On April 14, 2026, the Spanish government approved a reform of the Immigration Regulation that opens the way to the emergency legalization of approximately 500,000 migrants already living in the country without regularized status. At the briefing following the Council of Ministers meeting, the authorities presented the measure as a response to “social urgency” and as a way to bring into the legal sphere people who are already living and working in Spain.
According to the press conference materials and subsequent clarifications, the key innovation is the introduction of the so-called extraordinary arraigo (arraigo extraordinario), as well as a separate mechanism for applicants for international protection who filed their application before January 1, 2026. This means that the legalization will affect not only undocumented people who have long been living in Spain, but also some of those whose asylum cases have not yet been finalized.
Main conditions:
- The applicant must have been in Spain before January 1, 2026, and must prove at least five months of continuous residence in the country before submitting the application.
- A clean criminal record is mandatory.
- The authorities also emphasize that the applicant must not pose a threat to public order.
- The applicant must prove at least one of the following grounds: employment ties or an employment plan, family in Spain, or social vulnerability.
Online applications open on April 16, 2026, in-person applications begin on April 20, and the filing window will remain open until June 30, 2026. Once the application has been accepted for review, the migrant will be allowed to work legally on a temporary basis even before the final decision is made. This is one of the most important practical points of the reform, as it gives people a chance to leave the grey labor market immediately. The maximum processing time is 3 months; if no response is issued, the application will be considered rejected under the rule of administrative silence.
To process such a volume of applications, the state is involving not only migration services. The authorities are also engaging Correos, as well as the state-owned group TRAGSA and its subsidiary TRAGSATEC, for document intake and technical processing.
By scale, this is one of the largest migration reforms in Spain in the last two decades. The last major legalization took place in 2005 and covered more than 576,000 people.
