The Beckham regime and consulting structures: a recurring pitfall
International professionals who move to Spain, elect the special regime for inbound workers, and invoice their consulting services through a Spanish company they direct, often build the structure most exposed to challenge. A note on why, and on what the Spanish authorities now require.
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- Lullius
A pattern recurs in practice. An international professional plans to move to Spain, elects the special regime for inbound workers under article 93 LIRPF, commonly the Beckham regime, and provides consulting or advisory services as director of a Spanish company (an SL) through which those services are invoiced. The structure is frequently proposed. It is also one of the most frequently challenged by the Spanish Tax Agency.
What the regime requires
The regime allows a person who becomes resident in Spain to be taxed broadly as a non-resident for the year of relocation and the following five tax periods. Access is conditional. The taxpayer must not have been resident in Spain in the previous five periods, and the move must follow one of the circumstances in article 93.1.b): an employment contract or posting to Spain, or the acquisition of the status of director of an entity that is not a mere asset-holding company. The DGT insists on a genuine causal link between the move to Spain and the qualifying circumstance, a question of fact to be evidenced in each case (consulta V1068-25). Critically, the regime does not apply where the taxpayer obtains income that would be treated as obtained through a permanent establishment in Spain, or that amounts to an incompatible economic activity carried on in Spain.
Where the consulting structure goes wrong
The vulnerability is substance. Where the reality is that the individual personally performs the consulting work, while the Spanish company lacks substance of its own, meaning people, means and genuine functional autonomy, the company is exposed as an interposed vehicle. Under the substance-over-form tools of the General Tax Act, and in particular simulation under article 16, an arrangement of that kind can be disregarded, with the income re-attributed to the individual and the regime lost.
The administrative position is consistent. In consulta V1209-25 of 3 July 2025, the DGT warned that rendering services to one’s own company that go beyond the duties inherent to the office of director, and which qualify as an economic activity carried on in Spain, is incompatible with the regime. That sits alongside the settled doctrine that obtaining income through a permanent establishment in Spain brings immediate exclusion from the regime in the very period of the breach. The two propositions converge on the same point: a director who is, in substance, running a personal consulting activity through a thin company is outside the regime.
The courts are confirming it
This is no longer only administrative doctrine. The Tribunal Superior de Justicia de Madrid, in judgment 123/2025, addressed arrangements created to access the regime and held that simulated structures, such as contracts or companies without real activity, constitute simulation, upholding the reassessment that denied the regime and taxed the individual on worldwide income. The common thread across the administrative and judicial decisions is straightforward: formal arrangements alone are not decisive, and what governs is the economic reality of who performs the services and how the activity is organised.
What substance means in practice
For a structure of this kind to hold, several things have to be true together and be documented at the time, not reconstructed later. The company must have real means and people with which to render the services, and genuine functional autonomy in doing so. There must be a clear functional delimitation between the duties of the director’s office and any separate economic activity. The individual’s remuneration must reflect the office actually held, rather than a personal economic activity repackaged as corporate income. And the paperwork, from the engagement terms to the invoicing, must be consistent with that reality.
For professionals considering relocation under the regime, the lesson is that the commonly used model of consulting through a Spanish company carries significant risk unless it is designed and documented for substance from the outset. The regime rewards genuine relocation supported by genuine structures. It does not survive a vehicle built to package a personal activity, and the cost of getting it wrong is not only the loss of the regime but taxation on worldwide income, with interest and penalties.
Lullius is a tax boutique in Palma de Mallorca advising international private clients on Spanish tax, private wealth and tax controversy. The authors contributed the Spain chapter to the tax litigation guides of both Chambers and Partners (Tax Controversy 2026) and The Legal 500 (Tax Disputes Comparative Guide 2026). This note is general commentary, current to June 2026, and is not advice on any particular matter.