Instituto Nacional de Estadística
In 2023, a total of 240,208 foreign nationals resident in Spain acquired Spanish citizenship. This figure represented a 32.3% increase with respect to the previous year.
45.2% of foreign nationals who acquired Spanish nationality in 2023 were men and 54.8% were women.
By age, people from 30 to 39 years of age constituted the largest group in terms of acquisition of Spanish nationality, followed closely by the 40 to 49-year-old age group.
Regarding the methods of acquiring Spanish nationality, 212,779 cases were by residency and 26,844 by choice. This last modality occurred especially in those under 20 years of age (95.7% of total acquisitions by choice were of people below 20 years of age).
1Nationality on the basis of residence: the person needs to be legally resident in Spain for 10 years on a continuous basis and immediately before applying.
Nationality on the basis of choice: this is a right that the law offers foreign nationals who are in particular circumstances that entitle them to acquire Spanish nationality. Persons who are or have been under the parental authority of a Spanish citizen, or persons whose father or mother is/was a Spanish citizen or was born in Spain have the right to acquire Spanish nationality in this way.
Other ways: Nationality on the basis of naturalisation (this is discretional and is not subject to the general rules of the administrative procedure) and unknown (cases that are left blank in the original case file and it decided not to assign them to any category).
The most frequent nationality of origin among persons who acquired Spanish citizenship in 2023 was that of Morocco, with 54,027 cases.
This was followed by nationalities from South American, Central American and Caribbean countries, which accounted for the ten most frequent nationalities of origin.
The most frequent country of birth in the acquisition of Spanish nationality was Spain, with 52,451 cases. Among those born outside Spain, the most frequent country of birth was Venezuela, with 29,581 acquisitions of nationality.
Of the 240,208 people residing in Spain who acquired Spanish nationality in 2023, 21.2% had always resided in Spain. The remaining 78.8% had previously been resident abroad.
Since 2002, the most frequent year of arrival for people who acquired Spanish nationality in 2023 was 2018. That is, they took about five years to acquire Spanish nationality.
Cataluña (with 60,846 cases) and Comunidad de Madrid (with 50,049 cases) accounted for 46.2% of acquisitions of Spanish nationality in 2023.
On the other hand, La Rioja (952) and Extremadura (1,309) were the Autonomous Communities with the lowest number of acquisitions of nationality among their residents.
The data published today are final. All results of this operation are available on INEbase.
Since 2015 INE has published statistics on Acquisition of Spanish Citizenship of Residents (EANER), with data from 2013 onwards. Its main purpose is to provide the number of persons who, having their habitual residence in Spain, acquire Spanish nationality during the reference year, having previously had the nationality of another country or the condition of statelessness. Therefore, persons who have acquired Spanish nationality while residing in other countries are excluded as well as those processes in which Spanish nationality is obtained by reason of origin (by simple presumption or adoption) or by consolidation (possession of status of those who already act as Spaniards).
This operation is based on the statistical treatment of the registration of nationality files in the Civil Registry.
Acquisitions of nationality by persons residing in the different regions of Spain are published, according to sex, age, previous nationality, country of birth and mode of acquisition. In addition, starting in 2022 four new disaggregation variables have been included for data with a reference year from 2019 onwards: year of arrival in Spain, level of education, relationship with economic activity and occupation.
For more information, you can access the methodology and the standardised methodological report.
INE statistics are produced in accordance with the Code of Good Practice for European Statistics. More information on Quality at INE and the Code of Best Practices.
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