A Spanish mobile number is cheap to hold and easy to lose by accident. Banks send verification codes to it and some government systems will only talk to a Spanish mobile. The number matters even when the phone attached to it does nothing for months.
The rules that decide whether it survives are mostly not where you’d look for them, and in one case they aren’t published at all.
Prepaid Lines Expire, and What Resets the Clock Varies
Every Spanish prepaid line has a lifecycle that ends in the number being recycled. What varies is how long you get and, more importantly, what restarts the clock.
Simyo gives you four months from your last recharge before the line is suspended, at which point you can receive calls but not make them. A month later incoming dies too. At six months the line is canceled, and their own wording is that once canceled it cannot be recovered. What counts as activity is narrow: only a paid recharge or a bono renewal. Using the line does nothing. Their conditions are explicit that to avoid deactivation “es preciso realizar al menos una recarga o el pago de una cuota”, and they note separately that promotional credit doesn’t count either.
Digi is more forgiving on both counts. Their prepaid conditions suspend the service after six continuous months where the customer “no haga uso de los Servicios o no recargue su Tarjeta SIM”, and permanent loss only comes after nine. During that suspension the line still receives calls and SMS. And because the clause says use or recharge, actually using the line resets it, so one outbound SMS costing five cents does the same job as a top-up.
Digi’s terms also confirm something worth knowing generally: a prepaid line with zero balance still receives incoming calls and messages. Running out of credit doesn’t make you unreachable, it just stops you calling out.
The other operators sit somewhere between these, and their published figures are less reliable than either of the above, so check rather than assume.
The Contract Line That Costs Nothing
The dormancy clock is a prepaid mechanism. A contract line doesn’t have one, and at least one Spanish operator sells a contract line with no monthly fee at all.
Pepephone’s “la que no tiene cuotas” bills €0,00 a month with no minimum consumption, stated outright in their conditions: “sin exigencia de consumo mínimo mensual, y en el que el cliente únicamente paga por las comunicaciones realizadas”. You pay 7,3 cént. a minute plus an 18,15 cént. call setup fee, and 10,89 cént. per SMS sent. Receiving costs nothing, in Spain or roaming anywhere in the EU. There’s no data on the tariff at all, which for a number that exists to catch verification codes is irrelevant.
For a line that only receives, that’s genuinely €0 a year.
The Unpublished Rule, and Why You Should Ask Rather Than Read
Pepephone’s terms used to say a line with no billable consumption for three consecutive months was deemed inactive and the contract terminated on a month’s notice. That clause was removed in a restructure of their terms in late 2022, and it isn’t in the current Spanish text, the Catalan translation, or the document their signup flow links to.
What survives is a passing reference. Their clause on prohibited use calls it uso ilícito to make periodic calls “con la única intención de evitar la desactivación de la línea por inactividad”, which presupposes a deactivation mechanism whose threshold is published nowhere.
Their support, asked directly, gives the number: three months. And they add the detail that changes everything, which is that inbound calls and inbound SMS count as the line being in use.
That matters because the deleted clause measured “consumo de servicios facturables”, and receiving an SMS isn’t billable. Anyone working from the documents alone would conclude that a receive-only line is exactly the kind that gets cut. The operator says the opposite.
The published terms were silent, the historical wording pointed one way, and the operator’s actual practice went the other. Two of their sibling brands under the same ownership disagree with each other on the same clause, one still publishing a four-month version and one having no such rule at all. If your number matters, ask the operator in writing and keep the reply.
What Spain Requires Regardless of Operator
Some things don’t vary and will stop you if you’re organizing this from outside the country.
A Spanish identity document is required, DNI, NIE or CIF. So is a Spanish address, even on an eSIM order where nothing is being posted, because the province field is a dropdown of Spanish provinces only. In practice you also need a Spanish IBAN: billing forms reject foreign ones even though SEPA Regulation 260/2012 makes IBAN discrimination illegal, and arguing that point is a losing use of an evening.
The bank account holder also has to be the same person as the contract holder, which matters if you’re arranging a line for a family member.
This is the same paperwork that gates most Spanish admin, so if you already have what the Spanish tax system or a Spanish healthcare provider asked of you, you have what a mobile operator will ask for.
Porting and Canceling Are Not the Same Thing
Confusing the two is what costs people their number permanently.
Requesting a baja, a cancellation, hands the number back. O2 states it plainly: cancel without changing company and “eliminaremos tu número y no podrás recuperarlo”. A portability, by contrast, moves the number to the new operator and cancels the old line as a side effect. You never need to call the old operator at all.
So if you’re switching, request the port with the new operator and nothing else. And if you’re canceling a bundled service like fiber while keeping mobile lines, say so explicitly in writing, because an ambiguous instruction processed by a person is how a mobile line gets swept up in a fiber cancellation.
eSIM Removes Some Friction and Adds One Hard Constraint
Most operators now issue eSIMs on portabilities, free, with the QR sent by email. Simyo and Suop both do. Digi is the exception worth knowing about: their eSIM is for contract lines only, so a Digi prepaid port still needs a physical SIM delivered to a Spanish address.
The constraint to plan around is activation. Pepephone’s portability instructions state that the eSIM activates only on first network registration inside Spain: “tu eSIM se activará cuando te conectes a Internet por primera vez en España.” Having a Spanish address on the contract isn’t enough. Somebody has to be physically there.
That has a sharp edge. The port itself completes overnight on the scheduled date whether or not you can activate. If you’re abroad when it lands, the old line is already gone and the new one isn’t live, so the number goes dark until you next arrive in Spain.
There’s a smaller trap in the same instructions: don’t install the QR before 8am on the switch day, or the eSIM blocks and you need a new code.
Roaming Fair Use, Which Is the Real Exposure
If the line lives abroad, this is the clause that concerns you rather than any of the above.
Pepephone, Digi and Simyo all carry near-identical EU roaming fair-use terms, and all three name the same pattern: long periods of SIM inactivity combined with mainly-roaming use. That is precisely the shape of a dormant Spanish number kept alive from another country.
The machinery is spelled out. Indicators of presence and consumption are assessed over rolling four-month windows. Presence is prevalent above 50% of days spent roaming, consumption above 50% of actual voice, SMS or data traffic. Operators reserve the right to ask for evidence of habitual residence in Spain or stable ties to it. If they act, you get 14 days to submit your own figures, and any surcharge is capped at the prevailing wholesale price.
Two details soften it. Receiving calls and SMS within the EU is free, so a receive-only line generates almost nothing chargeable for a surcharge to attach to. And days when the handset is switched off count as days without connection and don’t accumulate toward the presence indicator.
None of this applies in reverse, incidentally. A foreign line used on visits to Spain, a Portuguese SIM for example, is exactly the periodic travel the roaming rules were written to protect.
The Short Version
If the number needs to survive without attention, a €0 contract line beats prepaid, because prepaid clocks expire silently and take the number with them while a contract line’s worst case arrives with notice.
If you go prepaid anyway, prefer one where using the line resets the clock rather than one that only counts money, and put a recurring reminder somewhere you’ll actually see it.
Whatever you choose, get the operator’s answer in writing on what counts as activity and how long you have. The published terms are not a reliable guide, and on the question that decides whether you keep your number, they were wrong in both directions.
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