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Residency · Non-dom · Tax · Legal · Banking
Greece has quietly built one of the most generous tax positions in Europe, and then made it complicated enough that most arrivals get the sequence wrong. The order you do things in costs or saves you a year.
Everything between deciding to come and actually being here.
The framework, not a listing. Rules and figures are sourced and current as of August 2026; anything that would name a business waits for an editor who has been there.
Two different things get confused constantly. The Golden Visa buys residency through property. The non-dom regime (article 5A) buys tax certainty: €100,000 a year flat on all foreign-sourced income regardless of size, €20,000 per additional family member, fixed for fifteen years. You qualify by not having been a Greek tax resident for seven of the previous eight years, and by investing at least €500,000 in Greek assets within three years. Most people who move here for the tax do not need a Golden Visa at all.
Real estate, a business, securities: all qualify. This matters more than it sounds. It means you are free to satisfy the investment obligation one way and buy the home you actually want separately, at whatever it costs. The recorded behaviour bears this out: the median home a non-dom buys here is €2.95 million, six times the minimum.
Article 5B taxes foreign pension income at a flat 7% for fifteen years. Article 5C gives a 50% exemption on Greek employment or business income for seven years, and it applies to Greeks returning from abroad too. More than 4,700 people have been approved across the three regimes. If your income is a pension or you intend to actually work here, 5A may be the expensive answer to the wrong question.
Applications run on an annual cycle with a filing window. Miss it and you wait a full year on the ordinary tax regime, which for most people in this position is the single most expensive administrative error available. Confirm the current year's deadline with your tax adviser before you do anything else, including before you buy.
A Greek tax number (AFM) comes first, and almost nothing else can happen without it. Opening an account as a new arrival with foreign wealth triggers source-of-funds review that can run for weeks. Start it in parallel with everything else, not after. The purchase completion date is where this failure shows up.
April 2025 ended the UK non-dom regime. Fifteen months later, more than half of every wealthy arrival in Greece holds a British passport, and the median thing they buy is a €2.95 million house on this coastline.
The Desk · The Move
We keep a short list of tax advisers and immigration lawyers who have actually run 5A applications to completion, and who answer email. Tell us your situation and we will make an introduction to the two or three that fit it, and tell you plainly where we have a commercial relationship and where we do not.
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What opened, what closed, what quietly changed hands, and the one thing worth your Saturday. Read by roughly four hundred people who live between Alimos and Sounio, and by the people who advise them.
