UK Embassy insists Brits in Spain get TIEs or risk being 'treated as overstayers'

The UK Embassy in Madrid is once again urging Britons who are residents in Spain to exchange their green EU residency certificates for TIEs, this time stating that they risk being treated as tourists who have overstayed in the Schengen Zone.

The British Embassy in Madrid on Tuesday wrote yet another on Facebook post telling Brits who reside in Spain to exchange their pre-Brexit green EU residency certificates for Tarjetas de Identidad de Extranjero (Foreign Identity Cards), better known as TIEs.

"Only those with a biometric TIE are exempt from the EES when entering Spain," wrote the Embassy.

"If you only have the green certificate, it will not be accepted as proof of residency for EES purposes."

Since July 2020, British residents in Spain have been told that their EU green certificates would still be valid and that the exchange was not compulsory, but Spanish and British authorities have been increasingly encouraging them to get the biometric TIE card, identical to that issued to other third-country nationals living in Spain but with the words "Acuerdo de Retirada" (Withdrawal Agreement).

This is now the third post about exchanging residency cards that the British Embassy has posted since March 21st 2025, suggesting that they are really trying to drill the issue home.

While in past years they've sang the praises of the TIE for being a biometric document that's more durable than the paper-based green certificates as well as including a photo, more recently they have been warning that the old green certificate will not be recognised by the EU’s new Entry Exit System (EES).

According to the British Embassy in Madrid, "To be exempt from registering with the EES, British residents in the EU will need to show a valid uniform-format biometric card".

For British nationals who are legally resident in Spain, this means that only a TIE will be accepted by Spanish and EU authorities when travelling.

If you only have the green certificate, it will not be accepted as proof of residency for EES purposes.

Now, the embassy is saying that “You could be treated as a tourist at the border, subject to full EES checks and potentially accused of overstaying in the Schengen Zone”.

This means that if you go on holiday to another EU country, boarder guards at the airport could potentially think that you're not a Spanish or EU resident, that you’ve overstayed your allotted time within the Schengen Zone (the 90-day rule) and you could face problems with entering or re-entering.

The EU's much-delayed EES system of biometric passport checks could begin in October this year, after an agreement was reached in March between member states.

According to the latest data from Spain's Immigration Observatory, 403,925 UK nationals were officially registered as living in Spain as of June 2024, but only 217,408 of those had TIEs.

This suggests that there could still be tens of thousands of UK nationals who still haven't carried out the exchange, and the ongoing Facebook messages by the UK Embassy suggest that is indeed the case.

The response from the British community in Spain to this latest message has been varied, from complaints that there aren’t any appointments available to exchange their residency cards to others saying their fellow countrymen have had plenty of time already to make the swap.

One person wrote: “My partner has been trying to get an appointment in Valencia to change his green credit card size certificate for a TIE since last September”.

Another wrote: “I hope the Consul is going to ask the Spanish authorities to make more appointments available. Many existing TIEs will be approaching renewal and appointments are already scarce”.

Getting an online appointment for administrative processes is already a big issue in Spain, with bots run by criminal groups booking up all the available appointments and charging people for them, when in fact these citas previas should be completely free.

Other Brits advise just hiring a gestor to do the exchange for you, but again that’s an extra expense for a process that shouldn’t cost anything at all.

Some readers have been pointing out that the Withdrawal Agreement stated that the green residency certificates would be recognised as proof of residency for Brits and that they shouldn’t have to exchange them.

thelocal

UK Embassy insists Brits in Spain get TIEs or risk being 'treated as overstayers'