Greece’s Golden Visa thresholds range from €250,000 to €800,000

Greece has kept the real-estate route into its investor residence permit, but the qualifying sum depends on where the property stands and what is done to it.

The minimum acquisition value is €800,000 in the Attica Region and in a defined list of island and metropolitan areas, €400,000 across the rest of the country, and €250,000 on two narrow routes that require conversion or restoration work. The figures are set by article 100 of Law 5038/2023 as amended in 2024, and no purchase agreed today can reach the older, lower ones.

What article 100 actually sets

The governing text is article 100 of Law 5038/2023 (Gazette Α΄81), as amended by article 64(1) of Law 5100/2024 (Gazette Α΄49).

Circular No. 9 of 24 September 2024, signed by the Secretary General for Migration Policy, instructs the decentralised administrations of the country on how the amended article is to be applied. It is written for the officials who decide the applications, and it is the document that states the figures.

One requirement runs across all three of the article’s investment routes: the minimum must be met by a single property, which the circular restates in terms. An allowance runs alongside it — storage rooms and parking spaces may count towards the value where they are bought under the same contract, stand in the same building, and are auxiliary in use.

A further requirement applies to the €800,000 and €400,000 routes alone. Where the property is built, or a building permit has been issued for it, the main spaces must measure at least 120 m².

The 120 m² floor does not apply to unbuilt property — the circular names plots and fields as its examples — and it does not apply on either €250,000 route. Ancillary storage and parking are excluded from the 120 m² even where their price counts towards the threshold.

One definition carries more weight than the rest. The threshold is the acquisition value of the property at the time it is acquired, so transfer tax sits outside that figure rather than inside it. A tax announced in September 2026 would therefore change what the qualifying purchase costs without moving any of the figures below.

Where the €800,000 band applies

The circular sets the higher figure for four categories:

• the Attica Region;
• the Thessaloniki Regional Unit of the Central Macedonia Region;
• the Mykonos and Thira Regional Units of the South Aegean Region;
• any island whose population at the last census exceeds 3,100.

Euboea, the circular adds in answer to questions it had received, is an island area and falls in the €800,000 band.

The administrative unit is worth reading closely. The band is drawn around the Regional Unit of Thessaloniki, which extends well beyond the city; the Municipality of Thessaloniki appears in the circular only in the transitional provisions reciting the superseded €500,000 figure. A summary that describes the current band as covering the municipality is describing a smaller area than the circular does.

Everywhere else in Greece, the minimum acquisition value is €400,000.

The two routes at €250,000

The lower figure survives in two forms, both narrow, and both demanding work rather than capital alone.

• Change of use. A property whose main spaces are converted to residential use qualifies at €250,000, with no 120 m² floor. The conversion must be complete before the application is submitted, and must have been completed on or after 5 April 2024. Either the buyer or the seller may carry it out. Industrial buildings in which no industry has operated for at least the previous five years fall into the same route.
• Listed buildings. A listed building, or part of one, bought for restoration or full reconstruction also qualifies at €250,000 with no 120 m² floor. The obligation does not end at the purchase: full restoration is an additional condition of the first renewal of the permit, and any transfer of the property before that restoration is complete is void.

A letting restriction sits alongside them. Property acquired in full ownership for the grant or renewal of the permit may not be let short-term within the sharing economy, nor sublet.

The circular defines the prohibition by reference to article 111 of Law 4446/2016, which reaches lets of under 60 days where nothing is supplied beyond accommodation and bed linen; long leases are outside it, as are leases to tourism businesses that provide other services.

The prohibition does not reach property acquired under the earlier provisions, or property whose investment was completed inside the transitional period. Property bought under the conversion route carries a further condition: it may not be used as the seat or a branch of a business.

When the figures took effect, and when the last transitional deadline expired

Article 64 of Law 5100/2024 entered into force on 5 April 2024, but the dates that decide individual files are later, and they turn on one anchor. A buyer kept the former €500,000 and €250,000 figures only by paying a 10% deposit and signing a dated preliminary contract by 31 August 2024.

Any purchase not anchored by that deposit and contract falls under the new figures, and the circular records that for sales carried out from 1 September 2024 onwards no transitional arrangement exists and the price must be paid in full before the application is submitted.

For those who did hold the anchor, the bridge closed in two stages. Completion was required by 31 December 2024, a deadline that article 37 of Law 5167/2024 extended to 28 February 2025, as recorded by the Notaries’ Association of the Courts of Appeal of Athens, Piraeus, Aegean and Dodecanese.

Where the buyer had to substitute a different property for the one under deposit, the circular allowed completion until 30 April 2025.

Both dates are now well past, which is why the three current figures are the only ones a purchase agreed today can be measured against. Completion, in the circular’s sense, means the final contract signed and the price paid in full; registration of the deed may follow later, provided it precedes the issue of the permit.

What the announced transfer tax would add

Greece charges transfer tax at 3% of the taxable value, with a levy in favour of municipalities charged at 3% of the tax itself, giving 3.09% in total. On 5 September 2026, at the 90th Thessaloniki International Fair, the Prime Minister announced that buyers who are third-country nationals will pay 15%.

Officials setting out the detail two days later put the start date at 1 July 2027 and the combined rate at 15.45%. Reporting of the speech itself had carried 1 January 2027, which belongs to a different measure in the same package.

Searches on 8 September 2026 found no bill and no published text of the measure, and the draft is expected in Parliament during October. Nothing below is settled law. The figures illustrate the announced rate applied to each threshold, and they assume the taxable value equals the threshold figure — where the two differ, the tax follows the taxable value.

Threshold	At 3%	At 15%	With the levy, 3.09% → 15.45%
€800,000	€24,000	€120,000	€24,720 → €123,600
€400,000	€12,000	€60,000	€12,360 → €61,800
€250,000	€7,500	€37,500	€7,725 → €38,625

Two details from the same briefing would matter here, and neither has been traced to a text.

The higher rate is described as reaching residential property and not commercial premises or vacant land, which as described would leave a purchase of unbuilt land outside it; what the reporting does not settle is how a building converted to residential use after purchase would be treated, and that is the route where the question bites.

The rate is also described as excluding citizens of European Union and European Economic Area states, ethnic Greeks abroad, third-country nationals already holding long-term resident status in Greece, recognised refugees and second-generation permit holders. Both descriptions come from briefings rather than from a draft, and either could change in the drafting.

Where the governing figure is published, and where it is not

A reader who goes looking for the number at the obvious address will not find it. The Migration Ministry’s own English-language golden visa page, read on 8 September 2026, still describes the permit under article 20B of Law 4251/2014, cites Law 4546/2018, and quotes €250,000. It does not mention €400,000 or €800,000, does not cite Law 5038/2023, and carries no date of last revision.

That is the practical reason “check the official source” is not, by itself, usable instruction on this programme. The ministry publishes both the guidance page and the circular, they describe different versions of the same permit, and only one of them was written for the officials deciding the files.

The circular also names a successor it does not contain: its closing paragraph records that a ministerial decision and a further clarifying circular were still to be issued on the documents applicants must produce. Searches on 8 September 2026 did not find either, which is a statement about the search and not about what exists.

So the figures to work from are the ones article 100 now carries, as the circular states them: €800,000, €400,000 and €250,000 — each the value of one property, paid in full before the file is lodged.

On the Attica band, transfer tax on that purchase comes to €24,720 today including the municipal levy. If the announced rate is enacted as described, the same purchase carries €123,600 from 1 July 2027.

Rewritten on 8 September 2026. The earlier version of this article did not state the investment thresholds, and referred readers to the ministry’s own pages to find them. This version states the figures, the provision that sets them and the dates they took effect.