At Remote Work Europe we keep hearing from people facing similar dilemmas: They want to move abroad – for example, from the UK to Spain – and they have a remote job they assumed would travel with them. Then they discover it can’t, at least not as it stands, and they are facing a choice they weren’t prepared for: keep fighting to hold on to the job, or go freelance so the move can actually happen.

This guide is the honest map of that decision. It covers the two realistic paths, why employers so often refuse the simple one, the real maths of going freelance, the security you are and aren’t giving up, and the situations where making the switch is a genuinely bad idea.

One thing first, because it matters. If you would rather stay employed, that is a perfectly good answer, and we will show you when it is realistic. Nothing here is an argument that everyone should go freelance. It is a map of a fork a lot of people find themselves at, whether they planned to or not, so you can walk it with your eyes open. It is a path I walked myself, years ago, so some of this is hard-won rather than theoretical.

(General information, not legal or tax advice. The rules below vary by country and change; take professional advice on your own situation before acting.)

The short version

Move abroad and your employer often can’t keep you on the payroll there – so you face a fork: stay employed (through an Employer of Record, or a visa that allows it) or go freelance and invoice instead. Freelancing is frequently what makes the move possible, but only if you price it properly – your rate has to cover everything an employer used to fund – and the arrangement is genuinely independent. It is a poor fit for company directors, and for anyone whose job wouldn’t really change. Here is how to decide.

Why the choice appears at all

A remote job sounds portable, and technically the work is. The problem is never the work – it is the employment relationship underneath it.

When you move to another country, your employer suddenly has to deal with the laws of the place you now live: payroll, income tax withholding, social security, employment protections, and potentially corporate tax exposure of their own. If they have no legal presence where you have moved, keeping you as a normal employee ranges from awkward to genuinely risky for them. That is the moment the job stops being simply portable, and the fork appears.

There are really only two ways through it.

Path one: can you keep your job?

There are two versions of staying employed after a move.

The first is an Employer of Record – a third-party company that legally employs you in your new country on your employer’s behalf. You stay a salaried employee with local protections; the EOR handles the compliant contract, payroll and taxes. Some companies are happy to do this. Many are not, because it costs them more and hands a chunk of the relationship to a third party.

The second is a visa route that keeps you employed, such as Spain’s digital nomad visa, which has a track for salaried remote workers. Our guide to working from Spain for a UK employer walks through how that actually works.

Here is the honest part: for a lot of people, the employer simply says no. And the reason is usually the same one, poorly explained. It is called permanent establishment risk – the danger that having you working from another country creates a taxable presence for the company there. It is the single biggest reason “fully remote” jobs still come with “but not from abroad” attached. We explain it in full in why your employer said no to remote work abroad. If you have hit that wall, it is not usually personal, and it is rarely something you can argue your way past.

And even if there is no PE risk, it is always more costly, and involves greater administrative burden, for an employer to employ you in another country. So it’s not a negotiating point in your favour, if the wish to relocate is all yours and nothing to do with the requirements of the job.

When path one closes, path two is what is left.

Path two: go freelance

Going freelance turns the problem inside out. Instead of your employer working out how to employ you abroad, you become a business of one and invoice them – or invoice new clients entirely. The permanent-establishment headache that made them nervous mostly belongs to employment, so a genuine freelance arrangement can be the thing that unlocks the move.

Sometimes the old employer becomes your first client. Sometimes the move is a clean break and you build a client base from scratch. Either way, the mechanics are the same: you register as self-employed where you now live – as an autónomo in Spain – and you invoice for your work.

It is a bigger shift than it looks, and the rest of this guide is about doing it with your eyes open rather than talking yourself into a number that doesn’t add up.

At a glance: your three options

RouteWhat it isYour statusWho handles the complianceBest when
Employer of RecordA third party legally employs you in your new country for your employerEmployeeThe EORYour employer is willing to keep you as staff and pay for it
Visa route as an employeeYou keep the job and get a visa that permits it (e.g. Spain’s digital nomad visa)EmployeeYou and your employerYour employer will support the paperwork
Go freelanceYou register as self-employed and invoice your old employer or new clientsSelf-employedYouYour employer won’t keep you employed, or you want the independence

The maths, done properly

This is where almost everyone trips. The instinct is to take your old salary, add a little, and quote that as your freelance rate. It is nearly always far too low, and the clearest way to see why is to run real numbers.

Say you earn £50,000 as a salaried employee. Two figures matter, and most people only ever see one.

What you actually take home after income tax and National Insurance is around £39,000 a year.

What you actually cost your employer is rather more than £50,000. Add employer National Insurance, pension contributions, your equipment and software, and a share of overheads, and the true cost of employing you is closer to £60,000.

That gap – roughly £21,000 between what you net and what you cost – is everything employment bundles together without ever itemising it: the state’s share, your pension, your paid holidays and sick days, and the employer’s own costs of having you on the books.

Now go freelance. To simply stand still, your invoices have to cover, from the top: income tax, your own social-security contributions (in Spain, the autónomo quota), your pension, holidays and sick days, equipment, software, insurance, an accountant, and the gaps between contracts plus the unpaid hours spent on admin and finding the next client.

The trap is to divide a salary by 220 working days and call that a day rate. The real sum runs the other way: add up the income you want plus every cost you now self-fund, and divide by the days you can genuinely bill. Once you remove weekends, holidays, sick days, admin and pipeline time, a full-time freelancer bills perhaps 180 days a year, not 220. A larger number over fewer days is why a sustainable rate looks so much higher than your old salary implies.

And here is the part that surprises people: work it through honestly and your freelance rate can still land below the £60,000 it cost to employ you, while paying you more than the £39,000 you used to take home. Priced properly, you earn more and the client pays less. Underpricing helps no one.

(These figures are illustrative and rounded, to show the shape of it – not a tax calculation. We break the rate-setting down in full, including the Spanish social-security reality, in our guide to turning a salary into a freelance rate.)

The security you think you’re giving up

The hardest part of this decision is rarely the spreadsheet. It is the feeling that you are trading a safe thing for a risky one. That feeling deserves an honest look, because it is only half right.

Start with the salary you think of as steady. Research from the JPMorgan Chase Institute puts it plainly: steady employment does not lead to steady income – for many workers, take-home pay changes from month to month even in the same job. And the job itself is less permanent than it feels. In the United States, median time with an employer is under four years, and outside a handful of countries, “permanent” employment can end quickly: American employers can dismiss with no notice and no reason given, while the UK and most of Europe offer more protection, but not immunity.

Now the part people get backwards. The danger in leaving employment is not that you will fail to see a layoff coming – if anything, people tend to over-estimate the odds of losing their current job, often by around double. The real, well-documented blind spot is over-confidence about bouncing back: study after study finds people underestimate how long it takes to replace an income once it stops. That is the risk to plan for, and it is a planning problem, not a reason to stay put.

So be fair in both directions. Freelance income is genuinely more variable than a salary – that is real, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. But a salary is a single point of failure: one employer, one decision, and it is gone. Spreading your income across several clients does not remove volatility, but it does mean no one person can end all of it at once. Employment feels safe because the risk is invisible until the day it isn’t; freelancing makes the risk visible every month, which is uncomfortable but arguably more honest.

What you actually take on

None of this works if you go in starry-eyed, so here is the plain list of what moves onto your shoulders when the salary stops:

  • Your own pension provision
  • Health cover and insurance
  • Paid time off and sick days (no one pays you for the days you don’t work)
  • Equipment, software and an accountant or gestoría
  • Tax filings and advance payments, on a schedule
  • A buffer for the lean months, and the ongoing work of finding the next client

For some people that list reads as exposure. For others it reads as control. Both are true. The people who thrive tend to be the ones who costed it honestly first.

When is going freelance the wrong move?

Sometimes the answer is no, and it is worth knowing before you register anything.

The clearest warning sign is doing the same job for the same employer at the same desk, just with an invoice attached. If nothing about the working relationship actually changes – same hours, same manager, same exclusivity – then in the eyes of the law you may still be an employee, however the paperwork reads. In Spain that is falso autónomo; in the UK it runs into the IR35 rules; the principle is near-universal that substance beats the label. Getting this wrong can be expensive, mostly for the engager but not only for them.

Company directors and senior decision-makers are a category of their own, and this is the most important warning in the piece. If you direct a business or habitually negotiate and sign its contracts, going freelance usually will not solve the permanent-establishment problem. For a director, that risk comes from where the company is actually run and where its decisions and contracts are made – things you carry with you – rather than from whether you are labelled an employee or a contractor. Swapping a salary for invoices changes very little.

Directors usually have to look at other routes instead. Two that people use, as illustration and emphatically not as advice: keeping the company’s real decision-making in the home country – for example, travelling back each quarter to hold and minute board meetings there, so control demonstrably stays put (a route that worked for me in my own early years abroad); or operating through a properly run limited company rather than as a sole trader, which can carry more substance, though it is more expensive for the individual to set up and run. Neither is a magic fix, and neither is a recommendation. This is precisely the situation to put in front of a cross-border tax specialist before you move, not after.

We go into the traps, the criteria, and how to raise a contractor switch with an employer properly in our guide to going from employee to contractor. Whatever your situation, this is the point to talk to a professional rather than a forum thread.

How to do it well

If the maths works and the arrangement is genuine, a few things make the difference between a stressful leap and a sound decision:

  • Build a buffer before you jump – several months of costs, not weeks.
  • Line up clients before you quit, ideally earning a real fraction of your target income on the side first.
  • Set up properly where you settle. In Spain that means registering as autónomo before you invoice; a service like Xolo handles the whole autónomo side in English so you can get on with the work.
  • Make the relationship genuinely freelance – more than one client where you can, control over how you work, your own tools – both because it is safer and because it is the point.

Frequently asked questions

Can I keep my job if I move to Spain? Sometimes, but it depends entirely on your employer. The two routes that keep you employed are an Employer of Record (a third party that employs you locally on their behalf) or a visa that permits employed remote work, such as Spain’s digital nomad visa. Both need your employer’s cooperation, and many say no because of the cost and the permanent-establishment risk. If they won’t, going freelance is usually the remaining route.

My employer says working from Spain would breach my contract – is there a way around it? Not by ignoring it. Working from another country without agreement is a genuine contract and compliance problem for both of you, and “just don’t tell them” risks your job and creates tax exposure for the company. The realistic routes are to get them to agree to an Employer of Record arrangement, or to leave employment and work with them – or other clients – as a freelancer. Which is possible depends on the employer, not on a loophole.

My employer has an office in another EU country – does that help? Usually less than people hope. An entity in, say, Portugal lets them employ people in Portugal; it does not automatically let them employ or pay you compliantly in Spain, which has its own payroll, tax and social-security rules. It can occasionally open a conversation, but it is not a shortcut.

Do I need to charge more as a freelancer than my old salary? Almost always, yes. Your rate now has to cover everything your employer used to fund on top of your pay – social security, pension, holidays, sick days, equipment and downtime – spread across the fewer days you can actually bill. Matching your old salary usually means taking a real pay cut. Our guide to setting a freelance rate breaks down the sum.

Is it legal to become a freelancer for the same company I just left? Only if the relationship genuinely changes. If you do the same job, the same hours, for the same single client, it can be treated as disguised employment – falso autónomo in Spain, IR35 in the UK – whatever the paperwork says. Real independence (more than one client where you can, control over how you work, your own tools) is what makes it legitimate.

Is freelancing less secure than employment? More variable, but not simply less secure. Freelance income swings more month to month, which is real. But a salary is a single point of failure – one employer, one decision – and even that pay is less steady than it feels. Spreading income across several clients trades visible volatility for a lower chance of losing everything at once.

Where to go next

Going freelance to move abroad is rarely the plan. Handled well, it is often the making of a remote career rather than the end of a stable one. The people who regret it are usually the ones who under-priced the work or never built the buffer; the people who are glad they did it costed it honestly and set it up properly.