CCSE 2026 calendar and exam centers: where and when to take it

How the CCSE calendar works

Instituto Cervantes publishes the full calendar for the following year every autumn on examenes.cervantes.es. That's where you'll find the official session dates, the cities running the exam, and the exact time registration opens for each one. The pattern has held for years: five sessions across the year, almost always on Thursdays, roughly spread between February, April, June, September, and November.

That rhythm has been stable for a while, but the exact dates can shift by a day or two depending on the labour calendar and long weekends. Check the official page before you lock in personal plans (flights, moves, holidays), because sometimes what was a Thursday slides to a Wednesday, or the session gets pushed up by a week. If you plan this year off last year's dates from memory, you can get caught out.

Registration is online only. There's no counter you can walk into and no center where you can show up in person to ask for a slot. Everything runs through your Cervantes account, you pay by card, and you download the payment receipt yourself as a PDF. The fee is 85 euros per session, and if you fail and want to retake, you pay another 85 the next time.

How many sessions are there in 2026 and when

The expectation for 2026 is the usual one: five sessions, normally Thursdays, in February, April, June, September, and November. The exact dates come from Cervantes on their website. Don't trust screenshots flying around WhatsApp groups or blogs that have copy-pasted the previous year's calendar; the only thing that counts is what's published on examenes.cervantes.es.

Slots open about two months ahead of each session. So if you're aiming for late June, registration usually goes live around late April. Cervantes announces the exact opening time on the website, almost always first thing in the morning peninsula time. Once a center's quota fills, that center closes for the session and won't take more sign-ups until the next round.

Sign up for Cervantes calendar notifications the moment you create your account. You can also follow their official social channels and keep the CCSE page bookmarked so you can check it every few days. The people who get shut out of Madrid or Barcelona almost always tell the same story: they saw the news late, and by the time they logged in to register, only centers in other provinces were still open.

One detail that matters if you're in the Canary Islands: peninsula time runs one hour ahead of Canary time. If Cervantes says registration opens at 09:00 peninsula time, that's 08:00 in the Canaries. Same thing on exam day: a session that starts at 12:00 on the peninsula starts at 11:00 in Las Palmas and Tenerife local time. Set your alarm with that in mind, because oversleeping by an hour on the day slots open is how you lose Madrid.

CCSE centers in Spain by autonomous community

The CCSE runs in all 17 autonomous communities plus Ceuta and Melilla. Every region has at least one center, though availability swings widely with population and demand. Here's the picture by zone, with the caveat that the active list for each specific session is confirmed on examenes.cervantes.es once the calendar is published.

Madrid has the highest demand in the whole country. Between four and six locations are typically active, counting the main Cervantes headquarters and several partner centers spread around the city. Even so, every Madrid slot is gone within the first few days after opening.

Catalonia has centers in four provinces: Barcelona, Tarragona, Girona, and Lleida. Barcelona fills almost as fast as Madrid; the other three give you more breathing room and often still have spots when the regional capital has already closed.

Andalusia has the most active centers outside the Madrid-Barcelona axis. You've got options in Sevilla, Málaga, Granada, Córdoba, Almería, and Cádiz. People living in the south often find a local slot without having to travel.

The Valencian Community offers Valencia, Alicante, and Castellón. Galicia splits its locations between Santiago de Compostela, Vigo, and A Coruña. The Basque Country activates Bilbao, San Sebastián, and Vitoria. Castile and León covers Salamanca, Valladolid, and León, which gives decent coverage if you live in the center-north.

The rest of the communities also have at least one authorized center: Aragon, Asturias, the Balearic Islands, the Canary Islands, Cantabria, Castile-La Mancha, Extremadura, La Rioja, Murcia, and Navarre. Same goes for Ceuta and Melilla. Specific availability changes session by session, so open the Cervantes page and filter by your province before you pay anything. Sometimes a smaller city sits out one session and shows up again in the next.

CCSE centers outside Spain

Cervantes also runs the CCSE from its locations abroad. If you're living outside Spain while you wait for your nationality interview, you can sit the exam there and upload the certificate to your file without flying back.

In Morocco there are centers in Rabat, Casablanca, Tangier, Tetouan, and Fez. In the UK the active locations are London and Manchester. In the United States you can register in New York, Chicago, and Albuquerque. France offers Paris, Lyon, Toulouse, and Bordeaux. Brazil has São Paulo and Rio. The Philippines concentrates everything in Manila. Italy activates Rome, Milan, Naples, and Palermo.

Cervantes has plenty of other locations (Germany, Austria, Belgium, the Nordics, Eastern Europe, Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa), and not all of them run the CCSE every session. The full updated list lives on examenes.cervantes.es. Filter by your city and you'll see whether that location appears as an authorized center for the next date.

One useful warning: the number of slots abroad is much smaller than in Spain. A Cervantes location in Berlin or Rome might offer 30 or 40 slots per session, while a big Madrid center handles several hundred. If you're planning to sit it abroad, plan even further ahead, and register the same day slots open.

How to get a slot in Madrid or Barcelona

The gap between landing a slot and being shut out is measured in minutes. These are the concrete steps that make the difference.

Create your examenes.cervantes.es account well in advance. Verify your email, upload the photo the system asks for, and fill in all your personal details. When the session opens, you don't want to burn five minutes creating an account, confirming your email, or hunting for the photo on your phone. Show up to that page with your account ready and your session already logged in.

Set an alarm for the exact opening date and time. It's usually around 09:00 peninsula time on the day Cervantes has announced, roughly two months before the session. That time is published on the site with several days of lead time. Don't calculate it from memory: if in doubt, log in the night before and double-check.

Ten minutes before opening, load the CCSE page in your browser, sign in, and have the card you're paying with ready. The instant the system lets you pick a date and center, do it without second-guessing and move to payment. Slots are locked when you confirm the charge, not when you select them, so any hesitation during payment is time you're handing to the next candidate.

If Madrid fills up, look at alternatives you can reach from Madrid. Alcalá de Henares is half an hour away on the commuter rail. Toledo and Segovia have direct buses and reasonably frequent trains. For Barcelona, Tarragona and Girona usually still have slots when the Catalan capital has already closed. The exam is the same, the certificate is identical, and a round-trip train ticket is dirt cheap compared with waiting two more months for the next session.

Keep one thing in mind: registration closes when slots run out, not on a calendar date. There's no "last day to register" reminder. Miss it by a week, the slots at the center you wanted are gone, and you're pushed to the session two months later, which can in turn delay your nationality file by several more months.

What to do if you can't find a slot

If you log in and everything you had in mind is already closed, don't passively wait for the next session. These are the real options.

Register in any available city, even if you have to travel. A cheap train ticket or short flight to Zaragoza, Bilbao, or Sevilla works out better than waiting two extra months to unblock your nationality file. If you're in Madrid and the only slot left is in Murcia, go to Murcia. The exam is identical, a pass counts the same at the Civil Registry, and the time you save more than pays for the trip.

Consider a Cervantes location abroad if you've got a trip planned or you're going to be outside Spain for work. If you're spending two weeks in Morocco for family reasons and a session in Casablanca happens to line up, take it. The certificate uploads to your file the same way from any Cervantes location in the world.

If you're in a rush because of something specific, don't get stuck on the ideal location. That includes a residency renewal closing in on its expiry date, a DELE A2 certificate that's already in its third or fourth year and about to expire, a Ministry of Justice file paused waiting on the CCSE, or a Civil Registry appointment already on the calendar. In any of these cases, prioritize having the CCSE in hand as soon as possible, even if you have to travel 400 km. The certificate is valid for four years from the pass date, so once you've got it, the rest of the paperwork has plenty of margin.

If you haven't sat the exam for the first time yet and you want to know how the form works, take a look first at how to register for the CCSE step by step. It'll save you a lot of trial and error at the critical moment.