Moving to Valencia With Kids: What You Can No Longer Choose, Month by Month

There is no shortage of relocation checklists. They are mostly accurate and mostly useless, because a checklist assumes the only thing standing between you and the move is remembering the items.

That is not what goes wrong.

What goes wrong is that a family does everything on the list, in a sensible order, at a sensible pace, and still arrives to find the decision they were most looking forward to making was made for them months earlier by a date they did not know existed.

So this is not a list of tasks. It is a list of doors, and roughly when each one closes.

Twelve months out — everything is still open

At twelve months you have the full range. Any school type. Any neighbourhood. Any arrival month. Nothing has been foreclosed and nothing is urgent, which is exactly why almost nobody starts here.

The only thing that matters at this stage is deciding what kind of schooling you want, because that single decision quietly determines most of what follows: which neighbourhoods are viable, what you can spend on housing, and when you need to be in the country.

What closes if you skip this window: nothing yet. But every month from here narrows the set of schools that will still take an application.

Nine months out — the international school door begins to close

The most sought-after international schools want applications roughly nine to twelve months before the intended start. Some run rolling admissions and will look at you later. The strongest ones fill.

Still open: state and concertado schools, all neighbourhoods, your arrival month.

Closing: first-choice international places. Not all of them, and not everywhere. But if you have a specific school in mind and you are inside nine months, you are now applying into whatever is left rather than choosing.

Six months out — the neighbourhood stops being a preference

By six months, the honest position is that you are no longer choosing a neighbourhood. The school is choosing it for you.

If your child has a place at a particular school, the viable addresses are the ones within a workable commute of that school — which in Valencia's case often means the towns around the city rather than the city itself, if the school is one of the international ones in the Rocafort, Godella, La Cañada or Puçol belt.

Still open: the public admissions round for the following September, if you are on the right side of the calendar.

Closing: the idea that you will find a flat you love and work outwards from there.

Three to four months out — the registration window

This is where the calendar becomes unforgiving, and it is the part almost nobody sees coming.

State and concertado admissions run as a single main round with a published window and a hard close. Your registered address — the padrón — is a scored criterion, and it needs to be correct before that round opens. Not before it closes. Before it opens.

Which means your rental contract, your registration appointment and your application all have to land in a specific order, and the first of them is a housing decision made months before you move.

Confirm the exact dates against your region's education gazette for the year you are moving. In Andalucía the 2026/27 round opened 1 March and closed 31 March, with late applications losing priority entirely. Valencia publishes its own calendar. The dates differ; the shape does not.

Closing: the public school round for that September, and with it your ability to influence which school your child attends.

One month out — you are executing, not deciding

At one month, everything that was going to be a choice has been made. What is left is logistics: shipping, flights, the arrival appointments, the utilities, the bank.

This part is genuinely manageable and it is the part every guide covers well.

What is closed: all of it. Which is fine, if the earlier doors were walked through on time.

After arrival — the second calendar starts

The move does not end when you land. A second set of dates begins: the residence card appointment, the healthcare registration, the driving licence exchange window, the tax residency threshold at 183 days.

None of these decide your child's school. All of them have their own deadlines, and the same thing is true of them as everything above: each is manageable alone, and the difficulty is the order.

The pattern underneath

Read back through and one thing repeats. Nothing on this calendar is difficult. Registering an address is not difficult. Applying to a school is not difficult. Signing a lease is not difficult.

The difficulty is that each of them is a precondition for another one, and the dependencies run backwards from how a family naturally plans. Most people plan forwards from the move date. The constraints run backwards from the admissions round.

Start four to six weeks earlier than feels necessary. It is the single change with the best return in the entire process, and it costs nothing.

Frequently asked

How far ahead should we start planning a move to Valencia with children?

Twelve months if you want a real choice of school. Nine is workable. Under six and the school decision starts making your other decisions for you.

What is the first thing to decide?

The type of schooling. It determines neighbourhood, housing budget and arrival timing more than any other single choice.

Can we move mid-school-year?

Yes, and families do. Out-of-round admissions exist. You are working with remaining places rather than preferences, which is a different exercise from the one you were planning.

Does this apply to the rest of Spain?

The shape does. The specific dates and criteria weightings are set by each autonomous community and revised, so confirm your region's own calendar rather than borrowing another family's.

---

Spainlander helps international families work out this order before it starts making decisions for them.