Health insurance for international students in Spain — fast, affordable, and visa-ready.

The short answer: any international student or intern coming to Spain who is not fully covered by a comparable national or EU-level scheme that Spanish authorities recognise. In practice, this means virtually every non-EU student applying for a student visa, all non-EU Erasmus+ participants, and many EU students who want more comprehensive cover than the EHIC provides. Starting in 2025, updated Erasmus+ programme guidance increasingly requires a private health insurance policy as a condition of mobility, even for EU participants.

We offer two core tiers designed to cover different student profiles. The Standard Student Plan provides all the coverage Spanish consulates require: full medical, emergency, and hospitalisation coverage with no co-payments, plus a bilingual certificate issued within 1–2 business days. The Premium Plan builds on this with added personal English support, mental health coverage, optional dental, and the documentation package required for TIE renewals. Both plans can be issued for periods ranging from 1 month to 12 months (extendable).

The single biggest decision is Standard vs. Premium. The Standard plan is the correct choice for a first visa application on a stay of six months or less: it hits every consular checkbox, costs less than €50/month, and issues within 24–48 hours. The Premium plan makes sense as soon as you're planning to stay longer than six months, renew your TIE in Spain, bring dependants, or want mental-health and dental cover included without add-on paperwork. The delta between the two tiers is small (~€10–€20/month) relative to the friction it saves at renewal time.

Every Spanish consulate has an internal checklist that the officer runs down when reviewing your insurance certificate. Missing any single line is grounds for immediate rejection of the document, and often the whole visa file. These are the seven items we see rejected most frequently — and every ASISA policy issued through Spain Internship is pre-formatted to satisfy all of them without exception.

Once you're in Spain with a NIE and — if your internship is paid — a Social Security number, you become eligible to register with the Sistema Nacional de Salud (SNS) and receive a public health card (Tarjeta Sanitaria Individual, TSI). The public system is excellent for primary care, hospitalisation, and emergencies, but access for non-EU students without a Social Security number is generally limited to emergency treatment only. Even once registered, waiting times for non-urgent specialist appointments can run to several weeks or months, especially in Madrid and Barcelona.

Private cover through ASISA complements the public system in three practical ways: it fills the initial gap between arrival and public-system registration, it gives you direct access to specialists (no GP referral required) with wait times measured in days rather than weeks, and it covers dental, mental health, and optional maternity that the public system either excludes or restricts. Most international students end up using ASISA for everything routine and reserving the public system for emergencies or continuing care from a specific specialist.