Hiring a housekeeper on a non-lucrative visa: you cannot work, but you can employ

It is one of the first questions asked, and almost never at the beginning. It comes six months in, after the TIE and the padrón are done, in the middle of a conversation about something else. Someone comes twice a week to clean. Or there is a garden that has turned out to be more garden than anyone anticipated. Or — increasingly, and this is the version that matters most — an ageing parent has joined the household and needs a few hours of help a day.

And the question is always framed apologetically, as though it were a confession: is this allowed?

This page is for American retirees and financially independent movers on the non-lucrative visa who employ, or are about to employ, someone in their Spanish home. The short answer is yes, it is allowed, and the reason it is allowed is more interesting than the fact. The longer answer is that the question people ask is not the question that carries the risk. Nobody has ever lost a Spanish residence permit for hiring a housekeeper. People do get into serious trouble for how they hire one — and, uniquely, an American on a non-lucrative visa gets into a different and worse kind of trouble than the Spanish neighbour doing exactly the same thing.

"They ask me whether they are allowed to have a cleaner, in a lowered voice, as if it were the dangerous part. It is not the dangerous part. The dangerous part is the answer they have already been given by four neighbours, which is to pay her in cash and not complicate things. For a Spanish family that advice is a fine waiting to happen. For a client of mine it is an expulsion file with his name on it. The advice is not wrong because it is illegal. It is wrong because it was written for someone with a different passport."

What the regulation says — and the word it never uses

Start with the actual text, because the actual text is unusually clear and almost nobody reads it.

The non-lucrative residence is now governed by Real Decreto 1155/2024, which replaced the old Reglamento de Extranjería with effect from 20 May 2025. Article 61.1 defines the status:

Now read the rest of the chapter and watch the grammar. Article 61.2.a) requires sufficient means "sin necesidad de desarrollar ninguna actividad laboral o profesional" — without needing to perform any labour or professional activity. Article 62.1 speaks of those who wish to reside "sin realizar una actividad laboral o lucrativa". Article 64, on renewal, repeats the 61.2.a) formula twice. Four different phrasings, one identical structure: every one of them is built around what you personally do. The subject of the prohibition is you, as the performer of the work.

None of them says anything about what you pay someone else to do. We looked, properly, rather than assuming. Across the entire non-lucrative chapter — articles 60 to 64 of Real Decreto 1155/2024 — the words empleador, empresario, contratar, contratación and emplear appear zero times. The same is true of articles 46 to 51 of the repealed Real Decreto 557/2011, which said nothing about it either, for fourteen years.

So the honest characterisation is this, and we would rather give you the honest one than the comfortable one: the regulation is silent, not permissive. It does not authorise you to employ domestic staff. It simply never contemplates the question, because the prohibition it was drafting was a prohibition on your labour, and paying a housekeeper is not your labour. That is the ordinary reading and we are confident in it. But it is an argument from what the text does not say, and you are entitled to know that is the shape of it.

There is even a small irony worth noticing. Article 62 required you to demonstrate 400% of the IPREM per month for yourself — €2,400 at the IPREM of €600 a month that has now been in force since January 2023 and is still in force in 2026, carried forward by successive budget prórrogas — plus 100% (€600) for each dependent family member. You proved that income specifically so that you would not need to work. Hiring someone to help you run the household you funded with it is the system operating exactly as designed.

The same mistake, two different prices

Here is the part that changes the shape of this page, and the reason we wrote it.

Everyone in Spain knows that hiring a cleaner off the books is common, that the fine is theoretically large and practically rare, and that half the country does it. Your neighbour will tell you so, kindly, over the wall. What your neighbour does not know — because it has never been a fact about his life — is that the sanction he is describing is not the sanction that applies to you.

Take the worst version first: the person you hire is a third-country national without work authorisation. This is not a hypothetical; it is the most common status of an undocumented domestic worker in Spain, and the arrangement typically begins as a favour and a recommendation rather than a decision.

That is the sanction your neighbour is discounting, and for him he is broadly right to: it is money, and it is rarely pursued for a single domestic worker. But now read the article almost nobody reaches, three provisions later:

Read that chain slowly, because each link is boring and the result is not. Hiring an unauthorised foreign worker is conduct classified as very serious. You are a foreigner. Article 57.1 therefore permits the administration, subject to proportionality and a reasoned decision, to impose expulsion instead of the fine. And article 57.4 provides that expulsion carries with it, in every case, the extinction of any authorisation to remain legally in Spain.

Article 57.5 does contain shields — but look at who they cover: people born in Spain who have resided legally for five years; long-term residents; former Spanish nationals; recipients of certain permanent incapacity benefits. An American three years into a non-lucrative permit is none of these. Long-term residence takes five years to acquire. So the exposure is at its absolute maximum in years one to five — which is precisely the window in which a retiree is settling into a new house, discovering that the garden is unmanageable, and being told by everyone that a friend of a friend can come on Tuesdays.

Now the milder version, which is far more likely to be your actual situation: the person is Spanish, or EU, or already work-authorised. Article 54.1.d) does not engage at all — it bites only on foreign workers lacking authorisation, and this is a genuine and important narrowing that we want to be fair about. But you have still not registered her with Social Security, and there is a second hook:

Note what this does and does not say, because the distinction is real. A LOEX fine is not itself a listed renewal criterion — on that, the text is silent. Criminal records are listed. And so, expressly, is failure to comply with your obligations in tax and Social Security matters. Employing someone in your home without registering her is not a peripheral breach of your Social Security obligations. It is the entire content of them. You have no others.

So the reason to do this properly is not that the Spanish state is likely to catch you. It is that you have voluntarily created the only Social Security obligation you will ever have in Spain, and then failed it, in a status where compliance is expressly weighed each time you ask to stay. Everything else about your renewal is a document you can produce. This is the one thing you can quietly get wrong for two years and then have to explain.

What you become on the day she starts

The relationship is not an informal arrangement that the law tolerates. It is a named, regulated, special employment relationship with its own Royal Decree: Real Decreto 1620/2011, "por el que se regula la relación laboral de carácter especial del servicio del hogar familiar".

Article 1.3 tells you who the employer is, and it is worth quoting because Americans expect there to be a formality they have missed:

That is all it takes. You are the householder; therefore you are the employer. There is no registration to opt into, no threshold to cross, no company to form, and — we checked this specifically, because it is the obvious question — no nationality or immigration requirement of any kind. The words nacionalidad, extranjero and any equivalent appear nowhere in the Royal Decree. It never occurred to the drafters that the householder might not be Spanish, and their silence works in your favour.

Article 1.4 defines the work, and it is broader than most people assume — it expressly covers household tasks, running or caring for the home in whole or in part, "el cuidado o atención de los miembros de la familia o de las personas que forman parte del ámbito doméstico o familiar", and then names the ones people wrongly think are different jobs: "guardería, jardinería, conducción de vehículos y otros análogos". Childcare, gardening and driving are household service. Your gardener is not a contractor because he works outdoors, and your driver is not a contractor because he has a licence. If they work for your household, under your direction, for pay, this is the regime.

What follows from it, in the order you will meet it:

• Registration before the first hour. You register her with the Tesorería General de la Seguridad Social in the Sistema Especial para Empleados de Hogar. Since 1 January 2023 there is no exception for small jobs: Real Decreto-ley 16/2022 abolished the old option under which a worker doing fewer than 60 hours a month could handle her own registration and contributions by agreement. That option is gone. The obligation is yours, at any number of hours.
• The contract. Article 5 does not impose a blanket written-form rule — that is a common overstatement and we will not make it. What it says is that either party may demand written form at any time, including mid-relationship (art. 5.3), and that in the absence of a written agreement the contract is presumed to be indefinite and full-time (art. 5.2). Read that presumption again and you will see why "we never wrote anything down" is not the safe option people think it is. Article 6.2 caps the probation period at two months, with notice during it of no more than seven calendar days.
• Pay, and the limit on paying in kind. Article 8.2 lets you discount an agreed percentage for board and lodging, but with a hard ceiling: the various concepts together may not exceed 30% of total salary, and the cash payment must still guarantee at least the monthly minimum wage. There are not separate caps for room and for food; it is one combined 30%.
• Payslips. Article 8.6 requires an individual receipt justifying payment. This is the document that, three years later, either exists or does not.

And if she lives in — the "interna", still common in Andalucía for elder care — a further set of rules that exist precisely because live-in work has a history: rest between shifts of twelve hours, reducible to ten for a live-in with the balance compensated within four weeks (art. 9.4); at least two hours a day for main meals, not counted as working time (art. 9.4); thirty calendar days of holiday, during which she is not obliged to remain in the family home or to travel with the family (art. 9.7); and, if she falls ill, the right to stay lodged in the home for a minimum of thirty days unless hospitalisation is medically advised (art. 10.3).

The word Spain deleted in 2022

If you read one section of this page, read this one, because it is the largest single gap between what an American assumes and what is true.

American domestic employment is at-will. You may end it on Tuesday, for any reason or none, and the only question is whether you were kind about it. Spanish household employment used to have a close analogue called desistimiento: the employer could withdraw from the relationship freely, without cause, on notice and with compensation. Every English-language article written before 2023 — and a great many written since — still describes this regime.

It was deleted. Real Decreto-ley 16/2022, of 6 September, rewrote article 11 with effect from 9 September 2022. Desistimiento is gone from the operative text. What replaced it is a closed list of three justified causes:

1. A drop in the household's income or a rise in its expenses through a supervening circumstance.
2. A substantial change in the household's needs justifying dispensing with the worker.
3. Conduct by the worker reasonably and proportionately grounding a loss of confidence.

And the procedure is not a formality:

Miss the writing, or fail to put the compensation at her disposal, and article 11.3 presumes that you elected the Statute of Workers dismissal regime instead — an expensive presumption to trigger by accident. (An excusable arithmetic error in the compensation, or failing to give notice, does not trigger it; you simply owe the right amount.)

There is a subtlety here that matters and that we would rather you heard from us than from a blog: the money did not change. Twelve days per year, capped at six months, is exactly what desistimiento paid. It is therefore tempting to conclude that nothing happened in 2022 except a rename. That is wrong. The money is the same; the test is completely different. Before, you needed no reason. Now you need one of three reasons, and you must write it down, and having written it down you have created a document that can be tested. "It wasn't working out" is not one of the three. "I have decided to spend six months a year in the US" might genuinely be the second one. Which sentence you write is now a legal decision.

And then the rule that stops every client in the conversation, which we include because it tells you what kind of statute this is:

You may not dismiss a live-in employee in the evening or at night. The provision exists because the alternative is putting a human being out of the only door she has after dark. It is a good rule. It is also a precise measure of the distance between Spanish household employment law and the American intuition that this is a private arrangement between two adults.

One honest footnote, because you may go looking. If you read the consolidated text on the BOE, you will find the word desistimiento still appearing in the 2011 preamble, in article 10.2, and in the first transitional provision — with cross-references to an "article 11.3" that no longer says what they assume. Real Decreto-ley 16/2022 rewrote article 11 and left those references stranded. They are legislative loose ends, not a surviving right of free withdrawal. Do not let an out-of-date summary — or a stale preamble — tell you the old regime is alive.

The duty that arrived in November 2025

This one is new enough that your Spanish neighbour probably does not know it either, which for once is genuinely comforting.

Until 2022 the Prevention of Occupational Risks Act (Ley 31/1995) expressly excluded household service from its scope. Real Decreto-ley 16/2022 removed that exclusion and inserted a new provision requiring effective protection of the health and safety of household workers "en los términos y con las garantías que se prevean reglamentariamente" — and gave the Government six months to write the rules. It took two years. The result is Real Decreto 893/2024, of 10 September, in force since 12 September 2024.

What it asks of you, as a private individual in your own home:

• An initial risk assessment (art. 3.1), updated with the periodicity it sets and in any event when working conditions change or after any harm occurs (art. 3.2).
• Preventive measures if the assessment reveals risks — and here is the part people miss — "documentándolas por escrito con la fecha concreta de su adopción", with a copy given to the worker (art. 3.3).
• Suitable work equipment and, where risks cannot be avoided by other means, personal protective equipment (art. 4.1 and 4.2).
• Information on the risks and the applicable protective measures (art. 5.1), which must include the protocol on violence and harassment (disposición adicional segunda).

You are not expected to become a safety engineer. Article 7.1 lets you assume the preventive activity personally, designate a worker, or contract an external prevention service; and article 7.2 says you may assume it personally provided you have the relevant capacity or "la capacidad suficiente para utilizar correctamente la herramienta" — the official tool. That tool exists, it is free, and it was built for exactly this: the INSST published it on 14 May 2025 at Prevencion10.es. An hour with it discharges the core of this.

Timing, because it decides whether this is live: under disposición final quinta the obligations were not demandable until six months after the tool was made available. The tool arrived on 14 May 2025, which puts enforceability from around mid-November 2025. We give it as a computation rather than an official date, because the Ministry announced only that the process had to be complete "before next November" and the BOE fixes no calendar date.

Three pieces of proportion, so you do not over-read this:

One more, for accuracy rather than for you: on 29 September 2025 the Supreme Court annulled disposición final primera of this Royal Decree. It does not touch you. That provision concerned home-help services provided by companies, and was challenged by the sector's employer associations. The regime for the private householder stands.

Four traps in how Americans actually live here

These are not general risks. They are the four that recur specifically among our own clients, because of how this particular group tends to live.

1. The one who also cleans the rental

Very common, because so many US retirees buy a second property and let it. Article 2.3 of Real Decreto 1620/2011 presumes a single ordinary employment relationship — not the special household one — where a worker who provides domestic services in your home must also, with any periodicity, perform "otros servicios ajenos al hogar familiar en actividades o empresas de cualquier carácter del empleador". Rebuttable only by proving the non-domestic work is marginal or sporadic. Trigger it and you are outside the household regime entirely — and you have an employee in a business activity while holding a residence premised on not having one. If you let property, see how that income is taxed in our page on rental income for landlords, and keep the cleaning of the let flat structurally separate from the cleaning of your home.

2. The carer who arrives with the parent

An ageing parent joins the household; someone comes for a few hours a day. Two things to know. Article 2.1.c) and 2.1.d) exclude professional carers contracted by public institutions or private entities under the dependency legislation, and non-professional family carers — neither of which is your situation if you are hiring privately. So you are in the regime. But this is also the one case with a real US tax consequence in your favour: see the US side below.

3. The au pair who is not one

Article 2.2 excludes "a la par" arrangements — but only where the services are of marginal character and given in exchange for meals, accommodation or simple reimbursement of expenses, and even then only "salvo prueba en contrario que acredite su naturaleza laboral". Someone running your household on real hours is an employee whatever you call the arrangement, and the burden of proving otherwise is yours.

4. The gap between the visa and the household

The one that catches people who are otherwise careful. Your own status is squeaky clean; you have never worked a day in Spain; your income proof is immaculate. And there is someone in your house, twice a week, for three years, unregistered — because the arrangement started before you thought of yourself as an employer and nobody ever suggested that a cleaner was an immigration matter. It is not one. It is a Social Security matter, and article 31.7.b) of the LOEX is what turns a Social Security matter into an immigration matter at renewal.

What it costs in 2026, with the numbers

Most clients over-estimate this badly — they have heard "half again on top" and budget accordingly. The real figure is closer to a fifth.

The floor for an external worker paid by the hour is set each year in the minimum wage decree. For 2026 it is Real Decreto 126/2026, of 18 February (BOE of 19 February 2026), which raised the general SMI by 3.1% to €1,221 a month, €40.70 a day, €17,094 a year. And in article 4.2, the figure you actually need:

Contributions run on a bracket scale, not on actual salary. The move to actual salary has been suspended again for 2026; Orden PJC/297/2026, of 30 March, keeps the scale in its article 15.1. The relevant brackets:

Worked example — a housekeeper, twenty hours a week, external, at the 2026 floor:

• Wage: €9.55 × 20 hours × 52 weeks ÷ 12 = €827.67 a month (≈ €9,932 a year).
• Bracket: 4th → contribution base €785.00.
• Common contingencies: 28.30% total, split 23.60% employer / 4.70% worker (art. 15.3). Employer share €185.26 — less the 20% reduction in disposición adicional primera of Real Decreto-ley 16/2022 → €148.21.
• Accidents and occupational illness: 1.50% for CNAE 97 (households as employers of domestic staff), employer only, up from 1.10% → €11.78.
• Unemployment: 7.05% on an indefinite contract (5.50% employer). Employer share €43.18 — less the 80% bonificación → €8.64.
• FOGASA: 0.20%, employer only, €1.57 — less 80% → €0.31.
• MEI: 0.90%, split 0.75% employer / 0.15% worker → €5.89.

That last point deserves its own sentence, because it is the reason all of this exists. Household workers were excluded from unemployment protection until the Court of Justice of the European Union held, on 24 February 2022 in case C-389/20, that the exclusion was indirect discrimination on grounds of sex contrary to Directive 79/7. The preamble to Real Decreto-ley 16/2022 sets out the Spanish state's own figures: 95.53% of the Sistema Especial is women. That judgment is why contributions for unemployment and FOGASA became obligatory on 1 October 2022, and why you cannot simply dismiss at will any more. The two changes are the same change.

One planning note on the bonificaciones. You will find pages describing a 45% or 30% reduction based on the household's income and assets. Read the dates: under disposición final séptima.4 of Real Decreto-ley 16/2022 that one takes effect only when the implementing regulation appears, and we have not found it. Plan on the 20% and the 80%, which are in force. And do not confuse it with the old 45% for large families — that was article 9 of Ley 40/2003, which the same Royal Decree-law repealed, preserving it only transitionally for those already receiving it.

The US side: no nanny tax, one exception, one deduction

Americans arrive braced for the nanny tax. Schedule H is one of the few pieces of US household-employment compliance that ordinary people know by name, and they assume it follows them.

It does not — but we want to be careful about why, because the obvious source is a dead end. IRS Publication 926, the Household Employer's Tax Guide, says nothing whatever about work performed outside the United States. Not a word, in either direction. If you go looking there for reassurance you will find silence and read it as whichever answer you arrived with.

The answer is in the statute:

Apply it. The work is performed in Spain, so the first route fails — and note that the statute expressly says citizenship and residence are irrelevant to that route; only the place of performance counts. The second route fails twice over: your housekeeper is not a US citizen or resident, and you, living in Spain, are not "an individual who is a resident of the United States". No Schedule H. No FICA. No FUTA.

Two caveats we will not bury:

• The snowbird exception is real. The whole conclusion turns on your genuinely not being a US resident. Someone who keeps a US home and splits the year has not clearly left, and if that person employs a US citizen abroad, both prongs of subparagraph (B) are satisfied and Schedule H is due. "Resident of the United States" is not defined in §3121 and is not the income tax residency test — it is a question of fact. If you are reading our snowbird page as well as this one, this is a question for your US adviser rather than a conclusion you can take from here.
• The child and dependent care credit will not help you. Pub. 926 is clear that to qualify "you must pay these expenses so you can work or look for work". A retiree does not.

But there is one item on the other side of the ledger, and it is worth real money to the client whose parent has moved in. IRS Publication 502 allows nursing services as a medical expense, and it imposes no geographic limitation — we searched it for "foreign", "outside the United States" and "abroad", and it is silent, which here means unrestricted:

So a Spanish carer performing nursing-type services for you, your spouse or a dependant can generate a US medical expense deduction, subject to the 7.5% of AGI floor and to itemising. It requires you to record the split between care and housework, which is exactly the record the Spanish side already pushes you towards. One thing we cannot tell you: whether your Spanish employer Social Security contributions are includible as part of that expense. Pub. 502 lists only US employment taxes, we found no authority addressing foreign contributions, and we are not going to guess. Ask your US adviser, and if this matters to your numbers, read it alongside what happens to your Medicare.

You and your Spanish neighbour, side by side

What we actually do

This is a small matter that is capable of becoming a large one, and it responds extremely well to being handled once, at the start, properly. The work looks like this:

1. Check her status before anything else. Spanish or EU: article 54.1.d) never engages and you are in an ordinary compliance exercise. Third-country national: do not proceed on a recommendation and a handshake. This is the single question that separates an administrative task from an immigration risk, and it takes one conversation to answer.
2. Register her before the first day, not after the first month. The alta is the whole of your Social Security compliance. There is no threshold to hide under any more — the under-60-hours option died on 1 January 2023.
3. Write the contract even though article 5 does not strictly force you to. The default in the absence of writing is indefinite and full-time. If you want part-time and defined, the document is what makes it so. Put the hours, the in-kind arrangement and the presence time in it (art. 5.4).
4. Do the risk assessment on Prevencion10.es and keep the copy you gave her. An hour. It is documentation you either have or, three years on, do not.
5. Keep the household and any let property apart. Article 2.3 is the trap that turns a housekeeper into a business employee and puts an economic activity next to a visa that is premised on your not having one.
6. Before you end it, call us — not after. The written cause and the simultaneous indemnity are the whole of article 11.2, and article 11.3 punishes getting either wrong. This is the one step where an afternoon of advice is worth what it costs.

We are immigration lawyers, and part of this is labour law and part is US tax; the household contract and the payroll are things we will bring the right person in for, and the Schedule H question belongs to your US adviser. What is ours is the piece nobody else in the chain is looking at: that you are a foreigner, that article 57.1 exists, and that a Spanish labour-law adviser handling this for the hundredth time is — reasonably, and correctly for his other ninety-nine clients — not thinking about your residence permit at all.

There is a version of this page that would tell you to keep it simple and pay cash like everyone else. Everyone else is right about the odds and wrong about the stakes. The cost of doing it properly is about €175 a month and an hour of paperwork. The cost of the other thing is not money.

Sources reviewed July 2026. Immigration: Ley Orgánica 4/2000 (LOEX), consolidated text, arts. 31.5, 31.7, 36.1, 36.4, 36.5, 54.1.d), 55.1, 57.1, 57.3, 57.4 and 57.5; Real Decreto 1155/2024, de 19 de noviembre (BOE-A-2024-24099), arts. 60, 61.1, 61.2, 62 and 64, which repealed Real Decreto 557/2011 with effect from 20 May 2025 (the term scan reported here — empleador, empresario, contratar, contratación, emplear: zero occurrences — was run across arts. 60–64 of RD 1155/2024 and arts. 46–51 of RD 557/2011). Household employment: Real Decreto 1620/2011, de 14 de noviembre (BOE-A-2011-17975), consolidated text (last updated 8 September 2022), arts. 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 5, 6.2, 7.2, 8.2, 8.5, 8.6, 9.4, 9.7, 10.3, 11.1–11.4 and disposición adicional primera; Real Decreto-ley 16/2022, de 6 de septiembre (BOE-A-2022-14680), arts. primero, segundo, tercero, quinto and sexto, disposición adicional primera and segunda, disposición transitoria segunda y tercera, disposición derogatoria única and disposición final séptima; STJUE de 24 de febrero de 2022, asunto C-389/20 (quoted in the preamble to RDL 16/2022, together with the TGSS figure of 95.53% for May 2021). Risk prevention: Ley 31/1995, disposición adicional decimoctava (added by RDL 16/2022); Real Decreto 893/2024, de 10 de septiembre (BOE-A-2024-18182), in force 12 September 2024, arts. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7 and 8, disposiciones adicionales primera, segunda, cuarta and sexta, and disposición final quinta; INSST announcement of the Prevencion10.es tool, 14 May 2025 (the mid-November 2025 enforceability date is a computation from disposición final quinta.2, not a date published in the BOE); Sentencia del Tribunal Supremo de 29 de septiembre de 2025 (BOE-A-2025-20797), annulling disposición final primera of RD 893/2024. Figures: Real Decreto 126/2026, de 18 de febrero (BOE-A-2026-3815), arts. 1, 3.1 and 4.2; Orden PJC/297/2026, de 30 de marzo (BOE-A-2026-7296), arts. 15 and 16 (unemployment and FOGASA rates verified against Seguridad Social's published tables rather than the BOE text); Ley 31/2022, disposición adicional nonagésima (IPREM of €600/month, still in force in 2026 by budget prórroga). United States: IRC §3121(b), §3121(h), §3306(c) and §3306(j)(3); IRS Publication 926 (2026) — which contains no reference to work performed outside the United States; IRS Publication 502 (2025), "Nursing Services".

This page is general information about Spanish immigration and residence planning. It is not legal, tax, labour or US tax advice. Whether you may employ someone in your circumstances, how the contract should be drafted, what your Social Security and risk-prevention obligations are, how any termination must be handled, and whether any US filing or deduction applies to you must be confirmed for your own facts with Spanish labour and US tax advisers before you rely on them. Spanish figures for 2026 rest in part on a budget prórroga and may change; the risk-prevention enforceability date given here is a computation. Last verified 18 July 2026.