The government is turning to the Immigration Office to speed up the regularization process: here's what's changing

The government has taken another step to ensure that the extraordinary regularization process doesn’t stall. It is now mobilizing the Immigration Offices to do the “dirty work” before the final decision is made. The measure comes after the Social Security Administration took over the task of receiving applications in April—though not of reviewing them.

How does this affect you? Well, until now, you’d go to Social Security to submit your paperwork, but they wouldn’t even check your ID card. Under this new agreement, the Immigration Offices—which report to the Government Delegations—are getting down to business: they’ll verify your identity, assign you a NIE if you don’t have one, review your information and address, and request any necessary police and court reports. In other words, they prepare the entire file so that the decision-maker has everything ready to go.

That said, the final decision on your residence permit is still made by the General Directorate of Migration Management. The Immigration Offices merely lay the groundwork; they do not make the final decision. The goal is to clear the bottleneck and speed up your application process. We’ll see if it works.

The measure has been published in the Official State Gazette (BOE) and is initially valid for 45 days. But take note: the offices won’t get started until the Treasury releases the funds to pay for staff overtime. A monitoring committee has been created to coordinate the operation and address any questions that arise.

If you already have an application in progress, you don’t need to do anything new. This reinforcement doesn’t require any additional paperwork or change the requirements. It simply means that the government has assigned more staff to process the flood of applications generated by the reform of the Immigration Regulations (Royal Decree 316/2026). So, don’t worry.

The government acknowledges that the regularization process has exceeded expectations. First, it mobilized the Social Security system so you could submit your application in person; now it’s turning to the Immigration Offices to keep the paperwork moving. Will 45 days be enough? We’ll see. If not, they’ll ask for more staff. Stay tuned.

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