In Australia - Non Lucrative Visa Application for Spain
When you kick off your application process contact your relevant Consulate and make the initial enquiry.
Ask them to send you the ‘requirements checklist’ as well as the below 3 Spanish governmental forms that you will need (Items 7, 8 and 9 below). This way it ensures you will be using the latest application forms as often web links from blogs etc can be out of date.
As we were Perth based our application was routed through the Melbourne Consulate. Overall we found them helpful and certainly our turn around time seemed quite quick (3-4 weeks) once all the correct documents were submitted and processed. You get a checklist of requirement from the Consulate. We worked through the list and managed the process ourselves (no Agent required) but I can’t stress enough, you must be diligent and organised with the paperwork preparation and timing for all the pieces of the puzzle to come together. The below is our experience and tips that may also help.
Bank Statements for minimum last 12 months. Online statements were accepted by Melbourne Consulate 2021. These do not need to be translated or authorised in any way, as long as they clearly demonstrate your bank transactions and are in colour showing the bank branding. We provided Australian bank accounts showing readily available funds AND Superannuation statements. I also have a Spanish account that I provided.
** Further note here, as Andrew and I were both renting out Australian houses we indicated on our application letter that the rent from these would act as passive income as well. We also indicated mortgage status. Anything that supports your financial status.
Medical Certificate from local GP stating the applicant “does not have any of the diseases that could harm the public health according to THE INTERNATIONAL HEALTH REGULATIONS (2005) and is fit to travel”.
Letter of application - remember it is about visiting, exploring Spain, learning the language the culture etc. Yes European trips are of course permitted however your reasoning to go is all things Spain!
Police Certificate - you MUST get fingerprints done locally and then post these to Canberra with your payment request for a Police Certificate with fingerprints. This took about 2 months in total during COVID with long postal delays adding to the lengthy processing times, so do these early in your application
Colour photocopy of your passport - every single page AND another copy just of the details page
Spanish private health insurance and repatriation - search online or get recommendations for a provider. You will be required to health AND repatriation insurance for the Australian NLV. Repatriation may be sold (by the same provider) but as a separate policy. It will be expensive so be careful to ask the provider if it is a refundable policy in the event you are not successful with your NLV application. ** Be careful as the Consulate checklist indicates that ou can provide a Statutory Declaration for the application, whereby you can commit to purchasing the insurance only IF we your application is successful, however after sending off our application we were then informed by the Consulate that we MUST pay for the full insurance and provide the Certificate before they would process the application. We fortunately had our spanish health insurer on stand by (we chose ASSSA and they were excellent, very responsive and in english) and they prepared all the necessary certificate within 24hrs, we paid the full amount, they sent us the documents and our final delay was only about 3 days. Still annoying but fortunately it paid off and our visa was granted within about 3-4 weeks from supplying the paid in full health insurance. Due to the circumstances, this was submitted via email. By the way, you pay a bit more for a policy that is refundable in the event you don’t get the visa, but at +A$1000 it’s worth the piece of mind to get one that is refundable.
Visa request form (Solicitud de visado nacional) - does not need to be translated.
7a. One passport photo is to be glued on the top right side.
Form EX-01 residency application (Solicitud de autorizacion de residencia temporal no lucrativa)
Tax Extranjero Form Modelo 790, Codigo 052 (3 pages filled in and printed separately)
IMPORTANT NOTE - Items 2, 3 and 4 must be translated into Spanish by a NAATI accredited organisation. There are a selection on line. We used Aussie Translations and they were great.
None of our documents needed to be apostilled.
Once your documents are ready you head off to the Post Office; we bought 2 x A4 registered envelopes (one for the issue and one self addressed for the return of the documents), pay for the visa by Money Order (non refundable) and pay for the tax form fee. Everything goes in the envelope (don’t forget to include the Money Orders) and off it goes, then you wait! We applied during COVID when we knew Melbourne was in lockdown so paying the extra for registered mail gave me piece of mind it had been receipted at the other end - after all it did have our passports in it!
After sending it off, within the first 2 weeks I had a couple of emails as they reviewed the application. Then the stinger, when they advised that they would not process the application without the actual Health Insurance Certificates. We managed to get this arranged with ASSSA in about 3 days. The Consulate accepted them by email, immediately processed the application and we had our visa back in approximately 3 weeks.
In total it probably cost a little over A$500 each for the visa application (excluding the health insurance). One final thing depending on how long you plan to go for you have a couple of options with the Australian health insurance. I ‘paused’ my Australian insurance for 12 months thus saving that cost in Australia and Spanish was about the same price, so they balanced out. When we return to Perth in 12 months I can pick it back up and retain no waiting periods. Andrew decided to keep paying his Australian insurance as the tax levy medicare implications for him were different so it was more effective for him to just keep it and also have the Spanish insurance.