During the last decades, self-employment has been gaining strength as a job-generating element in the European Union, moving from representing a solution to unemployment, to be linked to dynamic, innovative and job generators business projects. Self-employment can be considered as one of the relevant indicators of entrepreneurship, hence the analysis of its characteristics and its evolution in relation to the economic cycle in our country is so important. On multiple occasions, the self-employed are the seed of entrepreneurship. Since the end of 2008, the Spanish economy witnessed the dramatic deterioration of all economic indicators. It went from a scenario where only a few months before the investment and consumption data of the economies seemed to reflect a happy situation, to a recession of dimensions close to that of 1929. The consequences have been felt so much in the employed as in those self-employed. The main objective of this research is to contrast the hypothesis that the economic crisis has been accompanied by significant changes in the profile of the new self-employed in Spain in the period between 2008 and 2013. Secondly, it analyzes the impact for the self-employees according to the different nationalities. To carry out this analysis, it has been used mainly -although not exclusively- the information contained in the Continuous Sample of Labor Lives (MCVL) for 2008 and 2013, which correspond to the last year of the expansionary and recessive period.