal allowance (£12,570, frozen for both 2025/26 and 2026/27) and your Capital Gains Tax annual exempt amount (£3,000 in both years), plus the marriage allowance, married couple's allowance and blind person's allowance if you'd otherwise have had them. Employees get a separate election on top — Overseas Workday Relief, covering earnings for duties performed outside the UK, capped at the lower of 30% of qualifying employment income or £300,000 a year, available across the same four-year window. Whatever you claim relief on, you can bring into the UK at any point afterwards with no further UK tax charge — there's no remittance trap waiting for the money later. Year five is a cliff: full worldwide taxation from that point, no taper, however the four years were used.

What Spain's Beckham Law gives you

Spain's regime (Article 93 of the Ley del IRPF, reformed by the 2022 Startups Law) runs differently from the ground up. Qualify, and Spanish-source employment income is taxed at a flat 24% up to €600,000 a year, with 47% on anything above that threshold — no personal allowance, no joint taxation, no sliding scale, just one rate from the first euro. Foreign-source income other than employment — dividends, interest, rent and gains arising outside Spain — is generally left out of the Spanish tax return entirely while the regime applies. There's no Modelo 720 foreign-asset declaration to file and no Spanish Wealth Tax on anything you hold outside Spain.

What the flat rate does not cover is Spanish-source savings income. Interest, dividends and capital gains on assets actually located in Spain are taxed separately, under Spain's ordinary progressive savings scale — running from 19% at the bottom to 30% at the top band for 2025 and 2026. The regime runs for the tax year of arrival plus the following five: six tax years in total, two longer than the UK's four, and assessed on Spain's calendar tax year rather than the UK's 6 April start.

The first four years, side by side

	UK FIG regime	Spain's Beckham Law
Who it's for	Becoming UK resident after 10 years away	Becoming Spanish resident after 5 years away
How you get it	Claimed year by year on Self Assessment	Elected once, via Modelo 149, within 6 months of starting work
Length	First 4 UK tax years, year by year	Year of arrival plus 5 more — 6 years, no annual choice
What's taxed lightly	Foreign income/gains: 0% if claimed that year	Spanish work income: flat 24% (47% above €600,000)
What's exempt	Foreign income and gains elected that year	Foreign-source income generally (not just elected items)
What stays taxed as normal	UK-source income, always	Spanish-source savings income, at 19%–30%
What it costs you	Personal allowance (£12,570) + CGT exempt amount (£3,000) in any claim year	No personal allowance, ever, on the 24% income
Who's excluded	Nobody by occupation — only by residence history	Freelancers, professional athletes, 25%+ company directors

How this typically plays out

Here's a composite, not a real client file. Say a UK finance manager relocates with their employer to Barcelona on a local Spanish contract paying €180,000 a year, and keeps a UK buy-to-let flat and a portfolio of UK shares back home. They haven't lived in Spain in the past five years, so they apply for the Beckham regime on arrival.

Their Spanish salary of €180,000 sits under the €600,000 threshold, so the whole amount is taxed at the flat 24% — roughly €43,200 a year in Spanish tax, for each of the six years the regime runs. The UK shares' dividends and any gains on them are foreign-source as far as Spain is concerned, so Spain doesn't tax them at all while the regime applies. The UK flat is a different story: rental profit is UK-source income, and Spain's exemption only reaches foreign income, not what the source country does with it — the rent keeps being taxed in the UK under the ordinary non-resident landlord rules regardless of Spanish residence, and the UK dividends may separately qualify for the disregarded income treatment covered in our guide to how the UK-Spain treaty actually interacts with domestic rules.

Now flip the comparison. Had this same person instead been arriving in the UK as a qualifying new resident with the same foreign earnings and investment income, the shape of the deal would look quite different: an annual election rather than a six-year blanket, a personal allowance and CGT exempt amount given up only in years actually claimed, and relief that reaches foreign income and gains specifically rather than a flat rate on local earnings. Spain's deal is broader in scope but rigid once taken; the UK's is narrower in scope but flexible year to year. Neither is simply "better" — it depends which kind of income you're protecting.

Who gets shut out

Spain's regime is openly built around employees, not business owners. Three groups can't use it at all: the self-employed and freelancers (digital nomad visa holders doing genuinely remote work for a non-Spanish employer are the one carved-out exception), professional sportspeople, and anyone who will hold 25% or more of the equity in the Spanish company paying them. The UK's FIG regime draws its line differently — there's no exclusion by profession or shareholding, only by residence history: ten consecutive non-UK-resident tax years, with nationality and domicile both irrelevant to the test.

What's genuinely verified here, and where to go next

Figures above are HMRC's published rates for the 2025/26 and 2026/27 UK tax years and Spain's Agencia Tributaria rules for the régimen de impatriados as reformed by Ley 28/2022, current as of October 2026. If you're planning the move itself, our leaving the UK review runs the UK side of a departure — split year, the property you leave behind, National Insurance — before you fly, and non-resident Self Assessment covers the UK filings that keep running afterwards regardless of what Spain does with your Spanish income. Our Spain page covers the wider set of UK tax questions that come with living there, and the Statutory Residence Test guide is the background for how HMRC decides you've actually left in the first place.

Questions readers ask

What does Spain's Beckham Law actually exempt from tax?

It exempts foreign-source income from Spanish tax — dividends, interest, rental income and capital gains arising outside Spain are left off your Spanish tax return entirely while you're in the regime. Spanish-source employment income is taxed at the flat 24% rate instead (47% above €600,000 a year), but Spanish-source savings income — interest, dividends and gains on assets actually located in Spain — isn't covered by that flat rate at all; it's taxed under Spain's ordinary progressive savings scale, running from 19% up to 30% at the top band. Two mistakes follow from this: assuming the flat rate covers everything Spanish, and assuming the exemption on foreign income also protects you from tax where that income arises. It doesn't — a UK rental property, for example, stays taxable in the UK regardless of your Spanish tax status.

What happens when the Beckham Law's six years run out?

You revert to ordinary Spanish tax residence with no transition or tapering — worldwide income taxed on Spain's normal progressive scale up to 47%, Wealth Tax potentially applying to assets you hold anywhere in the world rather than just in Spain, and the Modelo 720 foreign-asset declaration becoming compulsory again if you hold more than €50,000 offshore. Because the switch is immediate rather than gradual, the sensible planning happens inside the regime, not after it: realising gains, restructuring foreign holdings or taking distributions from a foreign company while they're still outside the Spanish net, much as UK arrivals use their FIG window. You can't requalify for the regime later either — once used, it's gone for good unless you leave Spain and rebuild a full five years of non-residence from scratch.

If I leave the UK for Spain, can I use both the FIG regime and the Beckham Law?

Not at the same time, and for most leavers the FIG regime won't apply at all. FIG relief is for people becoming UK resident after at least ten consecutive years of non-UK residence — it rewards arrivals into the UK, not departures from it, so someone moving from the UK to Spain is the Beckham Law's target audience, not the FIG regime's. The two only intersect if you later return to the UK after a long enough spell in Spain: ten consecutive non-resident tax years would make you a qualifying new resident for FIG all over again on the way back. Until then, your UK-source income — rent, dividends, any UK employment — keeps being taxed under ordinary UK non-resident rules in parallel with whatever Spain charges, with the UK-Spain double taxation treaty deciding which country gives credit for the other's tax.

Who can't use Spain's Beckham Law, even if they're newly arrived?

Three groups are specifically excluded: the self-employed and freelancers (digital nomad visa holders doing genuinely remote work for a non-Spanish employer are the main exception), professional sportspeople, and company directors who will hold 25% or more of the equity in the Spanish-resident company paying them. On top of that, you must not have been Spanish tax resident in the five tax years immediately before your move — a threshold cut down from ten years by the 2022 reform — so returning to Spain too soon after a previous stint rules you out too, however new the current job is. These exclusions exist because the regime was designed around employees relocating for work, not business owners moving their own companies or income into a lower-tax wrapper.