I react to a recent video about Brits leaving #spain and give some facts and statistics and my own opinions on whether it’s true and why. 

If you’d prefer to watch the video, click the pic below

On this video I’m going to respond to a recent video I watched all about people moving back to the UK in droves after Brexit. Are they? And if so, why? That particular video was made in Torrevieja, which is still full of Brits, so they’ve not all left. Don’t panic!

Now there was a lot of mixed up and sometimes innacurate information on the video, and on quite a few others I’ve watched on the same subject as well. 

It seems to be all based on heresay, talking to people in the pub, and looking at the number of boarded-up shops and bars on the local streets, which only gives you a narrow picture of the situation, because, as usual, there’s a lot more to it than what you can see in front of your eyes. 

So let’s do some fact checking and looking at the bigger picture, I’m gonna be using the official statistics and analysis (don’t worry, it’s not all boring numbers!), plus some of my own experience of talking to Brits across the whole of Spain on my live shows and from talking to experts on the show who help people with their battles with bureaucracy, because they’re in a great position to be able to comment on Brits either leaving or coming into Spain, they’re in touch with them and officials all the time. 

The first thing to look at if we want to gauge how many Brits are leaving Spain, is the official statistics. And these actually only tell us the number of official UK citizens who were resident each year up to 2023. They don’t tell you how many left and how many arrived, just the total numbers registered as residents. So it’s kind of impossible just from these figures to make blanket statements about how many Brits are leaving, and exactly why. But it’s a good place to start. 

Here’s the graph by Statista. 

As you can see from 2002 up to 2009, which is around the time the economic collapse happened, there was a rapid rise in the UK population in Spain from 104K ish to 302K, then it stayed in the low 300Ks, peaking in 2013 at 316K, then it dropped gradually to 284K in 2018, rose again to 300K in 2020, took a bit of a tumble to 285K, and it’s stayed there more or less up to the latest figures in 2023. 

Now, there was mention in the video of Spain’s high unemployment, and here’s an example of why talking to the man on the street won’t get you the full picture.

Here are the real unemployment figures on this graph

…showing that although it peaked at nearly 27% in 2013, it dropped quite dramatically each year except 2020 down to just over 11% in 2023. So blaming unemployment in any way for Brits leaving just doesn’t add up. 

Evidently something crucial happened in the Spanish economy and politics in 2013 to reverse the economic crisis and get people back to work. From what I’ve read there was a huge cut in the budget that year, plus some reforms to the economy and pensions. More recently there’s been notable investment in the technology sector which has created jobs and improved how Spain looks to Europe and the rest of the world in terms of investment. And while everyone else around them it seemed was having massive problems with fuel prices last year because of the troubles with Russia, Spain was able to keep prices down because it was dealing with suppliers from North Africa instead. 

So it looks Spain’s been on the up and up since before there was any mention of Brexit, so why are people claiming that since 2016 Brits have been leaving in droves and Spain’s looking like a ghost town?

Let’s get down to brass tacks.

For a start, quite a lot of Brits hadn’t registered as residents, so they’re not showing up on the official figures at all. Some people have said that was illegal,  but it wasn’t actually illegal for Brits as EU citizens to do that, it’s what’s called irregular, it’s important to know that. So before Brexit they were commonly referred to as ‘living under the radar’ – I think there was a common misconception that freedom of movement means you can just turn up with a few thousand quid in your pocket, buy a bar or start a cash business, and live the dream without having to bother with most the paperwork. 

As EU citizens, which they all were up until the end of 2020, they had all of the rights and privileges of every other EU citizen, so unless they’d committed a crime, EU laws said they couldn’t actually be thrown out, and it seems that Spanish authorities at the time weren’t overly concerned about chasing people to get them registered.

I’d put a bet on it that quite a lot of Brits in Spain just weren’t aware of what Brexit would actually mean, for a lot of reasons, and I know that’s going to cause arguments and recriminations and trolling, but it’s obvious from what people say now that most were ignorant of the importance of registering that they wanted to stay in Spain after Brexit – that caught a lot of people out. 

Since Brexit, it’s also evident that the authorities have tightened up on regulations because of the new status of Brits as non-EU citizens, so officials have probably had to sit down and study the rules again. And that’s meant that they’ve more recently started properly chasing the ones ‘living under the radar’ and encouraging them to leave.

It does seem that the ones leaving have been mainly people who either didn’t know what they had to do, or who saw themselves as being entitled to live in Spain because they’d been there for ages, or they’d got a house here. The word on the heavily Brit-populated streets evidently between 2016 and 2020, was that Boris would do a good deal for them and they needn’t worry. But it didn’t turn out like that. A Hard Brexit was touted by the engineers of the whole sordid affair, and that dumped a whole pile of poo on certain sections of the population. Was it their fault they didn’t know what the hell was going on? Well, yes of course it was. But also, no of course it wasn’t.

What’s also evident is the daily numbers of people applying for visas to move to Spain right now – BLS appointments are filled every day in all 3 offices, and some of the processes have become digital so there’s even more going on behind the scenes than there are people physically in the building at appointments. And so many immigration lawyers and residency specialists are dealing with visas and residency across Spain – I speak to lots of them all the time, and they’re so busy. So there’s been no drop in people wanting to move here. What that means in terms of the graph, and the slight drop in the number of UK citizens resident here, is that some Brits who were officially registered have left, but not in huge numbers. How many have left who weren’t registered, is a complete unknown, there aren’t as far as I can see any official numbers on that. 

Now, something else happened which you may remember that needs mentioning. Covid and the lockdowns in 2020 and 2021 devastated many businesses because they couldn’t operate. Lots of them closed down and it seems some people headed back to the UK as soon as they could.

So it’s evident that, for all those reasons I’ve mentioned, in the areas where there were lots of expats living, from the point of view of those expat populations gathered in their enclaves, it did look like they were living in ghost towns with closed businesses and fewer people in the bars. I’d have to say that the golden years of expats turning up and doing what they want is definitely over.

But there’s still a lot more to this situation. 

While it’s still cheaper to live in Spain than the UK (food, utilities etc) it’s not as cheap as it was. And more importantly, it’s more expensive to move to Spain now because you need to get a visa.

So, I’d say the situation isn’t now so much  about Brits leaving Spain, which is what the video I watched recently was saying and had in its title, it’s really about how much more difficult it is now to move here and what you need to do, so I’ll talk a bit about that, I’ve already made quite a few videos about it, there are getting on for 500 videos on YouTooSpain, and nearly half of them are live shows with specialists advising you all how to be successful in planning and applying for residency. 

So let’s have a quick look at the cost of visas which is putting off many Brits wanting to move here. The majority of people from the UK apply for the Non Lucrative Visa, which is the one where you’re not allowed to work for the first five years until you can become a permanent resident. Most people moving here are over 50 years old and heading for or already in retirement, so that’s the best visa for them. It costs about €500 each to make an application, then you need to prove you have either passive income or savings equivalent to nearly €30k per year for a single person, and another nearly €8k for each family member, so it’s not cheap, and when you renew your residency after the first year, you’re applying for a 2 year period, so if you don’t have passive income, you need twice as much in the bank. 

Then there are other visas for people wanting to work, the self employment visa, the working visa, and the Digital Nomad Visa. They’re more difficult to get, I won’t go through all the rules, but suffice to say you need to really put the bureaucratic work in to to get the visa, and the burden of proof is on you to convince the authorities you’re not going to be a burden on the state, and that you’ve got what it takes to succeed. 

Something else mentioned in other videos is the Autonomo payment. You’ll hear a lot of complaints that it’s really expensive and makes it impossible to run a business and it’s blamed for businesses shutting down and people leaving, and it wasn’t until later in the video I mentioned earlier that the guy admitted that those so called ‘taxes’, are actually Social Security payments, and they cover your healthcare and your pension, which is better than the UK pension. 

And not only that, they cover your whole family’s public healthcare, giving you all access to the brilliant public healthcare system here, which I can personally vouch for being better than the UK system, I’ve had radiotherapy and chemotherapy for months and months this year and the service is really good. They’re going to operate on me next month with robot technology, it’s awesome. Private healthcare for a whole family could cost you almost as much as the monthly Social Security payments. I mean, no one really enjoys watching their bank account dwindle every month by over €300, and I’m in a household with two self-employed people so we’re paying double that, but what you have to do is focus on what you get out of it in the end, free healthcare and a pretty good pension. 

Now, there are other costs when you’re getting a visa, like getting your documents sorted out and copied and made official and translated, and many people pay to have a specialist or lawyer help them with these things and get them through the process smoothly. If you want to know more about those costs and anything else to do with visas and residency, watch the live shows on YouTube every Saturday, or read the blogs on my website YouTooSpain dot com. There’s all the information you need.

One more thing to say, and that is this.

Any UK citizens leaving now, and that does happen, are doing it perhaps because they’re older and want to be nearer to relatives back home, or they miss the green of the British countryside, or they’ve not managed to survive in their business. The Brits turning up now seem to be much more aware of the rules, better researched, and probably with a little more cash in the bank to tide them over in emergencies. And from the point of view of the Spanish authorities, that’s a good thing. It’s better for the economy if immigrants bring money with them and abide by the rules by registering properly, and paying their taxes. It’s also a fact that Brits aren’t the only ones leaving, people from other European countries have too, and there have been more Spanish people leaving than returning recently, so you can’t say that Brexit is the big reason for Brits leaving. 

In conclusion, it’s complicated, and whether you get your information from statistics or someone down the pub, you’re not going to have all the facts in front of you. There has been a dip in the number of UK citizens in Spain, but it’s not as many as your man on the street in areas full of Brits will have you think. 

If you’re living in those expat areas, are the businesses still closed or has that changed more recently. Is it the same where you are elsewhere in Spain? Tell us all in the comments.

Peace & Love.
Peas & Fluff.
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Article by Skatz