Arraigo Reform One Year On: RD 1155/2024 in Practice

RD 1155/2024, one year on: what changed and why it still matters

Royal Decree 1155/2024, the new Reglamento de Extranjeria, came into force on 20 May 2025 and rewrote how Spain handles arraigo, the family of residence permits granted to people already living in the country without a valid permit. The old three-type system, social, laboral, and formacion, became five: arraigo social, arraigo sociolaboral, arraigo socioformativo, arraigo familiar, and a genuinely new figure, arraigo de segunda oportunidad. Instruccion SEM 1/2025, from the Secretaria de Estado de Migraciones, sets out how individual offices are meant to apply the new rules in practice, and it is the document our team checks against when an Extranjeria office in Malaga or elsewhere applies a requirement inconsistently.

A year is enough time to separate the headline changes from the ones that only mattered on paper. Some of what changed in May 2025 has reshaped real files immediately, the stay requirement above all. Other parts of the reform, arraigo familiar’s narrower scope in particular, mostly affect a smaller group of applicants who now need to look at a different, separate regime entirely. The rest of this page works through both kinds of change.

The headline change: three years down to two

For arraigo social, sociolaboral and socioformativo, the general continuous-stay requirement dropped from three years to two. That single change is the one most people searching for arraigo actually care about, because it moves the earliest possible filing date roughly a year closer for anyone who arrived in Spain from 20 May 2023 onward under the new count.

Two points about that stay requirement still trip people up a year in. First, the stay does not need to have been legal residence, time spent after a visa expired, or having entered without one, still counts, because arraigo exists precisely for people in that position. Second, “continuous” tolerates only limited absences from Spain during the two years, so a long trip home can reset the clock. Proving presence remains an evidence exercise: an unbroken empadronamiento history is the strongest single item, backed by medical appointments, school records, banking activity, and similar dated documents, ideally with something for every month of the two years rather than a scattering with gaps.

Arraigo familiar and segunda oportunidad do not run on this stay clock at all. Familiar now covers a narrower set of cases, parents or guardians of a minor EU, EEA or Swiss citizen, and specific dependent situations, since family members of Spanish citizens moved to their own separate regime under articles 93 to 99 of the same decree. Segunda oportunidad looks instead at whether you previously held Spanish residence and can evidence it, typically through your vida laboral record, with no stay count to rebuild.

The five arraigo types, recapped one year in

All five lead to the same destination, a temporary residence permit with the right to work, but the doorway differs sharply between them. A year of use has not changed any of the core requirements below; it has mostly confirmed that offices are applying them roughly as written.

Two of these deserve a specific note a year on. Arraigo social’s removal of the old informal-work documentation requirement has made it a meaningfully easier file to build for people whose strongest case is simply having lived in Spain and put down roots, rather than proving off-the-books employment. And arraigo socioformativo’s new permission to work while studying turned a route that used to force a choice between income and papers into a genuinely practical option, particularly for younger applicants building a trade through vocational training.

Full detail on each type, including document lists and the sharper edge cases, lives on our Arraigo Spain hub and the dedicated pages for Arraigo Social, Arraigo Sociolaboral, Arraigo Socioformativo, Arraigo Familiar, and Segunda Oportunidad.

What a year of practice actually shows

We would rather tell you plainly what is and is not verifiable here than invent a statistic to fill the gap. As of July 2026, no comprehensive official breakdown of arraigo applications by type under RD 1155/2024, filed, approved, or refused, has been published that we can point to and cite. Anyone quoting a specific national volume figure for the reformed routes without naming a source is likely estimating, not reporting.

What is verifiable is the rule as written and how it is being processed. The legal maximum for a decision remains three months from filing, with silence after that period counting as refusal, silencio negativo. In practice, Malaga files are commonly resolved within two to four months, consistent with how the office was processing arraigo cases before the reform, on top of the time needed beforehand to gather two years of stay evidence, the criminal record certificate, and, where required, the municipal integration report.

One structural development is worth naming because it changed how much this reform matters day to day. RD 316/2026, a separate, time-limited extraordinary regularization, opened for part of 2026 before its application window closed on 30 June 2026, with no extension. While that window was open, some applicants who would otherwise have looked at arraigo filed under the extraordinary route instead. With that window now closed, the five standing arraigo types are again the primary path to regularization for someone without a valid permit, which is exactly the situation this reform was designed for, and one reason understanding it well matters more now than it did in the first half of 2026.

Case-by-case, the pattern our own files show is consistent with what the rule change would predict rather than any dramatic reported surge: applicants who arrived in 2023 and 2024 are reaching their filing date roughly a year sooner than they would have under the old three-year rule, and social-route files that would previously have stalled on missing informal-work documentation are proceeding on integration evidence alone. That is a reasonable, rule-grounded read of the reform’s effect, not a claim about national volumes we cannot support with a published source.

Who benefits most from the reform

Three groups stand out clearly a year on.

Recent arrivals. Anyone who has been continuously present in Spain since roughly mid-2023 or later now reaches the arraigo threshold about a year sooner than the old three-year rule would have allowed, without needing anything else to change about their situation.

Arraigo social applicants without a paper trail of informal work. Before the reform, this group often struggled to build a file at all. Since 20 May 2025, presence plus family ties or a favourable integration report is enough on its own, which meaningfully widens who can realistically qualify.

Former residents who lost their status. Arraigo de segunda oportunidad simply did not exist before this decree. People who once held a Spanish permit and could not renew it, commonly after a job loss or a missed deadline, now have a dedicated route back into legal status built specifically for that situation, rather than having to restart a stay count from zero under one of the other four types.

If you are not sure which of the five you fit, or whether your stay evidence already covers the two-year window, that is precisely what we map out on the free call, including telling you honestly which months still need filling before a file goes in.