Do I really need to renew my NIE certificate...?

Posted: Tue Jan 15, 2019 6:28pm

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Doogie

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Location: Playa Flamenca

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Firstly - hello all, this is my first post and I hope I can tap into your knowledge and experience of Spanish life.

We bought our place in Playa Flamenca around 3 years ago but decided to move here permanently last month and now looking to get residencia ASAP. When we bought our home, unfortunately it was during the time when the NIE certs were only valid for 3 months. I'm aware the NIE number is for life and currently the expired cert has been accepted for a car purchase at a dealership, at our bank, getting a Spanish mobile, etc.

As I understand it, there are three steps to residencia (like the song...): Acquire NIE, Get on the Padron, Then the Residencia itself. At step 1, do we really need to renew the certs? After completing step 3 we'll have a residencia cert/card (?) with our NIE on it and the 'white paper' cert will be redundant.

Any thoughts...

Thanks

Doug

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Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2019 3:44am

Movingon

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Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2019 3:44am

In one of Jim's guides he mentions temporary NIE's and as I recall the letter prefixing the number identifies it as permanent or temporary.

Mine is permanent and starts with a Y.

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Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2019 5:32am

jimtaylor

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Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2019 5:32am

Temporary NIEs are only issued in rare cases. It sounds like the OP has a proper NIE, which will start with X or Y.

In my opinion, there's no need to do anything about the NIE, as the number is yours for life, irrespective of the document having an expiry date on it.

In any case, you don't have to first get an NIE to apply for a residency certificate, as that can be obtained as part of the residency certificate application process.

You do need a padrón, and the town hall should issue a temporary one to see you though the residency application, after which you go back to the town hall and they will make the padrón permanent.

The following spells out all the residency requirements:

Padron, residencia and passport advice

I've also done speculative guides about the post-Brexit requirements, which I'll be refining after the post-Brexit requirements have been clarified.

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Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2019 10:47am

Doogie

Original Poster

Posts: 14

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Location: Playa Flamenca

Joined: 3 Aug 2018

Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2019 10:47am

Thanks for all the posts to my query. Our NIE numbers (both for myself and my wife) start with a Y so it's good to know they're permanent.

Time to get things moving I think...especially after last night's UK vote in HoP: Although we may actually end up remaining as EU citizens for the foreseeable future the way things are going !!!