Beckham Law: Old Regime vs. New Regime — The Startup Law Transitional Rules Explained

Introduction: Two Different Regimes Coexisting Under the Same Article

Since 1 January 2023, the Beckham Law has existed in two distinct legal versions operating simultaneously. On one side are the taxpayers who applied under the pre-reform rules — the regime as it stood before Ley 28/2022, de 21 de diciembre, de fomento del ecosistema de las empresas emergentes (the Startup Law) entered into force. On the other side are taxpayers who applied after 1 January 2023 under the expanded, post-reform rules. These two groups are governed by materially different legal frameworks, even though they share the same nominal regime, the same basic flat tax rate, and the same Article 93 of the Ley del Impuesto sobre la Renta de las Personas Físicas (LIRPF).

This coexistence is not accidental. It is the product of a specific transitional provision — the Disposición Transitoria primera de la Ley 28/2022 — which deliberately froze in place the existing applications filed before the reform, rather than automatically upgrading them to the new rules. For advisers and for taxpayers already in the regime, understanding precisely where the dividing line falls, and what it means in practice, is one of the most important and most frequently misunderstood aspects of Beckham Law planning in 2025.

This article provides a full analysis: the historical timeline of changes to Article 93 LIRPF, the specific reforms introduced by the Startup Law, the exact terms of the transitional provision, the practical problems that arose during the 2022-2023 transition period, and what the two regimes look like when compared side by side.

1. Timeline: Every Major Change to the Beckham Law Since 2004

Article 93 LIRPF has been amended multiple times since its creation. The following timeline traces all significant changes, from the original 2004 enactment to the Startup Law reform.

2. What the Startup Law (Ley 28/2022) Actually Changed

The Startup Law's amendment of Article 93 LIRPF was far from cosmetic. It added three entirely new qualifying routes and for the first time gave the family member extension an explicit statutory basis. At the same time, the core parameters of the regime — rate, duration, prior non-residency requirement — were left untouched.

The Three New Qualifying Routes

Route A — Digital Nomad / Remote Worker (Art. 93.1.a LIRPF). This route covers persons who relocate to Spain on their own initiative to carry out their employment remotely, using exclusively computer, telematic, and telecommunications means, for a foreign employer. The key departure from the traditional worker route is that the relocation is not directed by the employer but by the worker. This is the route of choice for remote employees of US, UK, or EU companies who choose Spain as their base. Holders of Spain's Digital Nomad Visa (Visado para Teletrabajadores Internacionales) benefit from a statutory presumption of compliance with the causal relationship test. Note: self-employed autónomos cannot use this route — see DGT V2248-24.

Route B — Entrepreneurs (I+D+i) (Art. 93.1.c LIRPF). This route covers persons who relocate to Spain to carry out entrepreneurial activity that has been accredited as innovative or of economic interest by ENISA, the Escuela de Organización Industrial, or other bodies designated by regulation. The activity must typically qualify under the Ley 14/2013 de Apoyo a los Emprendedores. The term "empresa emergente" is not required in all cases but is the common context. Critically, this is the route where the strict PE prohibition applicable to other routes is softened: an entrepreneur who incorporates a Spanish startup and holds a stake in it does not fall foul of the PE rule in the same way that a salaried worker operating through a Spanish PE would.

Route C — Highly Qualified Professionals Serving Startups (Art. 93.1.d LIRPF). This route targets highly qualified professionals who move to Spain to provide services to an empresa emergente as defined by Ley 28/2022 (a young innovative company, typically certified by ENISA), or who conduct training, research, development, or innovation activities within the meaning of Ley 14/2011. The professional must have a high level of qualification — typically demonstrated by a postgraduate degree or equivalent professional experience. This route is narrower than the general worker route but is specifically designed to attract technical talent to the Spanish startup ecosystem.

Family Members: Art. 93.2 LIRPF

Prior to the Startup Law, the family member extension was implemented at regulatory level through the RIRPF and via DGT administrative practice. It was not expressly mentioned in Art. 93 LIRPF itself. This created a degree of legal uncertainty: while DGT consultas (notably V0258-21) had confirmed that spouses and dependent children could join the primary applicant's regime, the statutory basis for their inclusion was indirect.

Ley 28/2022 addressed this by explicitly inserting Art. 93.2 LIRPF, which now provides a direct statutory basis for family members of the primary regime beneficiary to access the same tax treatment. The covered family members are: the spouse (or unmarried partner in a registered partnership), and children under 25 years of age (or children with disabilities regardless of age). The family member must: (a) move to Spain in connection with the primary applicant; (b) acquire Spanish tax residence in the same year or the year immediately following the primary applicant; (c) satisfy the five-year prior non-residency requirement independently; and (d) not generate qualifying income exceeding the income of the primary applicant (preventing a situation where a family member tail wags the primary applicant dog on the income test).

What Did NOT Change

It is equally important to be precise about what the Startup Law left intact. The following parameters of the regime were entirely unchanged by Ley 28/2022:

• Prior non-residency requirement: still five fiscal years immediately preceding the year of arrival (unchanged since the 2015 reform).
• Flat rate: still 24% on income up to €600,000, and 47% on the excess (the 47% rate having been set by the 2020 reform).
• Duration: still six fiscal years (the year of acquisition of Spanish tax residence, plus the following five years).
• Modelo 149 filing deadline: still six months from the date of acquisition of Spanish tax residence, and still strictly enforced.
• PE prohibition for workers and investors: still applies to the traditional worker and investor routes; the digital nomad route inherits the same prohibition; only the entrepreneur route carries a partial exception.

3. The Transitional Rules: Disposición Transitoria Primera de la Ley 28/2022

The Disposición Transitoria primera of Ley 28/2022 is the critical provision governing how the reform interacts with pre-existing Beckham Law applications. Its logic is straightforward and its consequences are significant.

The provision establishes, in substance, three things:

1. Old-regime applications continue under old-regime rules. Taxpayers who applied for the Beckham Law before 1 January 2023 — that is, those whose Modelo 149 was accepted and who were already benefiting from the regime before the Startup Law entered into force — continue to be governed by Article 93 LIRPF as it stood before the reform. They are not automatically transferred to the new legal framework.
2. No obligation to re-apply. Old-regime taxpayers were not required to, and in principle could not, re-submit a Modelo 149 under the new rules in order to access the new routes or the new conditions. Their existing application was frozen in place for the remainder of the six-year period.
3. No cherry-picking of new rules. An old-regime taxpayer cannot selectively adopt provisions from the new regime that would be more favourable to them while remaining in the old regime for provisions that are less favourable. The transitional provision protects legal certainty for the state as well as for the taxpayer: the applicable legal framework is determined once, at the time of the application, and it applies for the entirety of the regime period.

Practical Illustration of the Transitional Rule

Consider three hypothetical taxpayers, all of whom arrived in Spain in 2020 and applied for the Beckham Law under the pre-reform rules in that year:

• Worker A arrived as a seconded employee. Their 6-year Beckham Law period runs from 2020 (year of arrival) through fiscal year 2025. They continue under old Art. 93 throughout this period. When the Startup Law entered into force in 2023, nothing changed for Worker A.
• Worker B arrived as a remote worker for a foreign company. Under the old rules, their qualifying circumstance was characterised as a standard secondment/worker route because the digital nomad route did not yet exist. After the Startup Law, the digital nomad route exists — but Worker B cannot re-label their application to access it. Their old characterisation stands.
• Investor C arrived as an administrador of a company in which they hold a significant interest. Their regime continues on old Art. 93 rules. The new entrepreneur route is not available to them retroactively, even if their activities would now qualify under the new route.

All three taxpayers' remaining years under the regime are governed by the pre-reform version of Art. 93. If any issue arises — a compliance question, a PE concern, a DGT enquiry — the relevant legal framework is the old statute, not the new one.

The Historical Parallel: The 2014-2015 Transitional Regime

This is not the first time a transitional provision has managed a transition between different versions of the Beckham Law. The 2015 LIRPF reform (Ley 26/2014), which reduced the prior non-residency requirement from ten to five years, also contained transitional provisions. Taxpayers who had been accepted under the old 10-year rule were permitted to continue their existing regime for its remaining duration without having to re-apply under the new 5-year rule — a sensible protection for those who had satisfied the more demanding historical requirement.

Conversely, taxpayers who had been refused the regime under the old 10-year rule — but who would have qualified under the new 5-year rule — were not retroactively granted the regime by the 2015 reform. The transitional provision benefited existing beneficiaries but did not reopen past refusals. The logic of the 2022 transitional provision is precisely the same: it protects the legal certainty of existing regime holders while the new rules take effect for incoming applicants from 2023 onward.

4. The Modelo 149 Problem During the 2022–2023 Transition

The Startup Law was enacted on 21 December 2022 and entered into force on 1 January 2023. This left approximately eleven days for all of the administrative infrastructure — including the AEAT's updated version of Modelo 149 — to be ready for use by taxpayers arriving in Spain from 1 January 2023 onward who wished to apply under the new routes.

In practice, the updated Modelo 149 form was not published and made available by the AEAT simultaneously with the law's entry into force. The AEAT did not immediately make available a form that reflected the new qualifying routes — the digital nomad route, the entrepreneur route, and the highly qualified professional route. The administrative form available in early 2023 was the pre-reform version, which did not contain tick-boxes or data fields for the new routes.

The AEAT issued administrative guidance to address this practical impasse. The approach permitted during the transition period was:

1. File using the existing Modelo 149 (pre-reform form) Early 2023 applicants were permitted to file the available Modelo 149 form, using the closest available characterisation for their qualifying circumstance and annotating the form to indicate the basis of the application under Ley 28/2022.
2. Retain the filing date The date of filing the transitional form was treated as the operative date for deadline purposes. The filing preserved the six-month deadline compliance, even though the form did not precisely reflect the new routes.
3. Supplement when the updated form was available The AEAT's guidance contemplated that once the updated Modelo 149 reflecting the new routes was published, early 2023 applicants who had filed the transitional form would need to make a complementary or corrective filing to properly characterise their route under the new legal framework.

This situation created significant uncertainty for early 2023 arrivals, their advisers, and the AEAT itself. DGT consultas from the first half of 2023 reflect questions from advisers grappling with precisely this transition problem. The practical lesson is that for a regime as deadline-sensitive as the Beckham Law — where a late Modelo 149 results in permanent and irrecoverable loss of the regime — the administrative unreadiness at the point of entry into force of major statutory reform created genuine compliance risk for a cohort of taxpayers. Any client who was in this position and filed a transitional Modelo 149 in early 2023 should verify whether a supplementary filing was made and whether their current regime characterisation correctly reflects the new post-reform routes.

5. Comparison Table: Old Regime vs. New Regime

The following table provides a side-by-side comparison of the key parameters of the pre-reform (pre-2023) and post-reform (post-Ley 28/2022) regimes.

6. DGT Consultas: Which Vintage Applies to You?

One of the most practically important consequences of the old/new regime divide is that the DGT's administrative rulings — consultas vinculantes — must be read in light of the legal framework they address. A consulta issued before 1 January 2023 interprets the old Art. 93 LIRPF. A consulta issued after 1 January 2023 may interpret either the old or the new regime, depending on the facts of the question submitted.

For advisers working with old-regime clients, the relevant consultas are largely those issued before the reform. The following pre-reform consultas remain authoritative for old-regime taxpayers:

• V2411-08 — early guidance on the scope of the worker route and the causal link requirement.
• V1422-09 — treatment of income from activities carried out partly outside Spain by an old-regime beneficiary.
• V0218-11 — qualification conditions for the worker route; what constitutes a secondment.
• V0897-14 — the administrador / investor route conditions; significant shareholding analysis.
• V3235-14 — scope of the regime and income taxable under IRNR; interaction with double tax treaties.
• V1964-15 — post-2015 reform clarification; updated analysis of qualifying circumstances following the reduction of the prior non-residency period to five years.
• V2791-19 and V2663-19 — PE prohibition; when activities of an old-regime beneficiary create a permanent establishment risk.
• V0777-19 — interaction of the regime with the salary cap; treatment of income above €600,000.
• V2297-20 and V2307-20 — specific worker route scenarios; secondment conditions in post-2015 legal framework.
• V0628-20 — treatment of passive income (dividends, interest, capital gains) under the IRNR rules applicable to regime beneficiaries.
• V0358-21 — qualifying conditions; confirmation of approach to the causal link test.
• V1203-21 — specific query on the investor/administrador route; conditions for a director of a portfolio company.
• V0258-21 — the family member extension under the pre-reform framework; conditions for spouse and children; this consulta was the principal pre-reform authority on the family member question and remains relevant for old-regime taxpayers whose family members entered the regime before 2023.

For new-regime clients, the post-2023 consultas govern — most notably V2248-24, which is the definitive ruling on the digital nomad route's exclusion of self-employed persons. As the DGT continues to issue rulings on the new routes post-2023, the consulting corpus for the new regime will expand. However, it is critical that each ruling be assigned to the correct legal vintage before being applied to a specific client's situation.

7. The 2023 RIRPF Update: Arts. 113–120

Ley 28/2022 amended the primary statute. The implementing regulation — the Reglamento del IRPF (RIRPF) — was updated by Royal Decree in 2023 to bring Arts. 113 through 120 RIRPF into conformity with the new Art. 93 LIRPF. This regulatory update was necessary because the RIRPF contained detailed procedural and substantive provisions for the regime that needed to be updated to reflect the three new qualifying routes and the codified family member extension.

The updated RIRPF provisions address: the specific accreditation requirements for the entrepreneur and highly qualified professional routes (Arts. 113-115); the family member regime conditions as codified in Art. 93.2 LIRPF (Art. 116 in its updated form); and the procedural requirements for Modelo 149 filings, including the updated time-limit and documentation provisions applicable to the new routes (Arts. 117-120).

For old-regime taxpayers, the pre-2023 version of Arts. 113-120 RIRPF remains the applicable regulatory framework for the remaining years of their regime. The 2023 update applies only to applications made under the new rules from 1 January 2023 onward.

8. What Changed for Family Members After Ley 28/2022

The treatment of family members is one area where the distinction between old and new regime is most practically significant. The differences can be summarised as follows:

Pre-Reform Position (Old Regime)

Before Ley 28/2022, Article 93 LIRPF itself made no mention of family members. The family member extension was implemented at regulatory level — through the RIRPF — and confirmed through DGT administrative practice, most authoritatively in consulta V0258-21 (March 2021). Under that framework, the spouse and dependent children of the primary regime beneficiary could apply for the regime, provided they individually satisfied the five-year prior non-residency requirement, moved to Spain in connection with the primary applicant, and acquired Spanish tax residence in the year of the primary applicant's arrival or the immediately following year.

The pre-reform framework was therefore workable, but its statutory basis was indirect. An ambitious AEAT inspector could theoretically have challenged the family member extension on the ground that Art. 93 LIRPF — the primary statute — did not refer to it. In practice, this challenge was never successfully advanced, and DGT consultas confirmed the position consistently from 2009 onward (see V1422-09). Nevertheless, the lack of an explicit statutory basis was a source of legal risk that advisers sometimes had to explain to clients.

Post-Reform Position (New Regime — Art. 93.2 LIRPF)

Ley 28/2022 resolved this uncertainty by inserting Art. 93.2 directly into LIRPF. The family member extension is now expressly part of the primary statute, and its conditions are set out in legislative language rather than being inferred from regulatory and administrative sources. The conditions codified in Art. 93.2 are broadly consistent with the pre-existing DGT practice, with one important addition: the family member's qualifying income must not exceed the income of the primary beneficiary (the test de renta preponderante). This condition, which was not always explicitly part of the pre-reform practice, prevents a situation in which a high-earning spouse could be "the real" regime beneficiary while the lower-earning primary applicant serves as the gateway.

Transitional Implications

For family members of old-regime taxpayers who are seeking to join the regime now — perhaps a spouse who has just moved to Spain after the primary applicant has already been in the regime for two or three years — the applicable framework depends on when the family member applies. If the family member's application is made under the new Art. 93.2 (because the primary applicant is a new-regime taxpayer), the full Art. 93.2 conditions and the income cap apply. If the family member is joining an old-regime taxpayer, the old RIRPF framework and the consulta V0258-21 analysis govern — though in practice, the AEAT may apply the Art. 93.2 conditions by analogy. This is an area requiring specific advice.

9. Practical Implications for Advisers and Clients

The old/new regime divide has concrete implications for different categories of clients in 2025:

Clients Who Applied in 2019–2022 (Old-Regime Cohort)

These taxpayers have between one and four remaining years in the regime (depending on their exact year of arrival) and are entirely governed by pre-reform Art. 93. Their compliance obligations — withholding, income classification, PE monitoring, income reporting — should be managed by reference to the old statutory framework and the pre-2023 consultas. The Startup Law and its new routes are legally irrelevant to their ongoing compliance, although they may be relevant in advising on what happens when the regime expires and whether a fresh application under the new rules is conceivable (it is not, given the five-year non-residency requirement that would need to be satisfied again from scratch).

Clients Who Arrived in 2022 But Whose Six-Month Application Window Straddled 1 January 2023

This is the most technically complex category. A person who arrived in Spain in August 2022 has a six-month Modelo 149 deadline running until approximately February 2023. Their qualifying circumstance arises in 2022, under the old rules — but their application is filed in 2023, after the new rules entered into force. The key question is whether the applicable legal framework for their application is the old Art. 93 (because their qualifying circumstance arose in 2022) or the new Art. 93 (because they filed in 2023). The transitional provision of Ley 28/2022, which focuses on applications accepted before the reform entered into force, is less clear on this exact scenario. Specific advice, and possibly a DGT consulta, is warranted for taxpayers in this position.

New Applications from 2023 Onward (New-Regime Cohort)

All taxpayers who arrived in Spain from 1 January 2023 onward and applied for the Beckham Law are governed by the new Art. 93 LIRPF as amended by Ley 28/2022. They have access to all three new routes (where their circumstances qualify), the codified Art. 93.2 family member extension, and the RIRPF as updated in 2023. Post-2023 DGT consultas — including V2248-24 on the digital nomad route — are the primary authorities for their ongoing compliance.

10. Frequently Asked Questions