The offer arrives and the interesting parts jump out first. Salary, start date, whether they will help with the move. Almost nobody reads far enough down to work out which company is actually employing them, or under whose employment law. It sounds like a technicality. It decides your notice period, your pension, your sick pay, who files your tax return, and what happens if the arrangement goes wrong in eighteen months. Worth twenty minutes before you sign.
There are three arrangements, and the paperwork tells you which one you are in
The first is straightforward. The company has a registered entity in the country you are moving to, and you become an employee of it. Local contract, local payroll, local rules. This is the most common setup for established companies with a real presence somewhere.
The second is a foreign employment contract. You are employed by the company in their home country while living in yours. This one is more fragile than it looks, and it is worth asking direct questions about, because the country you live in will generally consider you subject to its employment and social security rules regardless of what the contract says.
The third is that you are not an employee at all. You invoice them. More on that shortly, because the shift in cost and risk is larger than the day rate usually reflects.
If the company is genuinely relocating you rather than hiring you where you already are, pin down the support in writing, because it tends to be promised verbally and specified vaguely. Visa costs including dependents, whether there is an allowance or reimbursement against receipts, how long temporary accommodation lasts, and whether any of it is clawed back if you leave within a year.
To work out which one you have been offered, look at three things: the legal name of the employing entity, the currency and country of the payroll, and which country’s law the contract says governs it. If the answer to any of those is vague, ask before you accept.
When your payslip comes from a company you have never heard of
This one confuses people, and it is becoming the normal way remote hires get employed.
The usual route in is that you are already in Spain, or heading there for reasons of your own, and you apply for a remote job with a British company. Or you have been at the company for years, tell them you are moving because of a partner or family, and they would rather keep you than replace you. Either way the employer has no Spanish entity and no plans to open one for a single person.
So they engage a provider that already has one. Your first payslip then arrives from an organisation whose name you have never seen. Nothing has gone wrong. That provider is your legal employer on paper, runs your payroll and contributions, and invoices the company that hired you. You work for the people who interviewed you, exactly as expected.
The part worth understanding is that this is a proper local employment relationship rather than a workaround. Being employed in Spain this way means Spanish rules on notice, holiday, social security and severance apply to you, which is almost always better for you than being kept on a UK contract while living in Madrid.
Ask two things anyway. Who handles an HR issue or a grievance, since your legal employer and your actual manager sit in different organisations and the answer is not always obvious. And what happens to your employment if the company later sets up its own Spanish entity or switches provider, because the answer should be a transfer rather than a fresh start on probation.
The same pattern turns up as a fix for something that has already drifted. Someone invoices a UK company from Spain for two years, the relationship looks nothing like self-employment by the end of it, and converting them to a properly employed position through a provider is how it gets tidied up.
“You will just invoice us” costs more than it looks
Contractor offers can be genuinely good. If you have several clients, control your own hours and work on defined projects, being self-employed abroad is often the right structure and the rate reflects it.
The version to watch for is where the arrangement is employment in everything but name. Fixed hours, one client, their equipment, their manager, no end date. Before agreeing, work out what you are absorbing: your own social contributions, no paid holiday, no sick pay, no employer pension contribution, no notice period, and your own accountancy costs. In most countries that adds up to somewhere between a quarter and a half of the headline figure.
There is a second risk that runs in your favour, oddly enough. If the relationship really looks like employment, the country you live in may reclassify it, and the consequences land mainly on the company. That does not help you much in the meantime, though, if you need sick pay or find yourself out of work with no notice.
Social security is a separate question from tax
This is the one that catches even experienced expats, because people assume sorting out tax sorts out everything.
Within the EU, EEA and Switzerland, coordination rules decide which single country’s social security system covers you, and you do not get to choose it. It follows your work situation. Getting this wrong can leave you with gaps in your pension record that you will not notice for twenty years, and it is genuinely hard to fix retrospectively.
If you are being posted abroad temporarily rather than relocating permanently, the arrangement is different again. A posted worker normally stays in their home country system, and the employer should apply for an A1 document before departure to certify it, for a maximum of two years. UK nationals post-Brexit apply for an equivalent certificate of coverage through HMRC.
Healthcare sits alongside this and often gets assumed. Your entitlement in the new country normally follows your social security position, so a private policy offered as a benefit may be supplementing local cover or substituting for it. Those are very different things, particularly if you have a family joining you.
So ask which country you will be contributing in, and ask for it in writing. Then ask what happens to your existing pension arrangements, because the answer is frequently that they stop and nobody thought to mention it.
Ask what your first month actually looks like
This sounds soft next to tax and contracts. It is the thing most likely to make your first six months miserable.
If you are the only person your employer has in that country, and especially if you are working remotely from it, you can end up with no induction at all. No introduction to systems, no explanation of how decisions get made, no clarity on who to ask. People in the head office learned all of that by being in the building.
Larger employers increasingly run induction through training management software rather than a folder of links, so it is fair to ask whether you will be assigned a structured induction with material you can work through, or whether you are expected to piece it together from chat messages. The answer tells you something about how seriously the company takes hiring outside its home market.
Ask about the practical mechanics too. Who orders your equipment and where it ships from, how expenses get reimbursed in your currency, and whether you are expected to keep hours that match the head office or your own. That last one, left unspoken, is how remote hires end up working two schedules.
While you are asking, find out what mandatory training exists in your new country for your role. Some professions carry local certification or safety requirements, and whether your employer handles that or expects you to is better established before you arrive than after.
Before you sign
A short list, in the order I would work through it.
Get the legal name of the employing entity and check it exists. Confirm which country’s employment law governs the contract. Find out your statutory notice period under local law, not just what the contract says, since the local minimum usually wins. Ask which country you will pay tax and social security in, and get both answers in writing. Check what the pension arrangement is. And if the offer is on an invoice basis, price the arrangement properly rather than comparing the day rate to your old salary.
None of this is about distrusting the employer. Most of the time nobody is hiding anything, and the vagueness is simply because the person who wrote the offer has never had to think about it. Asking early means you find that out while you still have room to negotiate.
