The debate about the best perioperative management of the anticoagulated patients has increased with the arrival on the market of direct oral anticoagulants (DOAC), by the moment approved for long-term anticoagulation in patients with atrial fibrillation and for the treatment of pulmonary embolism. DOAC could be classified in two groups: direct inhibitors of thrombin (the only current available drug is dabigatran) and direct inhibitors of factor Xa (rivaroxaban, apixaban, edoxaban, and others soon to come). DOAC have pharmacokinetic characteristics that seem to favour stopping the drug for some days without substitution in the vast majority of the patients. Nevertheless, current lack of experience in the management of high doses of DOAC during the perioperative period, the absence of effective antagonists to reverse the anticoagulation, the unsuitable standardized laboratory monitoring and, also, the different pharmacokinetics between patients receiving these drugs, have made challenging to standardize the optimal management in the perioperative period. Some proposals have been published in last years from expert consensus, based on pharmacokinetic data, but DOAC short time of commercialization and the difficulties to interpret the post-hoc analysis from the randomized trials, for the heterogeneity of the included population and the wide kind of surgeries, most of them with low bleeding risk, have moved the spanish working group on perioperative management of haemostasis to plan a multi-institutional registry to gain experience and information in the periprocedural (urgent or scheduled) management of DOAC.