Research on national identities shows that citizens in multinational states develop a dual identification. However, these works did not describe closer the problems with the measurement of national identification in states with different nation-building projects. I address this gap by using survey data in the Spanish “State of Autonomies”. I find that even if in Spain we can see the development of a “dual identification”, it means something else in different Autonomous Communities (AC). In some parts, it is a complementary regional identification only, which grows due to the acceptance of a more decentralized form of state organization. However, in some sub-state units like Catalonia or the Basque Country these types of identities are complementary and conflicting at the same time. Also persons, which don’t want to make a decision about its national belonging, claim to have such kind of identification. I call this type of dual identification a “hybrid” national identification and recommend using it parallel to “dual” identification. Even if “dual identities” are widely used in research on nationalism, due to these conceptual shortcomings they only partly explain the different identification patterns in multinational states.