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FBI apostille for Spain
Non-lucrative visa (NLV)
Six months, and every Spanish consulate we checked says the same thing.
Verified 2026-08-04
What you will read everywhere else. Spain gives you 90 days from the date the FBI issues your report.
What the consulates actually publish. Six months. We read four Spanish consulates and all four say six months, three of them in those words. The 90-day figure is repeated across this industry without a source, and it pushes people into paying for rush handling they do not need.
Consulate by consulate
There is no single national answer to quote, because the instruction sheets are published per post and they do not match. Below is what each one says, in its own words, with a link so you can check us. Your jurisdiction is decided by where you live, and you cannot pick a different consulate because you prefer its rules.
Apostille
Required, and it must be the federal apostille from the U.S. Department of State in Washington. A state apostille on an FBI report is refused, because no state issued the document.
Translation
Required, into Spanish, by a sworn translator (traductor jurado). The Miami consulate states plainly that the apostille itself does not need translating and the translation does not need its own apostille.
The order matters
Apostille first, translate second. The apostille is a physical certificate the State Department attaches to your report, so a translation prepared beforehand does not cover it and has to be redone. This is the single most common way people pay a translator twice.
The caveat we would want told to us
The window runs to the date you submit the application, not to the date of your appointment letter and not to the date Spain decides. Book on the assumption that submission day is the deadline.
Working backwards from your appointment
The FBI issues the Identity History Summary electronically, and a printed electronic copy is accepted for apostille. Federal apostille takes about two weeks in person, five weeks or more by mail. Add a translation if your post needs one. Three to four weeks end to end is realistic through a courier; three months is realistic if you post everything yourself and nothing goes wrong.
We are a courier, not an adviser. You order your FBI report; we get it apostilled. We cannot tell you whether your application will succeed, and nothing here is legal or immigration advice. Confirm your own consulate’s current list before you rely on it — the pages we quote can change the day after we read them.
Related
We will tell you when your consulate changes the rules
Consulates revise their instructions without announcing it. When one of the posts we track changes a window, a fee, or what it asks for, we send a short note saying what changed and what it means. No more than that, and nothing else.
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