"They want to hire me, but only if I go freelance": how to tell a fair deal from a disguised job

The offer has landed. You’d be working for that company almost every day, with a fixed desk and a schedule they’ve already told you about. But instead of a contract, they’re asking you to register as self-employed (autónomo) and invoice them every month. And the question on your mind isn’t whether the job itself is interesting, it’s another one: is this even legal? Does it pay off? And above all, how much do you need to ask for so you don’t come out losing?

There’s no single answer, but there are two concrete questions that replace guesswork. The first: is this a genuine dependent self-employed arrangement, with its own protections, or a disguised job with a different label? The second: if you accept it, what rate makes invoicing actually worth as much as a salary?

First things first: what separates a legal TRADE from a disguised job

Being asked to invoice instead of being handed a contract isn’t, by itself, legal or illegal. It depends on how you’ll actually be working, not on what the paperwork is called.

If you’ll depend almost entirely on a single client, work a schedule they impose, use the equipment the company gives you, and have no real say over how you do the work, that looks a lot like an employment relationship dressed up as an invoice. That’s what’s known in Spain as a “falso autónomo” (a disguised employee), and while the party most exposed in an inspection is the company (it gets billed for the social security contributions it never paid), you’re the one living with the day-to-day consequences: no paid vacation, no sick pay, no unemployment benefit.

That said, working mostly for a single client isn’t, on its own, illegal. Spanish law has a figure built exactly for that: the economically dependent self-employed worker (TRADE, from its Spanish acronym). If your situation fits that mold, the answer isn’t to run from the arrangement, it’s to demand that it be formalized the way the law requires.

The law is fairly precise: you count as a TRADE when you receive at least 75% of your income from work and economic activity from a single client.¹ If that’s your situation, you’re entitled to a contract with specific terms, not just a verbal understanding.

What to get in writing before you sign anything

This is the practical part, the one that actually protects you:

A written, registered contract. A TRADE contract has to be formalized in writing and registered with the relevant public office, and that’s not an optional formality: the law says so, and the client has to sign it too, not just you.² If the company doesn’t want to put anything in writing, or tells you “your word is enough”, you already have your answer: if it were a genuinely fair deal, there’d be no problem putting it on paper.

Explicit recognition of your TRADE status. A regular self-employed worker isn’t the same thing as an economically dependent one: the contract needs to state explicitly that you hold that status with respect to that client.

Your right to stop working. As a TRADE, you’re entitled to 18 business days off per year, the equivalent of vacation time, and while the contract can improve on that figure, it can never take it away from you.³ If, in the conversation, they hint that “as a freelancer you don’t get vacation”, you already know they’re not talking about a properly structured TRADE arrangement.

If they refuse you any of these three things, you don’t need to keep weighing whether the deal is good: they’ve already answered you. A company that won’t put in writing what the law requires it to put in writing isn’t offering you a TRADE, it’s offering the convenient part of hiring you without the part that costs it money.

What if the client isn’t in Spain

Everything above assumes the company hiring you is Spanish. If your client is based elsewhere, the TRADE figure still exists on paper (it doesn’t depend on where the client is, only on depending on them for at least 75% of your income), but in practice it almost never gets applied: asking a company with no presence in Spain to sign a contract registered with a Spanish public office rarely goes anywhere, and if a dispute ever arises, neither the Spanish Labor Inspectorate nor Spanish Social Security has much to go after in a company that has nothing here.

That’s not necessarily bad news. The risk TRADE is meant to cover (a single client that treats you like an employee without paying you like one) usually shows up when it’s worth that client’s while to do it here, competing against what it would actually cost them to hire you as an employee in Spain. With a client abroad, that reference point changes: the rate they offer is usually already higher than the local market, precisely because they’re not bound by those same rules or those same reference salaries. In many cases, that rate difference more than covers the legal protection you won’t be able to enforce.

What does change completely is the VAT on your invoice: you’ll almost never charge the 21% from the example below. If the client is in the EU, the service is deemed to be provided where they’re established, so you invoice without VAT (and you’ll likely need to file form 349); if they’re outside the EU, you don’t charge Spanish VAT either. In both cases, redo the calculation without that line before comparing figures.

From invoice to salary: the math nobody walks you through

Here comes the second half of the problem, the one people forget even when the arrangement itself is legal: invoicing a figure is not the same as being paid a salary of that same figure.

Out of whatever you invoice each month, three things never actually land in your pocket, even though you see them pass through your account:

VAT isn’t yours. If your activity charges it (most professional services do, at 21%), you charge it to your client and hand it back to the Spanish Tax Agency every quarter. It comes in and goes out, as we explain in detail in what’s left after invoicing €40,000 a year as a freelancer.

The income tax withholding applied to your invoice isn’t an extra cost. It’s an advance payment toward your annual tax return, not an additional tax on top of what you already owe. It reduces what you actually receive each month, but it gets deducted later from whatever you owe when you file.

Your self-employed social security contribution is a real cost, and it’s based on what you actually earn. Since contributions are calculated on your annual net income, what you pay each month is provisional: it gets settled the following year against your actual declared earnings.⁴ You can estimate your own bracket in how self-employed contributions work based on real income.

And on top of all that sits what won’t show up as a deduction on any invoice, because it simply doesn’t exist: you don’t get paid vacation, you don’t get the extra Christmas or summer pay Spanish employees receive, and you don’t get paid sick leave from day one. If you don’t invoice one month, nothing comes in that month.

A worked example: from “€2,000 invoicing” to what you actually keep

Imagine you’re offered €2,000 a month invoicing for a role that, as an employee, would pay around €1,500 net. On paper it sounds better: 2,000 is more than 1,500. Here’s what’s underneath it:

Out of the “€2,000 invoiced”, what’s left is around €1,120, not €2,000. And that’s for a full month worked. If you want the same paid days off you’d have as an employee, that €1,120 has to be spread across fewer productive months a year (or set aside separately to cover them), because a month you don’t invoice is a month you don’t get paid at all.

Put that way, the classic forum advice to “ask for double what they’d offer you as a salary” isn’t crazy, but it isn’t accurate either. In this example, to reach a real net of €1,500 a month (the salary the offer was being compared against, made on top of the original €2,000 invoicing offer), you’d need to invoice around €2,680: 79% more than that reference salary, not double, and 34% more than what you were originally offered. The exact figure depends on your own contribution bracket, your expenses, and how many days off you want to pay yourself, but the method is the same: add back what you lose in vacation and contributions, add your tax reserve, and only then compare against the salary.

What to ask for before accepting, in short

• If you’ll be working mostly for a single client: a TRADE contract in writing, registered, and signed by the client too.
• Explicit recognition of your TRADE status and your right to 18 business days off a year.
• A rate you’ve calculated, not guessed: start from the salary you’re comparing against, add your contribution, your tax reserve, and the equivalent of the days you won’t invoice if you want the same time off you’d get as an employee.
• And if they refuse the first one, there’s no need to bother calculating the second.

How does Cuéntamo help with this?

Once you accept invoicing instead of being hired, the challenge shifts to keeping track of that math month after month, not just on the day you decide whether to accept. In Cuéntamo you tag every transaction by scope, personal or freelance, so you can see at a glance how much your activity invoices and how much of that ends up genuinely yours to live on.

With auxiliary accounts you can automatically set aside the part of each payment that isn’t yours (the VAT you’ll owe back, your tax reserve), instead of recalculating it every quarter by hand. And because Cuéntamo runs your balance forecast forward using your real and recurring transactions, you can schedule your own contribution and your own “payroll” as if you were your own employer, and see ahead of time whether the month you decide not to invoice (your vacation) leaves you short.

You can try it for free at cuentamo.com.

Frequently asked questions

Is it illegal for a company to ask me to be self-employed to work only for them?

It depends on how you actually work, not on what the paperwork says. Imposed hours, a single client, and no real say over how you do the work all point to a disguised job. If your situation genuinely fits the economically dependent self-employed worker (TRADE) figure, it’s legal, but it has to be formalized with a written contract with specific terms.

What is a TRADE and what rights does it have?

It’s a self-employed worker who receives at least 75% of their income from a single client. They’re entitled to a written, registered contract, signed by the client too, and to 18 business days off per year, among other conditions.

What if the company refuses to sign the TRADE contract?

It’s the clearest sign that you’re not being offered a complete, legal arrangement. If it were genuinely a proper TRADE deal, putting it in writing costs them nothing extra; refusing usually means they want the convenient part of hiring you without the part that costs them money.

Why isn’t invoicing the same figure as a salary the same as earning it?

Because out of what you invoice you have to hand back VAT that was never yours, pay your own social security contribution (which the company used to cover), and set aside a tax reserve, on top of getting no paid vacation, no extra pay, and no paid sick leave from day one. Only after all that do you know what you actually have left.

How much do I need to ask for so that invoicing pays off like a salary?

There’s no fixed figure, but the method is to add to the salary you’re comparing against your own social security contribution, your tax reserve, and the equivalent of the days you won’t invoice if you want the same time off you’d get as an employee. The result is usually quite a bit more than the same figure, though not always double.

This article explains the mechanism and what to get in writing before accepting; it doesn’t replace advice from an employment lawyer if your case is unclear or if you’re already in that situation and need to file a claim.

This article is checked against official sources and reviewed periodically. If you spot anything out of date, email us at [email protected].