Trademark Registration in Spain: 7 Essential Steps

Spain is where Europe’s trademark system physically lives — the EU Intellectual Property Office sits in Alicante — yet many brands still get the national route wrong. Trademark registration in Spain can be done as a Spanish national mark, as an EU trademark covering all 27 states, or through the Madrid Protocol, and the right choice depends on where you actually trade. This guide sets out the filing steps at the OEPM, the deadlines that trip people up, and how to keep a Spanish mark alive once it is granted.

Pairing a Spanish filing with a US one? Budget and evidence both shift. The OEPM examines absolute grounds and discounts electronic filing, which keeps a one-class Spanish application among the cheaper routes in Western Europe. The USPTO prices per class, runs its own search of earlier marks and refuses confusingly similar applications unprompted, and requires a specimen proving the mark is already in use. Our step-by-step guide to trademark registration with the USPTO sets out that sequence.

How Trademark Registration in Spain Works

There are three ways to secure a mark that protects you in Spain, and they are not interchangeable. A Spanish national trademark is filed at the OEPM (Oficina Española de Patentes y Marcas) and covers Spain only. An EU trademark (EUTM), filed at the EUIPO in Alicante, covers all 27 member states in one registration. The Madrid Protocol lets you extend an existing home mark to Spain or to the EU through a single international application.

The decision rule is simple. If Spain is your only European market, the national mark is cheapest and quickest. If you sell across the bloc, the EUTM is far better value than filing country by country. All three routes give a mark that runs for ten years and renews indefinitely — what differs is geographic reach and cost.

• National (OEPM) — protects Spain only; lowest official fee.
• EU trademark (EUIPO) — one filing, all 27 EU states.
• Madrid Protocol — extend a home mark to Spain or the EU.

One timing point governs all three routes. If you have already filed the same mark in another Paris Convention country within the last six months, you can claim priority from that first filing, so your Spanish application is treated as if it were lodged on the earlier date. That six-month window is easy to lose track of when a launch spans several markets, and losing it can hand an intervening filer a better right.

Want us to just file it for you? We file trademarks in Spain for a $399 professional fee per class — OEPM official fees passed through at cost and confirmed before filing. File a trademark in Spain →

Trademark Registration Spain: Four Local Rules Foreign Filers Miss

Most of what goes wrong in trademark registration Spain has nothing to do with examination. It comes from four procedural rules in Ley 17/2001, the Spanish Trade Mark Act, that have no equivalent at the EUIPO — and the first of them decides where you are even allowed to hand the application in.

Where you file depends on where you are based. Article 11 does not send a Spanish applicant to the OEPM. It sends it to the competent industrial property body of the Autonomous Community where the applicant is domiciled or has a serious and effective industrial or commercial establishment; that regional office records the number, day, hour and minute of receipt and forwards the application data to the OEPM within five days. Applicants not domiciled in Spain file directly with the OEPM, as do applicants based in Ceuta and Melilla. Because the recorded minute is what settles a race between two similar applications, lodging the papers at the wrong counter is not a harmless formality.

Castilian is compulsory; a co-official language is an optional extra. Article 11(9) requires the application and every document filed at the OEPM to be drawn up in Castilian Spanish. In an Autonomous Community that also has another official language — Catalan, Galician or Basque — the documents may additionally be drafted in that language, but the Castilian text is the one the office works from. A regional-language version does not replace it.

Renewal runs on a six-month window and a sliding late surcharge. Under Article 32 the renewal request and the fee both fall in the six months before the registration expires. Miss that and renewal is still valid for a further six months, with a surcharge of 25 per cent of the fee if you pay within the first three months and 50 per cent if you pay within the second three — a sliding scale, not the flat late fee most registers charge.

Two details in the same article catch filers out: if the fee is not paid in full, renewal is granted only for the classes that are fully paid, taken in the order they appear in the application; and if renewal is ultimately refused, 75 per cent of the fee is refunded on request.

Spain still keeps a separate register of trade names. Title X of the Act (Articles 87 to 91) maintains the nombre comercial — a registered sign that identifies the business itself rather than its goods or services — as a distinct national right, examined against earlier rights under Article 88 and otherwise governed by the trade mark rules where they are compatible. There is no equivalent register at the EUIPO. Spanish companies hold them routinely, so a clearance search that looks only at registered marks can miss the right that actually blocks you.

Three of those four rules are deadline-shaped, which is why a Spanish mark is far easier to lose administratively than on the merits: the part of trademark registration in Spain that goes wrong after grant is almost always a date. If you would rather the renewal window, the surcharge tiers and the five-year use date sat on somebody else’s calendar, that is what our Spanish trademark docketing service is for.

Step 1-2: Search, Then File at the OEPM

Before filing, run a clearance search. The OEPM does not refuse a new application because an earlier similar mark exists — so an identical or confusing prior mark will not stop you at the counter, but its owner can oppose you later. Screening for conflicts first is far cheaper than losing a contested application. Our opposition guide explains how those fights unfold.

You then file electronically through the OEPM, specifying the mark and the goods and services under the Nice Classification. The official fee for the first class online is modest — in the region of €150 — with a smaller fee per additional class. The application must be in Spanish. A representative is not mandatory for EU-based applicants, but non-EU applicants must appoint one.

Step 3: Examination on Absolute Grounds

The OEPM checks formalities and examines absolute grounds on its own initiative: a mark that is generic, purely descriptive, deceptive or contrary to public order is refused. What the office does not do is refuse your mark for conflicting with an earlier one — those relative grounds are left entirely to third parties through opposition.

The OEPM does notify the owners of earlier Spanish rights that a potentially conflicting application has been published, so they can decide whether to act. That notification is a courtesy, not a refusal — the burden to challenge stays with the earlier-rights holder.

Step 4: Publication and the Two-Month Opposition Window

Once it clears formal examination the application is published in the Official Industrial Property Bulletin (BOPI). Publication opens a two-month window in which anyone can oppose on absolute grounds, and owners of earlier rights can oppose on relative grounds. That two-month period is the single most important deadline in the whole process, and it is not extendable.

If no opposition is filed and examination raises no absolute-grounds objection, registration typically issues within roughly a year of filing. An opposition adds an adversarial phase and, naturally, time. This is why the up-front clearance search pays for itself: it tells you whether that quiet path is realistic.

Step 5: EU Trademark vs a Spanish National Mark

For many brands the real question is not how to file in Spain, but whether to file in Spain at all or to reach it through an EUTM. A single EU trademark is cost-efficient the moment you trade in three or more member states, and it is administered on Spanish soil at the EUIPO in Alicante. Its weakness is that it is unitary: a successful challenge or an earlier right anywhere in the EU can sink the whole registration.

A Spanish national mark is more resilient in that narrow sense — a problem in France or Germany cannot touch it — and it is the sensible choice for a business rooted only in Spain. If you already hold a home registration elsewhere, designating Spain or the EU through the Madrid Protocol can be cheaper still; our Madrid Protocol guide compares the numbers.

Step 6: Renewal and the Five-Year Use Rule

A Spanish trademark lasts ten years from the filing date and renews indefinitely in ten-year terms. Renewal is a formality — but keeping the mark enforceable is not. If you do not put the mark to genuine use in Spain within five years of registration, it becomes vulnerable to revocation for non-use, and a defendant you sue can raise that non-use as a shield.

• Term — ten years from the filing date.
• Renewal — indefinite, in ten-year periods.
• Use — genuine use in Spain within five years, or risk revocation.

Step 7: Cancellation Moved to the OEPM in 2023

A recent change reshaped Spanish trademark strategy. Since 14 January 2023, actions to invalidate or revoke a Spanish trademark are decided administratively by the OEPM itself, not by the civil courts — Spain’s implementation of EU Directive 2015/2436. In practice that makes cancelling a weak or unused mark faster, cheaper and more predictable than the old court route.

For a brand owner this cuts both ways. It is now easier to clear a blocking mark off the register before you launch, and easier for a rival to attack yours if you let it sit unused. Infringement litigation itself still runs through the commercial courts (juzgados de lo mercantil), with Alicante hosting Spain’s designated EU Trademark Courts for EUTM disputes.

Enforcement does not stop at the courtroom door. A registered owner can record the mark with the EU customs system so that Spanish Customs detains suspected counterfeit imports at the border — Spain’s Mediterranean ports and airports are a major entry point for fakes into Europe. Deliberate counterfeiting on a commercial scale is also a criminal offence under the Spanish Penal Code, which opens a route through the public prosecutor that runs in parallel with the civil claim. Choosing among civil, customs and criminal action — often in combination — is where a considered strategy earns its keep.

If Your Spanish Application Is Refused or Opposed

A refusal is not the end of the road, but it is the point where trademark registration in Spain stops resembling an EU filing. There is no Board of Appeal. You file a recurso de alzada, an administrative appeal decided by the Director of the OEPM, and the office’s own guidance is blunt about two consequences: lodging it is imprescindible, so you cannot reach a court without it, and it does not suspend the decision you are challenging. Let the window close and the refusal simply becomes final.

The clock is the trap. The one-month appeal period runs from publication of the decision in the BOPI, not from the day a letter reaches you or your agent, so a docket keyed to incoming correspondence starts counting late. Where the decision is a deemed refusal by administrative silence rather than an express one, the OEPM’s guide says the appeal may be lodged at any time. If the last day falls on a Saturday, the appeal is still good on the next working day. An appeal fee is payable, and Article 27(2) of the Trade Mark Act allows it to be refunded in defined cases.

Formal defects get a short rope. If the appeal is missing an essential element — most often evidence that the representative holds a power of attorney — the OEPM allows ten working days to put it right, and treats an uncured defect as abandonment of the appeal rather than a loss on the merits. One rule runs in your favour: reformatio in peius is prohibited, so appealing cannot leave you worse off than the decision you challenged.

Then there is the part that changed. Until 2023, an OEPM decision that exhausted the administrative route was reviewed by the administrative courts. Organic Law 7/2022 moved that jurisdiction, with effect from 14 January 2023 — the same day cancellation came in-house — to the specialised commercial sections of the provincial appeal courts. The appeal goes to the section sitting in the city that hosts the Superior Court of Justice for the appellant’s domicile, and the appellant may elect Madrid instead. The window is two months from the day after publication, and the judges hearing it are commercial, not administrative.

The second clock belongs to opposition. An applicant facing an opposition can require the opponent to prove genuine use of the earlier mark, but the tool exists only for applications filed on or after 1 May 2019, and only where the earlier sign had been registered for more than five years at the filing or priority date of the opposed application. The OEPM is deliberately impartial here: it cannot check use on its own initiative, and its own manual says it may not tell the applicant that the option exists or invite them to use it.

How you count those five years is where trademark registration in Spain diverges from the EU system. For an earlier Spanish mark or trade name, the five years run from the day its registration became firme — final, once no administrative or judicial challenge to the grant remains open — and not from the registration date. For an earlier EU trademark, the five years run from the registration date itself. The same calculation, applied to two earlier rights of the same age, can put one inside the grace period and the other outside it.

The request itself is unforgiving in form. It must be made expressly, unconditionally and in a separate document, within one month of the OEPM notifying you of the oppositions; the opponent then has one month to evidence the place, time, extent and nature of the use, with a Spanish translation of anything not already in Spanish. If the opponent produces nothing, produces too little, or cannot justify the gap, the opposition based on that mark falls away. Ask out of time and the request is rejected as improper, and the opposition carries on.

How PerspireIP Can Help

A Spanish mark is only as strong as the clearance work behind it. PerspireIP helps brands search, file and defend across Spain and the EU — and supports the wider portfolio with services in Madrid and Barcelona. Explore our Spain services hub or contact our team to protect your brand the right way the first time.

Frequently Asked Questions