Working in Spain as a Student

Studying in Spain comes with a work right attached. If you hold a student stay for higher education or an FP (vocational) programme, you may work up to 30 hours a week alongside your studies — and you do not need a separate work permit to do it. The right is built into the student authorisation you already hold.

That is a recent change. Under the old rules the ceiling was 20 hours and you had to apply for a separate compatibility permit before taking a job. The May 2025 immigration regulation (RD 1155/2024) raised the limit and removed the extra application step, which is why older advice online still tells you to file for permission you no longer need.

In practical terms, the right means three things:

• No separate application. You are not waiting on a permit before you can accept an offer. The work right travels with the student stay.
• A 30-hour weekly ceiling. This is the outer limit for work done alongside your studies, not a normal expectation of a student job.
• Studies come first. The work has to be compatible with your programme's schedule. That is the condition attached to the right, and it is the one an employer is least likely to think about for you.

Because there is no separate permit to show, employers sometimes need this explained to them — plenty of Spanish hiring managers last read about student work rules under the old regime. It is worth being able to name the rule and the reform it came from when the question comes up in an interview.

This is the part worth reading twice, because the word "student" covers programmes with very different rights.

• Higher education students — university degrees, master's programmes and equivalent — have the 30-hour right.
• FP (vocational training) students have it too. Formación Profesional is the Spanish vocational track, and it sits inside the same rule.
• Language-school students do not. There is no automatic work right attached to a Spanish language course. This catches people out constantly, because a language-course stay is often the cheapest and fastest way into Spain — it is simply not a route to working here.

A 30-hour ceiling and a fixed class timetable point at two shapes of role: part-time jobs and internships. Both are built around a schedule that is not a full working week, which is exactly the constraint you are working within.

We keep a listing for those shapes so you are not filtering a whole job board by hand:

Beyond the listing, the usual student channels are worth working: your university's careers service and internship office, which deal with the convenio paperwork below as routine, and any department with research or teaching assistance going.

Alongside working under your student stay, Spain has a dedicated internship route created by Ley 14/2013. It comes in two variants, and which one applies depends on where you are in your studies:

• Convenio de prácticas — for students who are currently enrolled. The placement is arranged through your programme, which is why the international or careers office at your institution is the first place to ask.
• Contrato de prácticas — for recent graduates. You qualify if you obtained a higher-education degree within the two years before you apply (or are still enrolled).

The residence granted for an internship follows the internship itself — from six months up to two years. You will also need to show financial means of 100% of the IPREM, Spain's public income index.

The two-year degree window on the graduate variant is worth noting early. If you are finishing a degree and think an internship in Spain might be part of the plan, the clock on that eligibility starts when you graduate, not when you decide.

Since RD 1155/2024, every intern in Spain must be enrolled in social security. There is no unpaid, off-the-books version of a Spanish internship that is also a legal one, and this applies to both prácticas variants.

Enrolment is the host organisation's obligation to file, not yours. It is still worth confirming it has happened: it is the paperwork trail that shows the placement was real, and small employers taking their first intern since the reform do not always know the rule changed.

The work you do as a student is not just income. It is the thing that makes the next step easy — because when you finish studying in Spain, you are already here, and the immigration system treats that very differently from applying from abroad.

Graduates can stay for up to 12 months to look for work or start a business, and if a job comes out of it you switch to a work authorisation from inside Spain rather than going back through a consulate. You can also switch straight from a student permit to a work permit if you already have a qualifying offer — the 30-hour right covers work during your studies, and the switch is what covers full-time work after them.