The Spanish security guard exam, explained in English

To work as a security guard in Spain you need a licence — the habilitación de vigilante de seguridad — issued after passing tests run by the Ministry of the Interior. This is how those tests actually work, based on the rules published for 2026 in the state gazette.

Two tests, and the written one comes second

The rules list two tests, both eliminatory, and say that each is only marked for people who passed the previous one:

The physical test uses tables set out in the resolution itself, differentiated by age and sex, and you must bring the original of a medical certificate. Failing a single exercise puts you out — and the written paper of anyone who fails is never marked. Planning only the syllabus is planning half the round.

There is no separate practical exercise. The practical part sits inside the same paper, which is why the rules call it teórico-prácticos.

The written paper: 100 questions in 50 minutes

One hundred questions in fifty minutes, each with a statement and three options of which exactly one is true. Marked from zero to ten, and you need five.

It is not a count of correct answers. The formula is:

mark = [A − E/(n−1)] × 10/P

where A is correct answers, E is wrong ones, n is the number of options and P the total number of questions. With three options, n − 1 = 2, so each wrong answer costs half a correct one. Unanswered questions do not appear in the formula at all: blanks are free.

So the real threshold, if you answer everything, is 67 — not 50.

When to guess

With three options and a half-point penalty, random guessing has an expected value of exactly zero: (1/3 × 1) − (2/3 × 0.5) = 0. It neither helps nor hurts in the long run, it only adds variance to something you sit once. Rule out one option and the maths flips to +0.25 per question. Practical rule: if you cannot eliminate anything, leave it blank; if you can cross out one option, answer.

The syllabus: 57 topics

The programme is Annex III of the resolution. Fifty-seven topics, which group into fifteen subject blocks: constitutional law, criminal law, criminal procedure, private security legislation, data protection and fundamental rights, protection and detection equipment, firearms and shooting, fire protection, first aid, professional ethics, employment law and risk prevention, legal practice (reports and complaints), protecting premises and access control, communications and IT, and physical preparation and self-defence.

The blocks do not carry equal weight — criminal law, premises protection and protection equipment hold many more topics than fire protection or data protection — so a mock that splits one hundred questions evenly across blocks does not look like the real paper.

One trap worth knowing: firearms and shooting are in the general programme, but ballistics and the theory of shooting belong to the annexes for close protection officers and explosives guards, not to this one.

2026 rounds, fee and locations

There are three rounds a year. For 2026 the application windows were the ten working days following publication of the resolution, 1–16 April, and 1–14 September. The fee is 23.34 euros.

The exam date is not in the rules. The resolution says the place and date appear in the decision approving the list of admitted candidates — that is, in a later publication, after applications close. Locations named in the 2026 rules: Baleares, Cádiz, Granada, Madrid, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Santiago de Compostela, Tarragona, Valencia and Zaragoza.

Questions can be challenged, but only within two calendar days. If the board annuls a question, it drops out of the count and the mark is recalculated over the remaining ones; there are no reserve questions to replace it.

A note if Spanish is not your first language

Everything is in Spanish: the paper, the syllabus, and the legislation behind it. Beyond the law itself, the vocabulary of the questions is administrative and precise, and the difference between retener and impedir el acceso is the difference between a right and a wrong answer. Our app keeps the literal wording of the article next to every answer, which is the fastest way to build that vocabulary — but the studying happens in Spanish.

Source

Resolución de 9 de enero de 2026, de la Secretaría de Estado de Seguridad — BOE-A-2026-813, state gazette no. 12 of 14 January 2026: Annex I (bases 2.1, 2.3, 4.1, 5.1.1, 5.1.3), Annex II (physical tests) and Annex III (syllabus). Dates, fees and locations can change in later rounds — check the current publication before relying on them.