Spanish law has a specific profile for people who work through a company they own or control. It comes with extra documentation — and one famous trap for single-member LLCs. Built correctly, it's also the profile where 100% ownership plus a year of real activity replaces other requirements.
Spanish regulations call this profile the autónomo societario — someone who works through a company they solely own or effectively control. It changes the application in your favor and against you at the same time: if you hold 100% of the company and it has genuinely operated for over a year, the usual 3-month work-relationship proof is presumed. In exchange, the UGE asks for a deeper file on the company itself.
The mistake to avoid: filing as a freelancer because "it's simpler." The profiles carry different evidence, and the UGE's own rules state that proof of one doesn't count for the other.
Spain asks for a "commercial registry certificate or equivalent." The U.S. has no single equivalent — the file is assembled from documents that together prove existence, ownership, taxes, and real activity:
Good Standing proves existence and regularity — not real activity. It anchors the file; it doesn't finish it.
Single-member LLCs are the exception — see below.
Private documents: sworn translation, no apostille.
This is what the UGE actually scrutinizes: that the company is a real operating business, continuously active for at least a year.
Spain asks for the company's corporate tax return. A single-member LLC is a disregarded entity — it doesn't file one. Its activity lives on Schedule C of your personal Form 1040.
Applicants who send nothing, or the wrong form, get a subsanación notice — or a denial. The compliant answer is a substitute package (1040 + Schedule C + IRS transcripts) delivered with an explanatory memo mapping each U.S. document to the Spanish requirement it satisfies — a practice the UGE's own guidance recommends. Building that memo is a core part of our service for owner cases.
Owners rarely have tidy pay stubs. The file works with what you actually have: invoices and bank-verified transfers from the company, W-2 wages if you pay yourself a salary through an S-Corp, and — where the standard trail is thin — your personal tax return as the fallback the Spanish rules themselves provide for owner cases. The threshold is €2,849/month for the main applicant, set in euros, with matching bank evidence for the last 3 months.
After approval, owners generally register with Spain's self-employed system (RETA). In specific configurations, the U.S.–Spain totalization agreement allows staying in the U.S. system with a Certificate of Coverage — but eligibility depends on your classification, and the UGE requires a certificate that expressly covers remote work from Spain, not a pending application. We treat this strictly as a case-by-case analysis, run before your strategy is chosen.
Entity type, ownership structure, activity evidence, income trail, Social Security route — free 30-minute assessment with the Madrid team that files these cases at the UGE.