Who this calculator is actually for
Most people googling a Beckham calculator are employees: someone moving to Spain on an employment contract, wanting their salary taxed at the flat impatriate rate. This page does not model that case. The calculator above runs our self-employed module: it assumes business income and prices autónomo (RETA) contributions on top. If you are on payroll, your social security works on different logic and the total here is not yours.
Within the self-employed world, the regime is narrower than the blog posts suggest. A plain autónomo does not qualify at all. Business income enters through exactly two doors: an activity certified as entrepreneurial under the start-up framework, or work as a highly qualified professional for a start-up (or in training and R&D) earning over forty per cent of your income from it. Most relocating freelancers fit neither. If that is you, the ordinary autónomo page is the honest one, and the checklist above exists precisely to tell you before the number does.
Two rates instead of a progressive scale
Qualify, and the general IRPF scale (state half plus your autonomous community’s half) is replaced by two flat tiers: 24% on everything up to €600,000, 47% on the excess. Your region stops mattering. All income from the certified entrepreneurial activity counts as Spanish wherever it is earned; other income only enters the base if it is Spanish-source, and items are taxed cumulatively with no offsetting between them.
Savings income (dividends, interest, gains on transfers) sits on its own scale, from 19% on the first €6,000 up to 30% above €300,000, but only when Spanish-source. Wealth tax, while the regime runs, reaches Spanish assets only.
The flatness is the whole point. On €120,000 of certified entrepreneurial income the tax is €28,800 before contributions. The marginal rate on the next euro is the same as on the first, all the way to the threshold.
The clock and the paperwork
The residence test is that you were not a Spanish tax resident in the five tax periods before the year of the move (cut from ten by Ley 28/2022). The regime then runs for the year of the move plus the five following ones: 6 years, no renewal. You opt in with modelo 149 within six months of your social security start date, and file on modelo 151 each year.
RETA does not care which box you ticked
Social security is independent of the income-tax regime. A Beckham freelancer pays the same cuota, in the same tramos, as an ordinary autónomo, including the first-year reduced cuota. The calculator uses identical contributions in both modes, so the gap it shows you is pure income tax.
What changed in 2026
For the regime itself: nothing. The two tiers are unchanged, the current savings scale has applied since the year before, and the five-year residence test dates from 2023. What moved is the RETA side that both modes share: a new order set the 2026 contribution bases and tramos, and the first-year flat cuota rests on a Budget Law that has not been passed: Seguridad Social publishes and charges the old figure, which is why the calculator flags it as provisional.