Moving to Spain with kids: the family file, by the numbers

Spain prices the family in public: the non-lucrative visa asks 400% of IPREM for the main applicant — €2,400 a month at the current index — plus 100% of IPREM, €600 a month, for each dependant, children and spouse alike. Two adults and two children therefore file at €4,200 a month of demonstrated income. The quirk in your favour: IPREM has been frozen at €600 a month since 2023 because Spain keeps rolling over its 2023 budget — so the family bar has held still while wages rose, and the honest caveat is the same one our income tool carries: the moment a Spanish budget passes, this number jumps after four frozen years.

The teleworking route prices dependants on SMI multiples instead, and family reunification later runs its own test — every figure, with its source and reset schedule, is in the income comparison.

School: education in Spain is compulsory and free in the public system from 6 to 16 (with near-universal public preschool from 3), administered by the regions and assigned largely by residence — which makes your padrón (municipal registration) the key that opens enrollment, and your choice of neighbourhood a school decision. International and concertado alternatives exist at prices from the moderate to the eye-watering; what no family should do is plan around a specific school before the residence paperwork that gates enrollment is in order.

Health: children ride on the family's route. On the NLV the family enters holding the private cover Spain requires — the famous rule: an insurer authorised to operate in Spain, no deductibles, no copayments — and public-system access for non-working residents is the paid-convention route until status changes; the Spain hub and our access comparison carry those rules sourced. Working-route families enter the public system through employment like Spaniards do.

The order that saves families months: consulate file first (income evidence at the +€600-per-head bar, insurance certificates for every named family member that meet Spain's authorised-insurer rule — children's are checked like adults', and how that rule is satisfied is something to confirm against the Spain hub's cited wording before you file), then arrival, padrón registration for the whole family immediately (it gates school assignment), then school enrollment through the region, then the residence-card appointments. Families who invert it — house first, school shopping second, paperwork last — are the ones posting panicked timeline questions in March.

The lifestyle half of the equation is the part Spain sells itself: the 677 Blue Flag beaches, the Valencia region's family belt, and Europe's top life-expectancy table. The file half is this site's job — and for the full route-by-route picture, the US mover guide and its UK sibling carry the sequence end to end.