English-speaking jobs in Spain: what 29,000 job ads say about language, cities and boards

How many jobs in Spain are advertised in English?

Of the 26,443 ads with enough text to tell their language, 9,671 were written in English, 36.6%, and 16,096 in Spanish, 60.9%.

About a third of the office and tech ads in this data are written in English. Across the whole market, roughly one offer in ten even asks for English, and that is a different count.

The Infoempleo-Adecco 2024 report counts offers that ask for a foreign language on two commercial channels in 2024. 13.4% of its 386,315 offers did; English was in 71.35% of those, so roughly one offer in ten names English. It records the language an offer asks for, not the language of the ad. Indeed Hiring Lab counts postings whose employers saw its prompt; 5.8% of Spanish postings in the twelve months to August 2024 were marked as not requiring Spanish. In the ad text, 1 of the 840 English ads in our sample says Spanish is not needed, so silence about the language is the signal to read for.

How much Spanish do English-language jobs ask for?

The 840-ad sample was read for exactly this question.

Most of the 840 ads never mention Spanish. 11.7% require it (95% range: 9.7% to 14.0%). The level is the finding. When Spanish is required it is C1, fluent or native in four ads of five, and in all but four of the ads that state a level; none asks for B1 or lower. A script over all 9,671 English ads agrees, with 76.3% of the 1,475 it flagged asking for C1 or higher.

In these 840 English ads, an ad almost never asks for a little Spanish. Either it never mentions the language, or it wants you fluent.

The reviewer judged 653 of the 840 (77.7%) workable with English and basic Spanish; the 10.1% marked unclear are the ones to read twice. The Instituto Cervantes groups the CEFR levels as basic (A1, A2), independent (B1, B2) and proficient (C1, C2). In English ads requiring Spanish, the proficient band is four in five. In Spanish ads requiring English, the independent band has real room, as the next chart shows.

A B2 in English opens a share of the Spanish-language ads that ask for English. A B2 in Spanish opens almost none of the English-language ads that ask for Spanish.

Which cities have the most English-speaking jobs?

Madrid has the most English ads; Barcelona the highest share. Together they hold 63.4% of the English ads in the data. 52.6% of Barcelona's readable ads are in English, against 35.1% of Madrid's.

In this data, Barcelona is the city where a job ad is most likely to be in English. Madrid has more English ads in total, and only Málaga comes close to Barcelona on share.

If you can choose your city, Barcelona and Málaga give the best odds that an ad is one you can read; Madrid has the longest list. "Spain, no city named", 1,911 English ads of 3,148, is mostly LinkedIn listings posted for the whole country, many of them remote: a third city if you can work from anywhere in Spain.

I'm an ML engineer, and looking for a job felt like a second job. A friend who is a frontend developer started looking at the end of 2025 in a country whose language she didn't know well, a couple of years after moving to the Basque Country. She wanted roles where Spanish wasn't required so she could work in English, and preferred remote work because there were few web developer jobs in the Basque Country. Those two limits cut the number of jobs she could apply to, and finding the ones that fit was hard.

The data has a number for that region. Bilbao and San Sebastián are the two Basque cities in the chart, both near the bottom of the English share: 14.9% and 14.1%. From there the choice is a thin local list or the country-wide remote ads.

Where to find English jobs: which boards

LinkedIn accounts for 85.9% of the English ads in this data, and about half of its ads here are in English. The LinkedIn and InfoJobs figures reflect the searches Oink ran for its users between 8 July and 8 October 2026, not each board's total volume, while Tecnoempleo is read as a broad feed. In those searches, InfoJobs is 6.6% English. The specialist boards EURAXESS, AI Jobs and Impactpool are small and almost entirely in English.

What surprised me once I started scraping boards was how many location-specific and field-specific boards exist. Not everything lives on LinkedIn, least of all in a region where local boards are more popular. I think local, niche boards are underrated. So when a new user joins, Oink prioritises the boards relevant to them, and I keep adding boards.

The order below is: LinkedIn for volume, the specialist board for your field, then Spanish boards searched in both languages. "Frontend developer" and "desarrollador frontend" pull up different postings.

Which jobs are posted in English?

This section uses LinkedIn ads only. Research and academia leads, and software engineering, the biggest family by far, sits at 44.7% English, below most other office jobs.

The families whose English ads most often still require Spanish are a different list, by the script over all English ads. Operations, logistics, and admin lead at 30.1%, followed by sales and finance, legal, and HR, versus 9.8% for software engineering.

Customer support is the multilingual case. 45 of 106 English customer-support ads (42.5%) require a language other than English or Spanish, German most often, and most of the 106 ads are in Barcelona, Madrid and Málaga.

Level in the title is where Spanish shows up too. On LinkedIn, junior titles are least often written in English, at 32.2%. Among English ads on all boards, junior titles ask for Spanish more often too, 25.6% of them against 9.0% of senior titles, by the same script.

In this data, junior roles are the most Spanish, twice over: fewer junior ads are written in English on LinkedIn, and the English ones, across all boards, ask for Spanish more often than senior ads do.

English LinkedIn ads that state an arrangement are more often hybrid and less often on-site than Spanish ads, meaning they more often include days at home. For anyone reading from abroad, across the data about a quarter to a third of remote English ads tie the job to living in Spain, 565 of 1,663 or 34.0%, and 25.6% without one aggregator's template, by an approximate text rule. Oink tries to distinguish remote within the posting country from remote worldwide, and the remote eligibility guide covers those country lines.

English as a requirement inside Spanish ads

A script that matched the AI reviewer on 42 of 45 checked ads found that 4,940 of 16,096 Spanish-language ads require English (30.7%). The share runs at 42.2% on Tecnoempleo and 14.7% on InfoJobs. When English is required, 62.1% ask for C1 or fluent and 21.4% for B2, so B2 or higher is 86.7%.

Three Spanish-language ads in ten in this data ask for English, mostly at C1. On InfoJobs, the Spanish ads that ask for it also advertise higher salary ranges.

On InfoJobs, among Spanish ads that state a salary, the ads requiring English have a median range of EUR 30,000 to 36,000 a year, 482 ads, and the ads that never mention English EUR 24,000 to 29,000, 2,694 ads. The two groups are different jobs, so it is an association and nothing stronger.

How to search, and what Oink does

Five things to read before the requirements list. (Oink, our pig mascot, learned "imprescindible" before "hola".)

1. The language of the adAn English ad almost never asks for a little Spanish. A Spanish ad usually means a job that runs in Spanish, whatever the title says.
2. The explicit line"Imprescindible español" and "Spanish C1" usually mean fluent. "International team" and "English is our working language" point the other way.
3. Who you deal withOperations, sales and finance are where an English ad most often still wants Spanish. Support roles often want a third language too.
4. The remote line"Remote (Spain)" and "100% remoto" usually mean remote inside Spain. Right if you live there, a no if you do not.
5. The level in the titleJunior titles are the most Spanish. Senior titles ask for Spanish least often.

Write your brief as separate facts: role and skills, level, arrangement with your residence attached, languages you work in (Spanish only if you'd take a role that runs in it), salary floor, dealbreakers. More in describing the job you want to an AI.

Oink removes duplicates, screens out explicit conflicts, and ranks the rest against your brief, and your resume if you add one, with reasons and concerns. Each source is included when switched on, reachable, and relevant. Your profile can list languages you work in. A posting written mostly in Spanish is treated as requiring Spanish unless your profile shows you work in it; a required language you lack scores 0 or 1. "Remote (Spain)" is read as remote for residents of Spain, a no if you live elsewhere (how the score is built).