Spain's student visa comes with an automatic right to work 30 hours a week

Ask a student adviser what changed recently in Spain's immigration rules and you'll usually hear about the twelve-month job-search permit graduates get once they finish a degree. It's a real improvement, and it's already been covered. What gets mentioned far less, and matters from the day you land rather than the day you graduate, is that Spain also rewrote the rules on working while you study. Since May 2025, an international student enrolled in a Spanish university doesn't need to file for permission to work at all. The right comes printed on the residence card itself, thirty hours a week, no separate authorisation, none of the employer paperwork that most other countries still demand. Almost nobody arriving in Spain this year seems to know that, and the countries competing for the same students, Germany, France, the Netherlands, still make you ask.

What changed, and when

Spain replaced its entire foreigners' regulation on 20 May 2025, when the Reglamento de Extranjería approved by Royal Decree 1155/2024 came into force, repealing the 2011 rulebook that had governed these procedures for fourteen years. Elsewhere on this blog we've written about what that reform did to the residence clock and the post-study job hunt. The part that affects you from your very first semester is the section on student employment, and it's a genuine change in how the system treats you, not just a longer deadline.

Before the reform, a student who wanted to work legally had to apply for a specific authorisation to modify their permit, a process an employer effectively had to sponsor, sometimes with a labour-market check attached. It wasn't impossible, but it was slow enough, and unfamiliar enough to most Spanish employers, that plenty of students ended up working off the books or not working at all. RD 1155/2024 removed that step entirely for students in higher education. The right to work now exists automatically, from the moment you're enrolled and holding a valid student residence card, no separate filing, no waiting on a resolution, no employer applying for anything on your behalf.

Thirty hours a week, full-time in the breaks

The number to know is thirty. A student on a bachelor's, master's, doctoral or higher vocational programme, a Formación Profesional de Grado Superior, can work up to thirty hours a week during term, and full-time during official academic breaks. The right is genuinely broad: the same thirty-hour cap covers a job with a Spanish employer under a normal contract, and it separately covers registering as autónomo and freelancing, invoicing clients directly rather than working for one employer. Either route sits inside the same automatic authorisation, and your TIE, the physical residence card, is marked to reflect it, so an employer checking your right to work sees the answer on the card itself instead of having to interpret a separate document nobody in their HR department has seen before.

How that compares with the rest of Europe

Put the number next to what the other big study destinations offer and the gap is larger than it first looks. Germany raised its cap in 2026 to 140 full working days a year, or 280 half-days, which averages out to roughly 20 hours a week once it's spread across the year. France runs on an annual hours budget too, 964 hours, again around 20 hours a week during term. The Netherlands is the tightest of the group: 16 hours a week for non-EU students, and the employer has to obtain a separate TWV work permit before they can legally hire you at all, a step that puts a fair number of Dutch employers off hiring international students in the first place. Spain's thirty hours a week, with no equivalent employer permit standing in the way, is both the higher number and the shorter path to actually getting hired.

The gap nobody warns you about: language schools

The one group this doesn't cover is exactly the group most likely to assume it does: students on a language-course visa. The automatic right to work belongs to students enrolled in higher education, a university degree or an accredited higher vocational course regulated by Spain's Ministry of Education. A language academy, even a well-regarded, officially accredited one, doesn't count as higher education for this purpose, so a student doing a year of intensive Spanish before starting a degree has no automatic work authorisation at all during that year. It's a trap precisely because the two visas look so similar on paper, and because the difference only becomes visible the day you try to sign an employment contract and discover your card doesn't carry the same marking a degree student's does.

• , Bachelor's, master's and doctoral students get the automatic 30-hour right, printed on the TIE.
• , Higher vocational students, Formación Profesional de Grado Superior, are included on the same terms.
• , Language school students, including at accredited academies, are excluded and need a separate authorisation to work legally.
• , Full-time work is allowed during official academic breaks, not only the 30-hour cap during term.
• , Both employed work under a contract and self-employment as an autónomo count toward the same weekly limit.

What this means for how you plan the year

None of this changes the harder questions, how many hours of paid work you can actually sustain alongside a full course load, or whether thirty hours at Spanish wages covers rent in Madrid versus a smaller city. What it does change is the friction. In Germany, France or the Netherlands, finding an employer willing to navigate a work-permit process for a student is often the harder part of getting hired, even when the hours themselves would work out fine. In Spain, that step is gone, so the constraint becomes finding the job and staying inside the hours cap, not the paperwork sitting between you and it. If your budget for the year assumes part-time income, Spain is the one major destination on this list where you can plan around that income directly, rather than planning around the bureaucracy that usually stands in front of it.

Frequently asked questions

Important notice: this article is for general educational purposes only. Work-rights rules, hour limits and permit requirements can change, and implementation can vary by university, immigration office and employer. The 30-hour automatic work right, the exclusion of language-course students and the academic-break exception reflect the Reglamento de Extranjería approved by Royal Decree 1155/2024, in force since 20 May 2025. Verify the current position with the relevant Spanish authority and consult a Visagrad expert before relying on this for an application or an employment contract.