Greece Digital Nomad Visa

The minimum is EUR 3,500 per month, rising by 20 per cent for a spouse and 15 per cent for each accompanying child. Joint Ministerial Decision No. 225679, on the level and the manner of proving sufficient resources, states plainly that this is net income or net capital, not gross.

Proof may be a foreign pension, a bank account, or evidence that the applicant holds sufficient financial means of their own whose lawful provenance is demonstrable under the legislation in force.

The method of assessment is the part rarely mentioned: where the periodicity of the income is demonstrable, as with a pension, a salary or dividends from abroad, the assessment is made on a monthly basis; income from other sources, such as bank deposits, is assessed on an annual basis.

For a person applying for the national entry visa under Article 68(1) or for the residence permit under Article 163(8) of Law 5038/2023 as a digital nomad, sufficient resources are assessed on the applicant own income, monthly or annually, with the further criteria of subparagraphs b, c and d of Article 68(2) of the same law applied.

One point on naming: this route is commonly cited to Law 4825/2021, but the instrument in force is law 5038/2023, the current Immigration Code, and the corresponding residence permit category is coded Ζ.1 "Ψηφιακοί νομάδες"

This route issues two different documents at two stages, under two different codes, and failing to tell them apart is where most confusion starts.

Stage one: the competent Greek consular authority issues a national visa for a period of up to twelve months, and the heading of Article 68 of the Migration Code itself gives the digital nomad’s residence title as Ζ.1.

Stage two: paragraph 4 of that same article empowers the Secretary of the Decentralised Administration to issue a two-year residence permit to the person and their family members — but that permit is not a digital nomad permit.

It is the permit for third-country nationals with sufficient means of subsistence under Article 163(8), type Ι.8, meaning that anyone staying beyond the first year moves into a general category rather than remaining in one of their own.

The condition for that move is that the requirements of paragraph 2 still hold, and the application must be filed before the national visa expires.

The workfromgreece.gr site, which carries the copyright of Marketing Greece, a private-sector non-profit tourism body rather than a government authority, calls the second-stage document a Digital Nomad Residence Permit — a readable name, but not the name of the category in the law, so anyone searching the Code for it will not find it.

The same site states a limit that the law casts as a prohibition: throughout this period the holder has no right to work for a Greek company, whether on an employment contract or on a freelance basis.

The law imposes a hard deadline on the authority at stage one and no deadline at all on the authority at stage two, and that gap is the most telling thing here.

Stage one, the visa: Article 68(2) of the Migration Code obliges the competent Greek consular authority to reply within ten days of the person's request, and to complete the visa issuance procedure by way of a “One Stop for the interested party” — a duty placed on the authority, not an indicative target.

The application may be lodged in person, by email or by registered letter, all three routes being open. The national visa is granted for a period of up to twelve months.

Stage two, the residence permit: Article 68(4) allows the Secretary of the Decentralised Administration to grant the person and their family members a type “I.8” residence permit for third-country nationals with sufficient resources, running two years.

But at this stage the law states no processing deadline whatever, and the verb changes too: paragraph 4 says the permit may be granted rather than is granted, making it discretionary rather than owed.

The only clock the law sets at stage two runs against the applicant: the application must be submitted before the national visa expires, to the Directorate of Aliens and Migration of the Decentralised Administration for the applicant's place of residence.

In short: the authority is on the clock for the visa, the applicant is on the clock for the permit.

The core residence condition is not a day count but sits inside the financial resources provision itself: the funds must cover the holder living costs without their providing dependent employment and without their exercising independent economic activity in Greece.

The line is therefore not between working and not working but between income from outside Greece and income from inside it.

Both an employment relationship and freelance practice within the country are excluded, and this is written into the same sentence as the money threshold rather than tucked into a separate heading that is easy to miss.

Procedurally, the residence permit catalogue places digital nomads in category Ζ.1, and the circular of the General Secretariat for Migration Policy states that category Ζ.1 is not subject to the prior approval procedure applied to most other categories.

That procedure sets a ninety-day deadline for the police authority to opine on public order and security and for the consular authority to verify the family relationship, extendable by a further thirty days in exceptional cases.

The same circular confirms the sufficient-resources level for digital nomads at EUR 3,500 per month, set beside EUR 650 for students and trainees, EUR 900 for researchers and EUR 500 for athletes and coaches in a preparation programme

Family members may accompany the holder, and Article 68(3) of the Migration Code defines that scope far more tightly than the percentage formula usually quoted. Three groups count as family.

First: the spouse, or the partner with whom the person has concluded a cohabitation agreement.

Second: the unmarried common children of the spouses or partners, under eighteen, including children lawfully adopted under a foreign judgment that is automatically enforceable, has been declared enforceable, or has been recognised as res judicata in Greece.

Third: the other unmarried children under eighteen of the sponsor or of the other spouse or partner, provided custody has been lawfully assigned to that person.

There is no group for parents, and no age exception for children in education. Two heavy consequences follow. First, a family member’s visa is individual but expires at the same time as the sponsor’s, so it cannot stand on its own and the whole household shares one date.

Second, and this is the provision that decides whether a family can live on the arrangement at all: while in Greece the spouse, the partner and the family members may not provide dependent employment and may not carry on economic activity of any form in the country — the household lives on a single income earned outside Greece.

On money, each family member raises the sponsor’s resources threshold by 20 per cent for a spouse or partner and 15 per cent for each child.

The status this programme grants, whether a visa or a residence permit, does not replace the holder's passport. The holder still travels on the passport of their own country, so the figure below belongs to the Greece passport and becomes the holder's only once they are issued a Greece passport.

According to the Passport Index of Prosperous Intelligence, on data dated 30 September 2026, the Greece passport reaches 200 destinations without applying for a consular visa in advance. The figure combines three forms of entry and does not count an e-Visa that must be obtained beforehand:

It is therefore a measure of how easily the holder travels, not a count of visa-free countries in the narrow sense.

For comparison, on the same source and the same method of counting, the Vietnamese passport reaches 44 destinations. The two lists of destinations do not nest inside one another, so the difference is an indication rather than a list of places newly opened.

Prosperous Intelligence dates its data and advises checking with the destination’s official authorities before travelling.

The provision creating this category contains no tax rule — no concession, no exemption, no day-count threshold. The programme has no tax regime of its own. But its structure says more about tax than any provision would, in two ways.

The first is a prohibition: paragraph 2(a) requires the applicant to file a sworn declaration containing two things, the intention to reside in order to work remotely, and an undertaking not to provide work, services or any other form of labour to an employer established in Greece.

Points (b), (c) and (d) tighten in the same direction: the employment contract, services contract or evidence of an employment relationship must be with an entity established outside Greek territory, and a self-employed applicant must show that their own undertaking is located outside Greek territory.

The second way sits inside the money formula itself, and it is the decisive sentence for this record:

Paragraph 2(e) sets sufficient resources at EUR 3,500 per month, increased by 20% for a spouse or partner and 15% for each child — and where the resources come from employment, that minimum is computed on net income after payment of the required taxes in the country where the work is provided.

The statute itself therefore assumes the tax is paid elsewhere and not in Greece. The remaining parameters: the category is open to third-country nationals who are self-employed, in a liberal profession or in salaried employment and can work remotely through information and communication technology for employers or clients outside Greece.

The consular authority issues a national visa of up to twelve months and must respond within ten days under a one-stop procedure; and the national visa fee is EUR 75.

Accompanying family members receive individual visas expiring at the same time, but the spouse and family members may not take salaried employment or carry on any economic activity in Greece.

The limit of this cell must be recorded: tier two could not be established because the texts of the Greek tax authority could not be checked at the official source.

So the concession in Article 5C of the Income Tax Code, which the market often attaches to this category, was not verified at source and this cell does not cite it; and Article 68 does not cite it either — no provision of the Migration Code points to that regime, so the two are separate doors until the contrary is shown.

Read this cell within its scope: the provision covers the visa conditions and the financial requirement, and not how Greece taxes a person once admitted; it does not say a holder is exempt from Greek tax, and equally does not say they do not become tax resident

This route does not appear in the Migration Code's fee schedule, and that absence carries meaning rather than being an omitted line.

Article 171, headed fees and fines, lists the electronic fee payable with applications for the grant and renewal of residence permits, and it names each category in turn: category Ε, category Ο, category Β, category Η, category Α, category Μ, category Ι, category Χ and category Υ.

Category Ζ — the category containing the digital nomad title Ζ.1 — does not appear.

Article 171 mentions neither the symbol for category Ζ nor the code Ζ.1, even though Ζ.1 is used elsewhere in the Code.

The reason lies in the nature of the document: Article 68 provides that a digital nomad is granted by the competent consular authority a national entry visa for a period of up to twelve months, rather than being issued a residence permit by a domestic authority.

But that stage’s fee is not fixed elsewhere: this same Code sets it, merely in a different article — Article 68(2)(στ) lists a national visa fee of seventy-five euro among the items to be filed with the application, rather than placing it in the schedule at Article 171.

And one further point should be read alongside it: the Ι.8 figure cited below is not an idle comparison, because the two-year residence permit that Article 68(4) allows the holder to move to is the Ι.8 permit — so that is what stage two of this route actually costs.

To see the scale of that schedule, and why standing outside it matters, a few levels can be compared, in euro:

Paragraph 2 of the same article lists eight groups exempt from the fee, among them minor third-country nationals and long-term residents applying to renew.

The last two paragraphs cover collection and use. Fees are collected through the electronic fee procedure, and 75 percent of the revenue is entered in the budget of the General Secretariat for Migration Policy of the Ministry of Migration and Asylum.

That share is applied to rent for the one-stop offices, purchase and maintenance of equipment, operating costs, and funding social integration actions carried out by local authorities.