The law counts residents one at a time. A family reaches long-term residence one person at a time — and the dates are rarely the same
You’ve worked out your own calendar: first legal day, one year, three years, renewals of two, long-term residence at five. Now the harder version of the same question. Your partner arrived fourteen months after you because of a lease and a job. Your daughter turns eighteen next spring. Or there’s a baby who was born here and has never been anywhere else.
The English-language pages about the digital nomad route and families are all about getting in — who counts as family, what income you add per person, which forms. Almost none of them say the one thing you need at this stage, which is that the five-year door opens for one person at a time. Here is how that works, and how to keep four calendars without losing one.
1. How your family got here, and what that means for the count
The route you’re on has its own family provision. Your spouse or partner in an equivalent relationship, your children who are minors — or adults who depend on you and haven’t formed a family of their own — and dependent ascendants can apply for their authorisation jointly with you, at the same time, or later (Ley 14/2013, art. 62.4, as amended in 2023). Each of them meets the general requirements in their own name — no criminal record, health cover — and the resources are yours, for yourself and for the members of your family (art. 62.3.f).
Two consequences follow, and the first is the whole article.
Long-term residence, in both its versions, goes to the foreign persons who have resided legally and continuously in Spain for the five years before the application (arts. 183.1 and 176.a)). The regulation speaks of persons, not households. Your partner’s five years start on your partner’s first legal day, and your children’s on theirs. If your partner arrived fourteen months after you, their door opens fourteen months after yours. There is no provision that lets a family member borrow the main holder’s time.
The second consequence is about what their status is until then. The family authorisation exists because of yours: it was granted to people who accompany or join the main holder. The law doesn’t spell out what happens to it if yours ends — and we’re not going to pretend it does — but the sensible reading, and the one we work from, is that until each family member holds long-term residence in their own name, their position is tied to yours. That is the practical reason to want everyone through the door, not just you: long-term residence is the moment a family member stops being your family member on paper and becomes a resident in their own right.
2. Four calendars, four absence budgets
The absence budget in the main article — no absence over six months, ten months in total, eighteen for work-related absences (arts. 183.2 and 176.a)) — is assessed per applicant, over that applicant’s own five years.
That produces situations families don’t expect:
- Your work trips are yours. The eighteen-month tier is for absences for work reasons. If your partner comes with you to a three-month client project, your three months may sit in the work tier; whether theirs do is not something the text answers — the article doesn’t say whose work. We plan the accompanying partner on the ordinary ten-month budget and keep their evidence separately. If it turns out better than that, nothing is lost.
- A child’s summer abroad counts for the child. Two months with grandparents every year is ten months in five years — the ordinary ceiling, exactly. One log per person, not one per family. The one-page table in our absence-log article works for each of them; just keep four of them.
- A long stretch away for one person doesn’t touch the others. If your partner spends seven months abroad caring for a parent, that is over the six-month ceiling for your partner — with the force majeure clause of art. 183.2 as the argument to make, case by case — and it has no effect on your count or the children’s.
3. The children: three dates that change the arithmetic
Nothing in art. 183.1 or 176.a) sets a minimum age: a minor who has resided legally for five years qualifies like anyone else. But three moments alter a child’s calendar in ways that are easy to miss.
Turning eighteen. The family provision covers adult children only while they depend economically on the holder and haven’t formed their own family unit (art. 62.4). The status doesn’t vanish on the birthday, but the basis for it changes, and a renewal filed for an adult child needs to show the dependence. If a child will turn eighteen before reaching five years, we’d rather they reach the five-year door — in their own right — than rely on dependence for one more renewal. Count backwards from the birthday.
Being born here. A child born in Spain to resident parents has a route of their own in the regulation for their first authorisation, and it’s a separate conversation we won’t compress into a paragraph. What matters for this page: the regulation also gives a person born in Spain a specific door to national long-term residence at majority, after three consecutive years of legal residence immediately before applying (art. 183.3.c)). A child born here in year two of your residence may have a shorter path than a sibling who arrived with you.
Arriving later than the parents. The most common case and the least noticed: the child who finished the school year at home and joined six months after you. Their count starts six months after yours, full stop.
4. Which long-term residence for each of you
For the national version, the requirement is the five years (art. 183.1). For the EU version, each applicant also needs fixed and regular resources for their own maintenance and, where relevant, their family’s, which may come from own means or from work, and health cover (art. 176.b) and c)).
That second list is where a family’s choice can split. A partner who works — in Spain or remotely — has resources of their own. A partner who doesn’t, and a child, don’t; whether the main holder’s income counts as their own means for the EU version is the one thing we most wanted to verify for this page and couldn’t. Until we can, we’d plan it this way: the working adults aim for whichever version fits the family’s answer to the Europe question in our comparison article; for a non-working partner and for children, the national version is the door we know opens on the five years alone — and the EU version is a conversation, not an assumption. If the whole family may one day move within the EU, that conversation is worth having in year three, not at the window.
5. What we could not verify, and what we’re sure of
Verified in the consolidated text: who counts as family on this route and that they apply in their own name; that long-term residence is counted per person over that person’s own five years; that the absence budget is assessed per applicant; the resources and cover requirement of the EU version; the specific door for people born in Spain at art. 183.3.c).
Not verified, and therefore not asserted: what formally happens to a family member’s authorisation if the main holder’s is extinguished before year five (the law’s family article is silent; we treat the status as tied); whether an accompanying partner’s absence during the holder’s work trip can be classed as work-related for the partner (we plan on the ordinary budget); and whether the main holder’s income satisfies the own means test of the EU version for a non-working partner (we plan on the national version for them, or we ask).
Where this leaves you
Your family doesn’t have a five-year plan. It has one per person, and they finish in a different order than they started. None of that is a problem if the dates are written down.
If everyone is still in years one to three: write four lines — name, first legal day, five years later, and for a child, the eighteenth birthday — and start one absence log per person.
If there’s a birthday, a birth, or a gap of more than a year between arrivals: send us everyone’s dates. Those are the cases where the order matters, and where the paperwork for one person has to be filed with the others in mind.
Sources: Ley 14/2013, arts. 62.3 and 62.4 (as amended by Ley 11/2023); Real Decreto 1155/2024, arts. 176, 183 and 201. All consulted in their consolidated texts on 6 September 2026. This page explains rules; it is not advice on your case.
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