Greek Employment Law for Expats: Contracts, Notice, Severance & the Digital Work Card (2026)

Greece has spent the past five years rebuilding its labour statute book — Law 4808/2021, the Individual Labour Code, Law 5053/2023 transposing the EU transparent working conditions directive, Law 5239/2025 on working time, and in 2026 both a pay transparency law and a collective bargaining law. The result is a system that looks continental-European on paper and is enforced through a near-real-time digital spine. That spine is the point. Greek labour compliance in 2026 is less about what is written in the contract and more about what is visible in ERGANI II at the moment a Labour Inspectorate officer opens the file.

For the professional moving to Athens or Thessaloniki, the headline numbers understate the package: the fourteenth-salary structure, the leave allowance and the statutory seniority increments all sit outside the monthly figure on the offer letter. For the employer, the arithmetic runs the other way — the monthly salary you negotiate is roughly 84% of what you will actually pay in cash wages across a year, before a single euro of EFKA contribution.

This article covers the contract, the pay structure, working time, the digital work card, leave, and termination, as the rules stand in October 2026. Immigration status is a separate question and is dealt with in the Greek work visa and residence permit guide for expats.

What must a Greek employment contract say, and by when?

An indefinite-term employment contract in Greece does not have to be in writing to exist. Part-time contracts do, and so do several special arrangements, but the ordinary full-time relationship can be formed orally and still be fully enforceable. What is mandatory is the information duty: Law 5053/2023 (Government Gazette A’ 158), which transposes Directive (EU) 2019/1152 on transparent and predictable working conditions, requires the employer to hand the employee a written statement of the essential terms on a two-tier deadline.

• Within one week of the start of work: the identity of both parties, the place of work, the job title or description, the start date, the end date of a fixed-term contract, the duration and conditions of any trial period, remuneration, and the working schedule.
• Within one month of the start of work: the identity of the indirect employer in temporary agency work, training entitlements, paid leave entitlements, the termination procedure and applicable notice, the applicable collective labour agreement, and the social security institutions receiving contributions.

The statement may cross-refer to statutory provisions rather than reproduce them. Under Article 7 of the same law, any change to a disclosed term must be notified in writing no later than the moment the change takes effect — unless the change simply follows from an amendment to legislation already cited. In practice this is where foreign employers slip: a quiet shift of working pattern or bonus formula that was never papered becomes a documentary gap at inspection.

Fixed-term contracts and the three-year ceiling

Fixed-term employment is lawful and ends automatically on expiry, with no notice and no severance. The limit is the anti-abuse presumption in Article 5 of Presidential Decree 81/2003, as amended by Law 3986/2011: if the total duration of successive fixed-term contracts exceeds three years, or if the number of renewals exceeds three within a three-year period, the contracts are presumed to cover permanent and continuing needs and are reclassified as a single indefinite-term relationship. Early termination of a fixed-term contract requires serious cause, judged case by case; without it the termination is void and the employee can claim the remaining contractual pay without working for it.

What does a Greek hire actually cost once you count 14 salaries?

The statutory minimum wage is set annually by ministerial decision under Article 103 of Law 4172/2013, following a fixed consultation cycle. For 2026 the cycle opened on 8 January 2026 and closed on 2 March 2026 with the consultation report from KEPE (the Centre for Planning and Economic Research) and its scientific committee. The resulting decision, 8934/27.3.2026, set the figures that took effect on 1 April 2026. The Ministry of Labour put the increase at 4.55% and the number of beneficiaries at about 1.5 million.

The trajectory is the policy. The Minister of Labour has framed the mechanism as one that tracks economic conditions and cannot cut the wage, and has publicly discussed how the minimum wage rises above €950 after 2027. Treat €950-plus as the announced direction of travel rather than a legislated number: each year’s figure still has to come out of the January-to-March consultation.

The 14-salary structure, and why it changes the budget

Three statutory allowances sit outside the twelve monthly payments, governed by ministerial decision 19040/1981:

• Christmas allowance (doro Christougennon) — one full month’s salary, or 25 daily wages, for a full reference period of 1 May to 31 December. Part-period service is prorated at 2/25 of the monthly salary per 19 days worked.
• Easter allowance (doro Pascha) — half a month’s salary, or 15 daily wages, for a full reference period of 1 January to 30 April, prorated at 1/15 of the half-month per 8 days worked.
• Leave allowance (epidoma adeias) — up to half a month’s salary, capped at 15 days’ pay, paid alongside annual leave.

One month plus half a month plus half a month equals two extra months, hence 14 salaries. At the 2026 floor that is €920 × 14 = €12,880 a year in cash wages, an effective monthly cost of €1,073.33. Any budget built on 12 × the monthly figure is 16.7% short before employer social security is added. The contribution side — EFKA rates, the income tax scale and the solidarity position of inbound employees — is handled in detail in the guide to Greek payroll, income tax and social security for expats, and the fully loaded figure, including recruitment and relocation, in the breakdown of the total cost of employing someone in Greece.

Sectoral agreements and the revived extension mechanism

The statutory minimum is a floor, not the market. Greek collective labour agreements operate at enterprise, occupational, sectoral and national level, typically run for one to three years, and bind the members of the signatory organisations. The lever that matters for non-member employers is extension — the ministerial declaration that makes a sectoral agreement generally binding. Law 5278/2026 revived it in practical terms by cutting the representativeness threshold from 50% to 40% of the sector’s employees, and by restoring the full post-expiry continuation of normative terms. Certain agreements co-signed by GSEE, the private-sector confederation, can be extended without meeting the threshold at all.

The consequence for an employer planning a Greek entity is concrete: check the sectoral agreement before you fix a salary band, because an extension declared after you hire will apply to you anyway. After expiry, normative terms continue for three months — six for the national general agreement — and individual terms then survive under the metenergeia doctrine until a new agreement or individual variation replaces them.

How do working time, overwork and overtime really work in Greece?

Contractual full time is 40 hours a week, set by the national general collective agreement and confirmed in Article 55 of Law 4808/2021. The legal maximum is 48 hours a week averaged over four months, inclusive of overtime, under Article 6 of Presidential Decree 88/1999. Daily limits differ by pattern: on a five-day week, 8 contractual and 9 legal hours; on a six-day week, 6 hours 40 minutes contractual and 8 legal.

Greek law then splits additional hours into two distinct categories, and the distinction is where payroll errors concentrate. Yperergasia (overwork) is the band between contractual and legal hours. Yperoria (overtime) is everything above the legal maximum, and it is the only one that is capped and formally authorised.

Rest entitlements are the hard floor beneath all of this: 11 consecutive hours in every 24, a weekly rest of 24 consecutive hours including Sunday, and a break of 15 to 30 minutes once daily work exceeds four hours. There are nine mandatory public holidays plus up to five further days fixed annually by ministerial decision after consultation with the Supreme Labour Council.

The six-day week: what the 2024 provision actually permits

The “six-day week in Greece” headlines of 2024 described a narrow provision, and the narrowness is the whole story. Articles 25 and 26 of Law 5053/2023 allow an employer to require a sixth working day in two defined situations: businesses of continuous operation running rotating shifts (Article 25), and businesses that are not continuously operating by nature but face an exceptional, unforeseen workload (Article 26). In both cases work on the additional day cannot exceed eight hours and is paid at the daily wage increased by 40%. Employees in hotel and food service businesses are expressly excluded from both articles. This is not a general move to a 48-hour week, and it does not displace the 48-hour four-month average or the 11-hour daily rest.

Who has to run the digital work card in 2026, and what does getting it wrong cost?

The psifiaki karta ergasias (digital work card) was created by Article 74 of Law 4808/2021 and went live on 1 July 2022 for all banks and for supermarkets with 250 or more employees. It obliges the employer to operate an electronic working-time measurement system connected to ERGANI II in real time, recording every change in working time — start and end, breaks, overtime, leave categories — as it happens rather than after the fact.

2026 is the year the system stops being a large-employer obligation. The Ministry of Labour announced on 23 September 2026 a two-wave expansion covering roughly 500,000 additional workers and bringing total coverage to about 2.5 million:

The enforcement data explains the policy momentum. In the first seven months of 2026, declared overtime across digital-card sectors reached 5.7 million hours, a 36.8% increase on the same period of 2025, with wholesale commerce up 212.8% and food service up 67.2%. Those hours were always being worked; the card made them visible, and therefore payable.

Law 5239/2025 added practical tolerance to the regime: an employee may clock in up to 120 minutes after the declared start without the declared schedule being treated as breached, and up to three single clock-in entries per month are permitted. Records must be retained for at least ten years.

Sector-by-sector onboarding, the ERGANI II filings that accompany a foreign hire and the inspection-readiness checklist are set out in the guide to employer compliance when hiring expats in Greece.

How much leave, sick pay and family leave does a Greek employee get?

Annual leave accrues from the first month and is expressed in working days, which means the five-day and six-day figures differ for the same entitlement. The table below is the 2026 position under Law 539/1945 as amended.

Unpaid leave of up to one year is available by written agreement under Article 62 of Law 4808/2021. Leave is paid in the ordinary way and carries the separate leave allowance of up to half a month’s salary described above.

Sick pay: the three-day gap and the EFKA offset

Greek sick pay is a split liability, and the split is counter-intuitive. For the first three days of absence the employer pays 50% of the daily wage under Article 5 of Law 178/1967 — the so-called waiting days. From the fourth day, e-EFKA (the single social security entity) pays the sickness benefit. The employer’s own liability under Articles 657–658 of the Civil Code is full pay for up to 15 days where service is under one year, and up to one month where service exceeds one year — but the employer may deduct whatever e-EFKA has paid for the same period. The employer is therefore topping up a state benefit, not duplicating it. These Civil Code entitlements cannot be reduced by individual or collective agreement.

Maternity, paternity and parental leave

• Maternity leave: 17 weeks — eight before and nine after birth — paid by e-EFKA.
• Paternity leave: 14 working days, fully paid.
• Parental leave: up to four months per parent, of which the first two months are subsidised by DYPA (the public employment service).
• Childcare leave: reduced hours of one hour a day for 30 months, or the enhanced alternative of two hours a day for the first 12 months and one hour for the following six.

Dismissal protection attaches to these periods. A dismissal during pregnancy and for 18 months after childbirth is void absent serious cause, as is the dismissal of a father for six months after childbirth; and reduced performance attributable to pregnancy or family obligations cannot constitute serious cause.

How do you end a Greek employment contract, and what is the bill?

Since 1 January 2022 the old distinction between ypalliloi (salaried employees) and ergatotechnites (blue-collar workers) no longer affects notice. One table now governs both. The employer chooses between ordinary termination with notice and extraordinary termination with immediate effect, and the choice halves or doubles the cost.

Between 11 and 16 years the entitlement rises by one month of pay per completed year, from seven months to the twelve-month ceiling. The calculation base under Law 3198/1955 is regular remuneration — base salary plus permanent supplementary payments, plus one-sixth of the holiday and leave allowances, which is how the 14-salary structure feeds back into the exit cost. Severance claims lapse six months after termination.

A transitional rule still matters for long-tenured staff: employees who had completed 17 or more years of service on 12 November 2012 are entitled to additional severance of one month per completed year, up to twelve months, calculated on a salary capped at €2,000 per month.

Two other exit routes are worth knowing. An employee with 15 or more years of service, or who has reached statutory retirement age, who resigns with the employer’s prior consent receives 50% of the severance (jurisprudence requires the consent to precede the resignation, not accompany it). On retirement with full pension conditions met, the entitlement is 40% of severance where supplementary insurance exists and 50% where it does not.

When is a dismissal void, and what happens if a court agrees?

Greece does not impose a general statutory requirement to show a valid reason for dismissing an indefinite-term employee. What constrains the employer is the combination of formal validity, the prohibited-motive list, and the long-standing doctrine of abusive exercise of a right under the Civil Code — the route through which Greek courts have historically policed arbitrary, retaliatory or disproportionate dismissals even where no statutory ground was breached.

Formal validity comes first, and it is unforgiving. Termination of an indefinite contract is valid only if it is in writing and the exact statutory (plus any contractual) severance is paid at the same time. Operationally the employer logs into ERGANI II, completes the electronic termination form, and deposits the severance in the employee’s bank account on the termination date. A payment that is short by a few euros because the holiday-allowance sixth was omitted is a defective termination, not a minor arithmetic dispute.

Article 66 of Law 4808/2021 then voids dismissals motivated by discrimination, by the employee’s lawful exercise of a right, by a health-and-safety complaint, by refusal of a part-time or job-rotation proposal, by a request for family leave or flexible working, or by exercise of the right to disconnect; union officials are protected during their tenure and for a year afterwards. Once the employee establishes facts suggesting a prohibited motive, the burden shifts to the employer to prove the dismissal happened for a different reason.

The remedy has changed shape. Rather than insisting on nullity and reinstatement, the employee may ask the court for compensation instead, and the court may award it: not less than three months’ regular remuneration and not more than double the statutory severance, with the amount set by reference to the gravity of the employer’s fault and the financial circumstances of both sides. For an employer this is a quantifiable worst case; for an employee it is a faster, cleaner outcome than a reinstatement order against an unwilling employer.

Collective redundancies

Law 1387/1983 sets the thresholds that convert individual dismissals into a collective redundancy procedure, measured per calendar month:

• 20 to 150 employees: more than 6 dismissals in a calendar month.
• More than 150 employees: 5% of the workforce, or up to 30 employees, in a calendar month.

The employer must notify employee representatives in writing with the reasons, the number and categories affected, the total workforce, the timetable and the selection criteria, file copies with the Supreme Labour Council (ASE), and consult for 30 days. If agreement is reached, the redundancies take effect 10 days after the minutes are filed. If not, ASE has 10 days to verify compliance and the redundancies take effect 20 days after its decision. In all cases they become effective within a maximum of 60 days from the filing.

Non-compete clauses

Post-termination non-competes are not regulated by statute and are enforced, or struck down, by the courts on a legitimate-interest test. The practical parameters: duration normally 12 months and exceptionally up to 24; a geographic scope that is genuinely necessary, often Greece as a whole; a clearly specified activity rather than a blanket ban on working in the sector; and financial compensation, which recent Supreme Court decisions treat inconsistently but which remains the safer drafting choice. Non-solicitation covenants of six to twelve months limited to direct professional contacts are generally upheld without compensation. During employment, a blanket ban on parallel employment is prohibited unless objectively justified — health and safety, confidentiality, conflict of interest or work for a competitor.

Who enforces Greek labour law, and how much do unions still matter?

Enforcement sits with the Labour Inspectorate, now constituted as an independent authority (Anexartiti Archi Epitheorisis Ergasias, still widely called SEPE), operating a complaints line on 1555 and drawing its evidence directly from ERGANI II and the digital work card feed. Article 123 of Law 4808/2021 gives inspectors a bound competence to impose certain administrative penalties on the spot, without a prior hearing of the employer, for defined documentary and posting violations. Law 5239/2025 went further in the other direction, abolishing the obligation to keep paper documents at the workplace — because the file is now the database.

Trade unions are governed by Law 1264/1982 as amended by Law 4808/2021. A first-level union needs at least 20 founding members with two or more months’ employment and must be entered in GEMISOE, the general register of trade union organisations, which has run inside the ERGANI system since 1 February 2022. Confederation is through GSEE in the private sector and ADEDY in the public sector.

Strike procedure has been tightened to the point where procedure, not appetite, often decides legality:

• Notice: written notification to the affected employer at least 24 hours before the action, served by court bailiff, stating date, start time, duration, form, demands and reasons (Article 91 of Law 4808/2021, amending Article 19(1) of Law 1264/1982).
• Safety and minimum service: the union must designate safety personnel, and in public-interest undertakings also minimum guaranteed service personnel sufficient for at least one third of the normally provided service. If that personnel has not been determined in advance, or is not actually placed at the employer’s disposal, the strike is unlawful (Article 95).
• Protection of non-strikers: obstructing a colleague’s access to work, threats, violence or workplace occupation carry imprisonment of at least six months plus fines (Article 93).
• Mediation: unions declaring a strike must engage the public dialogue procedure before OMED, the mediation and arbitration body (Article 94).

Two further 2026 developments belong on any employer’s radar. Law 5316/2026 transposed the EU Pay Transparency Directive: salary ranges must be disclosed to applicants before interview, questions about pay history are prohibited, and pay-secrecy clauses become unenforceable from 1 November 2026, with gender pay gap reporting starting 7 June 2027 for employers of 250 or more. And for remote workers, the statutory monthly cost reimbursement remains €13 for use of the home as a workplace, €10 for telecommunications and €5 for equipment maintenance, reduced proportionally below 22 remote days a month.

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