If you move to Spain and have a driving licence from another EU country, when should you exchange it? The answer may not be what you think! And there’s always an ‘It depends!’
Find out what you should do, and how to avoid the mistake I made.
Prefer to watch the video? Click the picture below.
Let’s get straight into some answers for you.
Some people say you don’t need to exchange your EU licence while it’s still valid.
Some people say you should exchange it within two years.
And some people say you should exchange it as soon as you move here.
Everything depends on the validity dates on the back of your EU driving licence.
So, first of all, on the official government website, it says this:
Your European driving licence will be valid in Spain as long as it is current. Any exchange of your valid EU licence is therefore entirely voluntary.
Okay, that’s all quite straightforward, but under what circumstances would you need to exchange earlier than the expiry date? Well, this paragraph explains:
If the driving licence has an indefinite period of validity (which means there’s no expiry date), or is valid more than 15 years for group 1 (which is all of the A & B categories), or more than five years for group 2 (That’s the C&D categories), then you must renew it two years after establishing your ordinary residence in Spain.
You’ll find those categories on the back of your licence, the expiry date for each category is on the end. So if there no date here, then you need to renew two years after moving here. If the date here is more than 15 years after you got your licence, or the date here is more than 5 years after you got your licence, then you need to renew within those two years.
Is that all clear? If you have any questions, by the way, ask them in the comments.
But keep reading, there’s more!
I decided to exchange my Irish driving licence early, after I’d been in Spain for only about a year. I’m not quite sure why I chose to do that.
It may have been because I just liked the idea of having a Spanish licence. It just felt right.
Anyway, it took me a few months before putting it through via my gestor, and the lovely new licence arrived, that was in March last year.
And here’s where I made the big mistake.
I just slotted it into my wallet without checking the expiry date. I just assumed it would be valid for ten years. And why shouldn’t I assume that? That’s what should have happened.
But no, something went wrong at the DGT and they put expiry dates which were only 2 years after my date of residency. I didn’t realise until last week when I was looking at my licence on the MiDGT app, and it said ‘Permiso Caducado’, which means my licence had expired, aaaaaargh!
I checked in with my gestor, who confirmed the DGT had made a mistake. They’d processed my licence exchange as if I’d been in Spain for less than a year, under which circumstances they would have been correct in giving me only 2 years validity. But I had exchanged after about 15 months, so they should have given me the full ten.
Unfortunately, the DGT only keep an open file on renewed or exchanged licences for 6 months, and it was much longer than that before I discovered the error, so it was impossible to get them to issue a ten year licence without paying for the medical test and the card fee to renew it all over again.
So the lesson to take away from this is check the validity and expiry dates on your new licence when you receive it. In fact, check all of your documents straight away.
I’m always telling people on my videos to get everything right, dot the i’s and cross the t’s, get your ducks in a row, check your documents, and what happens? I forget to do it myself. What a plonker!
To make up for that, here’s some bonus information! Later this year Spain has promised to start issuing driving licences lasting 15 years instead of ten. So look out for an announcement on YouTooSpain confirming the date when that begins.
It’s a bit late for me though. And I’m less than 15 years from my 70th birthday so I wouldn’t have got the full 15 years anyway.
Oh well! That’s all for now, see you in the next article.
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Article by Skatz
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