Corporate Services in Spain: Tax, Payroll and Compliance for Foreign Companies

What “corporate services” actually covers

Most of the site you’re on covers getting a foreign company or its owner into Spain: forming the company, buying an existing one, sponsoring a work visa. Corporate services is the part that runs after that, indefinitely, for as long as the company trades. It’s the quarterly VAT return that’s due whether or not anyone remembered it, the payroll run for the three people you hired in March, the annual accounts filing at the Mercantile Registry, and the invoicing software that has to meet Spain’s new certification rules from 2027. None of it is optional, and almost none of it is something a foreign-owned company can competently run itself without a Spain-based advisor who knows the actual filing calendar rather than a general description of it.

This is also the natural next step after two of our other services. If you formed your company with us through Company Formation Spain, the first quarterly VAT deadline arrives faster than most new founders expect, and pairing formation with a corporate services retainer from month one is the difference between a smooth first year and a scramble. If you acquired an existing Spanish company through our Buying a Business in Spain service, the target company needs its books, payroll and tax compliance running correctly from the day ownership changes hands, not from whenever the new owner gets around to appointing an advisor.

What Spaniards call this: the gestoria concept, explained

If you’ve asked a Spanish colleague, accountant, or business contact what to call this bundle of services, the word that comes up is gestoria. It has no clean English translation. A gestoria (or asesoria, the more generic term) is part accountant, part payroll bureau, and part administrative agent who deals with government paperwork on a company’s behalf, filing the forms, managing the deadlines, and standing between a business and the Agencia Tributaria, the Seguridad Social, and the Mercantile Registry so the owners don’t have to learn Spanish bureaucratic procedure themselves.

Here’s the part worth being precise about. Spain has a specific, statute-defined professional title, colegiado gestor administrativo, governed by the Estatuto Organico de la Profesion de Gestor Administrativo. That statute reserves the professional title itself, and a narrow set of representation procedures before specific public bodies, to individuals registered with a colegio. It does not, on the reading available to us, reserve the bare word “gestoria” as a protected trade name independent of that title, which is consistent with how real firms across Spain use the word descriptively in their own marketing. We are not a colegiado gestor administrativo practice, and we do not claim that credential. What we do is deliver the tax, payroll, bookkeeping and compliance work directly ourselves as tax and legal advisors, and where a client’s situation genuinely calls for one of the narrow procedures reserved to a colegiado gestor, we refer that specific piece of work to a partnered gestor rather than perform it ourselves. That distinction matters more to us than it will to most clients, but we’d rather state it plainly than let the word do work it can’t actually do.

The full service map: what’s included

Everything below is work we take on directly, coordinated as one function rather than farmed out to separate vendors who don’t talk to each other:

• Payroll and Social Security: monthly payroll runs, RETA or regimen general contributions, and Sistema RED filings as your authorised third party
• IVA/VAT, including OSS and IOSS: quarterly and annual returns, plus the One-Stop Shop and Import One-Stop Shop regimes for cross-border and digital sellers
• Corporate tax (Impuesto sobre Sociedades): preparation and filing, including the reduced first-year rate where it applies
• Bookkeeping: full contabilidad kept to the standard your annual accounts filing requires
• Verifactu-ready invoicing: setup and the Veri*Factu versus non-verifiable modality decision, ahead of the real 2027 deadlines
• Employment registrations: contract drafting and onboarding paperwork, coordinated with payroll
• NIF and EORI numbers: company tax ID and customs registration for businesses moving goods across the EU border
• Intrastat filings: for goods movements within the EU once you cross the reporting threshold
• Subsidiary and branch administration: board minutes, annual accounts filing at the Mercantile Registry, and ongoing corporate housekeeping
• Non-resident company tax representation: acting as fiscal representative for a foreign company with a Spanish tax footprint but no resident director

Two service pages go deeper on specific decisions inside this map: EOR vs Setting Up Your Own Company in Spain for anyone currently hiring through an Employer of Record platform, and Subsidiary vs Branch vs Representative Office for choosing the right legal structure before you file anything.

What we don’t do

Two things sit outside what any advisory firm without the specific regulated credential can perform, and we say so plainly rather than blur the line:

• Statutory audit (auditoria de cuentas): requires ROAC inscription under Ley 22/2015. If your company crosses the size thresholds that trigger a mandatory audit, we refer you to an inscribed auditor and coordinate the handover of your books.
• Notarial acts: the deed of incorporation and similar acts require a notario. We coordinate the notary appointment as part of formation, but the act itself is theirs to perform, not ours.

Anything narrowly reserved to a colegiado gestor administrativo specifically, rather than open to any registered advisory firm, follows the same pattern: we refer it to a partnered colegiado rather than perform it ourselves without one on staff.

One roof: legal, tax, payroll and immigration together

Global accounting platforms can run your VAT return. Global EOR platforms can put a Spanish employee on payroll without you forming a company at all. Neither one will tell you when your Malaga-relocating CFO needs a highly-qualified professional visa, or whether that same executive should be structured under the Beckham Law flat-tax regime before their first Spanish payslip is issued. That gap, between the corporate compliance side and the personal immigration side of the same relocation, is where most foreign companies lose time, because it usually means two advisors who have never spoken to each other working from two different timelines.

We run both from the same office. When a foreign company relocates staff alongside setting up or expanding its Spanish operation, we coordinate directly with our own immigration practice: Work Visa Spain for employer-sponsored staff generally, Highly Qualified Professional Visa for senior hires and specialists, Entrepreneur Visa for a founder relocating to run the company directly, and Beckham Law for the flat-rate expat tax regime that often changes the numbers on an executive relocation package materially. None of that requires a second law firm, a second point of contact, or a second explanation of who your company is and what it does.

Nobody else combines this specific set genuinely: a real Malaga office (not a remote-only platform), legal and tax and payroll under one roof, and immigration handled by the same team rather than referred out. Global EOR platforms and accounting groups have no local Spanish office in this sense at all. Local Malaga gestorias and asesorias, even the good ones, are overwhelmingly built around individual and property clients, or default to serving “all sizes” without a genuine corporate-services specialism. That’s the gap this page exists to fill.