Can I have two jobs under the Beckham regime?
By Daniel Bertomeu Quiles · Tax advisor (AEDAF nº 06838 · APAFCV nº 3080) · Reviewed by Juan Bertomeu · Lawyer (ICALI nº 4643, practising since 1991).
It is probably the question I get most from remote workers who have already been in Spain a year or two. The first contract is what brought them here. Now a second Spanish company offers them a part-time role, a few hours of consulting, an evening project. And the fear is always the same: is this going to blow up my regime?
Short answer: no. Holding two Spanish employment contracts at the same time is not a ground for exclusion from the Beckham regime. Spain's tax authority said so expressly in a binding ruling of February 2026, and the only exception is where that second contract is the special employment relationship of professional sportspeople.
Daniel walks you through the regime on video.
What the 2026 ruling actually says
The case was a German national who moved to Spain on a Spanish employment contract and had been taxed under the special regime since 2022. He was offered a part-time job with a second Spanish company starting in 2026, and he asked whether he could keep the regime for the first job and be taxed as an ordinary resident on everything else.
On the exclusion point the answer is unambiguous. Spain's Directorate-General for Taxation (DGT), whose binding rulings the tax agency must follow, states that receiving employment income “from two payers (arising from employment contracts with each of the companies) will not constitute a ground for exclusion from the special regime” (my translation). The only carve-out is the special employment relationship of professional sportspeople.
So the second contract does not, by itself, put your regime at risk. What still matters is what you already knew from the entry rules: the income has to be employment income, and you have to keep meeting the conditions you met on day one.
The detail nobody explains: the 600,000 euros withholding threshold is per payer
Here is the part almost nobody writes about in English. Under the regime your employer withholds 24% on your salary, and 47% on anything above 600,000 euros paid to you during the calendar year. The obvious question with two jobs: is that 600,000 measured across all your employers together, or for each one separately?
The DGT confirms in the same ruling that the limit “is for each payer of employment income” (my translation), reiterating a criterion it had already issued back in 2017. Two employers each paying you 400,000 euros means neither of them crosses the threshold. Each withholds at 24%.
The practical warning: withholding is not your tax bill
This is where I see people get hurt, so read it twice. The per-payer rule is a withholding rule. It tells your employers how much to hold back from each payslip. It does not tell you what you owe.
Your own liability is worked out on your taxable base for the year taken as a whole, with the 24% and 47% brackets applied to it, so two salaries are added together for that purpose. Two jobs can sit comfortably below the threshold individually and land well above it combined. Every employer withholds correctly, nobody makes a mistake, and you still open your annual return to a balance payable that nobody warned you about. And if the second payer is a foreign employer, there is no Spanish withholding at all on that salary, which makes the year-end gap wider, not narrower.
After handling more than 100 Beckham files, I would say this tends to be the most avoidable shock in the whole regime. If a second contract is coming and the combined figure is anywhere near 600,000 euros, the number worth running is the one for the full year, not the one on each payslip. Better to know in November than to find out in June.
You cannot split your taxation
The ruling also closes a door people keep trying to open, and it answers the question the taxpayer actually asked. For the same tax year you cannot be taxed under the special regime on part of your income and under the general IRPF rules on the rest. You file one single return: Modelo 151 if you are in the regime, Modelo 100 if you are not. There is no mixed option, and no cherry-picking which salary goes where.
Careful: a freelance side income is a different story
Everything above is about a second job as an employee. If your extra income comes from ordinary self-employed activity carried on from Spain, you are in completely different territory and the risk is real: the tax authority has held that moving into ordinary self-employment excludes you from the regime for that same year. There is a legal path through the regime's entrepreneur route, but it has to be planned before the switch, not after. That one is on my list of the 5 most common Beckham Law mistakes.
The test is not what you call it. It is how the work is actually structured. If the second income is invoiced rather than payrolled, get it looked at before you sign anything.
Where to start
Not sure whether your situation is a clean second employment contract or something closer to self-employment? Run our free eligibility checker. It takes two minutes and it flags the cases that need a proper conversation.
Cited with date: check us
| Source | What it establishes |
|---|---|
| DGT binding ruling V0466-26, 27 February 2026 look it up in the DGT database → | Employment income from two payers under two Spanish employment contracts “will not constitute a ground for exclusion from the special regime”, with the exception of the special relationship of professional sportspeople. Also: no mixed taxation, one single return (Modelo 151 or Modelo 100). |
| DGT binding ruling V0387-17 (2017), quoted in V0466-26 look it up in the DGT database → | The 600,000 euros limit for the higher withholding rate “is for each payer of employment income”. Its reference to 45% now reads 47%. |
| Art. 93.2.e) LIRPF (Ley 35/2006, de 28 de noviembre) | The tax scale of the regime: 24% up to €600,000 of taxable base and 47% on the excess, applied to the taxpayer's accumulated base, as distinct from the per-payer withholding rule |
| Art. 93.2.f) LIRPF | The withholding rule on which the per-payer criterion rests: 24%, and 47% on employment income above €600,000 paid by a single payer |
| Art. 93.2.b) LIRPF | Under the regime, all employment income is treated as obtained in Spain, which is why a foreign second employer still adds to your Spanish base |
| Art. 93.1 LIRPF (wording given by Ley 28/2022, effects from 1 January 2023) | The special regime and the employee route, with the express exclusion of the special employment relationship of professional sportspeople |
| Art. 114.3 RIRPF (RD 439/2007, de 30 de marzo) | Implements the withholding rates for the regime |
| Art. 118 RIRPF (RD 439/2007) | Exclusion from the regime: breaching any of the conditions after opting in triggers exclusion for that tax year, with a one-month duty to notify |
| RD 1006/1985, de 26 de junio | The special employment relationship of professional sportspeople |
| DGT binding ruling V2248-24, 21 October 2024 look it up in the DGT database → | An employee who moves to ordinary self-employed activity is excluded from the regime for that same tax year, with the entrepreneur route as the planned alternative |
Orientation only, not tax or legal advice. Your case is reviewed and signed by a registered professional before anything reaches the AEAT.