Project teams in Spain
You’ve won the work. Now you have to get your people in.
Work permits, posting notifications, social security, VAT and your tax position — from contract award to close-out, in one package with one fixed price.
Your people need to be on site on a date. The main contractor’s compliance platform is already asking for documents you’ve never heard of. And the answer isn’t a payroll platform, because you’re not hiring Spaniards — you’re sending your own team.
The problem nobody warned you about.
Since Brexit, British and American staff are third-country nationals. A 90-day Schengen entry lets them attend meetings. It does not let them install, commission, programme on a client’s site, or supervise work. And from 2026 every entry is recorded biometrically, so the informal version of this has stopped working.
Alongside that sit three more requirements most companies meet for the first time on the way in: a posting notification that has to be filed before day one, social security cover that has to be arranged in the country of origin before anyone travels, and a Spanish tax position that depends on how long the project runs and what your people actually do here.
None of it is difficult. All of it has a deadline, and most of it has a penalty attached that is larger than our fee.
Where it usually goes wrong.
“We’ll come in as tourists.”
The most expensive sentence in this business. Working without authorisation is sanctioned per worker, and the main contractor’s site-access system will stop you at the gate regardless.
“The project is eleven months, so there’s no tax exposure.”
The clock includes preparatory work, commissioning, snagging and your subcontractors’ time — and it can start before you think it did. Extensions are normal, and an extension is what creates the exposure.
“Our EOR covers Spain.”
An employer of record hires Spanish people locally. It does not send your own staff, does not invoice your Spanish customer, does not resolve your tax position, and does not touch construction-sector registration or site-access compliance.
“We’ll sort the VAT at the end.”
For an American company that is often a permanent loss rather than a delay. The recoverable VAT on a mid-sized project routinely exceeds the entire cost of doing this properly.
What we do.
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Before anything else — your tax position, in writing.
We map the project against the treaty test with delay scenarios, assess whether a fixed place or a decision-making role here creates an exposure, and recommend the structure that fits. A written position with a quarterly review built in, rather than an opinion in an email.
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Setup, at a fixed price.
Everything from apostilled powers and tax numbers through to the employer registration that lets a foreign company pay Spanish social security without being established here. That last one is the piece almost nobody gets right, and it is why projects sit waiting.
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Permits for your people.
Intra-company transfers and highly qualified permits, through the dedicated unit that handles them, with the files prepared per person. The immigration specialist who delivers them is named in your proposal.
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Posting notifications, before day one.
Filed for the first team and for every person who joins afterwards.
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Then it runs.
Payroll or contributions, VAT, the accounting, the clocks that matter — how long each person has been here, how long the project has been running, how long the social security cover lasts. You get told before a threshold arrives, not after.
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And it ends properly.
Final settlements, deregistrations, the last VAT return and the refund claim, closing whatever was opened. Quoted at the start, so nobody is negotiating an exit fee nine months in.
Why not the people you’d normally ask.
- An EOR hires locally. Your project needs your own people.
- A global firm won’t mobilise for a team of five to forty.
- An immigration boutique does the permits and nothing else — not the VAT, not the accounting, not the tax position.
- Your lawyer in the UK or the US knows the contract. They don’t hold a Spanish digital certificate, and everything here runs through one.
Who this is for.
A US or UK company sending five to forty of its own people to Spain for two to eighteen months. Installation and commissioning, industrial lines, data centres, pharmaceutical validation, IT and consulting.
Trips of a week or less. Meetings-only visits. Very large consortium projects — those belong with a bigger firm and we’ll say so. And anyone who wants to bring people in as tourists, which isn’t a negotiating position, it’s a sanction with your name on it.
What it costs.
A fixed price for the setup, a fixed monthly fee while the project runs, and a fixed price for the close-out — all three quoted before anything starts, and all three sized by how many people you’re sending and for how long.
It comes out of the project budget rather than your overhead, and on most engagements the recoverable Spanish VAT covers a meaningful part of it.
Tell us the start date.
The date your people need to be on site decides everything else. Tell us what it is, how many of them there are, and what they’ll be doing here.
You’ll get an honest answer about what’s achievable within one working day, because on this kind of work a week matters.
Replies within 24 hours.