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We use a novel dataset to study the impact of participation in dual vocational education (VE) on the labor market outcomes of three cohorts of graduates in the Spanish region of Madrid. Our control group is made of students in school-based VE who graduated in the same years, fields, and schools. We control for observable characteristics and also for selection on unobservables by means of an instrumental variable that exploits differences in commuting times to the nearest schools offering either track. We find that graduates from dual VE work more days and earn higher labor income in the first 24 months after graduating than their peers in school-based VE. There is also higher retention of dual VE students by their internship firm. On the other hand, there are no differences in job quality measured by contract length, open ended contracts or part-time work.