Relocating to Greece: AFM, AMKA, Housing & What Athens Really Costs (2026)

Greece is one of the easier European countries to want to move to and one of the less forgiving to arrive in unprepared. The obstacles are not hostile; they are sequential. A dozen institutions each need a number that a different institution issues first, and if you take them out of order you will spend your first six weeks in queues discovering that fact one office at a time.

This article is about that sequence and about what the first twelve months actually cost — in rent, in bills, in school fees, in insurance, and in the employer’s payroll line. The figures are the 2026 ones, with their dates attached, because Greek rents and Greek tax scales have both moved materially in the last two years and 2024 numbers will mislead you.

It is written for two readers at once: the professional who wants to know what will be left after the Greek state has taken its share, and the employer who has to reconcile an offer letter denominated in monthly gross with a budget line denominated in annual total cost.

Why does nothing in Greece start until you have an AFM?

The AFM — Arithmos Forologikou Mitroou, the tax registration number — is issued by AADE, the Independent Authority for Public Revenue. It is a nine-digit number and it functions as the backbone identifier of Greek administrative life. The landlord needs it to register the lease. The electricity supplier needs it to open an account. The bank needs it before it will consider you. Your employer needs it to put you on payroll. AADE needs it to accept the annual income tax return, which under Greek rules is filed only electronically, between 15 March and 15 July, for a tax year that is always the calendar year.

Two things about the AFM are worth knowing before you plan your arrival. First, it is not reserved for residents: AADE operates a dedicated registration channel for Greeks abroad and non-residents, covering issuance of the tax number and the accompanying authentication key, together with the appointment of a tax representative in Greece. Second, the number itself does not make you a Greek tax resident. Residence is decided on physical presence in Greece over a twelve-month period and on the centre of your personal and economic interests — permanent home, habitual abode, where your life is actually run from. Holding an AFM while living in Frankfurt does not move your tax residence, and tax treaties can override the domestic test in either direction.

Alongside the AFM you need the klidarithmos, the authentication key that turns the number into working credentials for TaxisNet and myAADE. That pair is what gets you into gov.gr, the single government services portal, which is where the rest of your administrative life then happens: certificates, declarations, appointments, the lot. Expect the gov.gr account to become the single most-used login of your first year in the country.

What are the AMKA and the PAAYPA, and which one will you actually get?

The AMKA — Arithmos Mitroou Koinonikis Asfalisis, the social security registry number — is the identifier for everything insurance- and health-related. It is what links you to EFKA for contributions, to EOPYY for healthcare entitlement, and to a named family doctor in the public system. The official citizen portal for it is amka.gr, which also serves the lookup for the second number most arrivals have never heard of.

That second number is the PAAYPA, the provisional social security and healthcare number for foreign nationals. It exists precisely because the AMKA presumes a settled legal status that many newly arrived third-country nationals do not yet have. The PAAYPA bridges the gap: it allows contributions and healthcare access to be recorded for someone whose residence file is still open, and it converts to a full AMKA once the underlying status is confirmed. If your HR team tells you that you cannot be insured until your residence permit is printed, the PAAYPA is the answer they have not thought of.

Registration with e-EFKA, the electronic national social security organisation, is an employer obligation rather than a personal errand. The employer notifies the employment relationship, submits the APD — the periodic declaration of insurance contributions — and the contributions are withheld and remitted monthly. What is left to you is choosing a personal doctor within the public system and registering your dependants, both of which run through the AMKA.

Which permit you hold before any of this is a separate question, and it is the subject of our companion piece on the Greek work visa and residence permit routes. In outline, third-country nationals arrive on one of a defined list of categories: dependent employment, the EU Blue Card for highly qualified posts, intra-corporate transfer, investment-activity permits, and since 1 January 2025 a start-up investor permit requiring a minimum investment of €250,000 in a company listed on the National Startup Registry. EU and EEA nationals need no permit at all and simply register their residence. The UK government, for its part, tells its own nationals moving to Greece to register their address in person with their regional Hellenic Police branch within 90 days of arrival and to apply for a temporary residence permit — a useful marker of how quickly the clock starts for non-EU arrivals generally.

Can you open a Greek bank account before the paperwork is finished?

You can, but not easily, and the document list is longer than the websites suggest. Greek banks apply anti-money-laundering onboarding seriously, and the branch will typically want all of the following in a single sitting: passport or national ID, the AFM, proof of a Greek address, evidence of income or employment, and a contact mobile number on a Greek network. Some branches will also ask for the AMKA, though it is not universally required.

The proof-of-address requirement is where the chain tightens. A utility bill in your name needs a lease; a lease needs a landlord willing to register it with AADE under your AFM; and a landlord will usually want to see an employment contract first. There are three practical ways through. The first is to arrive with the AFM already issued, which removes the hardest dependency. The second is to use the employer’s HR letter and the signed lease rather than waiting for a utility bill to arrive. The third, for employees of a Greek entity, is to let the employer open a payroll account on your behalf — most Greek banks have a corporate channel for exactly this, and it is far faster than the retail queue.

Open the account before you need it rather than when you need it. Salary payment, rent, EFKA-linked benefits, utility direct debits and your tax refunds all route through a Greek IBAN, and so does the electronic-payment obligation that Greek tax law imposes on individuals: taxpayers must incur expenses by electronic means equal to 30% of actual income, capped at €20,000 a year, or face a surcharge on the shortfall. A Greek card used for everyday spending is not a convenience in Greece. It is a tax compliance instrument.

What does renting in Athens and Thessaloniki really cost in 2026?

The Greek rental market after 2021 is a different market. Asking rents and asking prices have both risen for several consecutive years, and in the first quarter of 2026 average Athens apartment asking prices were 7.9% higher than a year earlier, with the Bank of Greece house price index up 5.63% nominally and 1.66% in real terms over the same period. Rents followed, and the geography of the increase matters more than the headline.

Read the centre’s +6.9% against the south’s +3.2% and you have the story of the last two years in one line: the expensive suburbs were already expensive, while the central districts — the ones a relocating professional without a car actually wants — are where the squeeze is being felt. Piraeus going slightly negative is the exception that proves the point, since it sits outside the short-let core.

What that translates to in monthly rent

Per-square-metre asking rents are useful for comparing districts and useless for budgeting. The Q2 2026 district-level figures are blunter. In Athens, a one-bedroom runs about €550 in Patision–Acharnon and €560 in Kipseli, against €1,100 in Kolonaki–Lykavittos; a two-bedroom is €690–740 in the first two and €1,750 in Kolonaki; a three-bedroom is €880 in Patision–Acharnon and €2,750 in Kolonaki. Thessaloniki is a materially cheaper market: €550 for a one-bedroom and €720 for a two-bedroom in the centre, €1,000 for a three-bedroom, and €550–650 in the Analipsi, Botsari and Nea Paralia belt.

The yield spread confirms it. Gross rental yields averaged 5.52% in Athens in May 2026 against 4.19% in Thessaloniki — Athens was the highest-yielding of the markets surveyed. High gross yields in a residential market are not good news for tenants; they are the signature of rents rising faster than capital values, which is exactly what a supply shortage looks like.

The short-let squeeze and what the state is doing about it

Short-term letting is the acknowledged driver. Greece has progressively restricted new short-term rental registrations, and at the end of 2025 the government announced a package of six housing measures that extended the ban on new registrations to central Thessaloniki. On the supply side it has gone the other way with incentives, offering tax relief to private developers who build new buildings or convert older ones and then let them on long leases of at least ten years. In June 2026 the Ministry published a National Strategy for Housing Policy covering 2026 to 2035, which proposes among other things a Golden Visa category for investors buying multiple properties on condition the homes are offered exclusively for long-term rental.

Two legal points matter more to a tenant than any of that. Greek law imposes a minimum residential lease term of three years regardless of what the contract says — a twelve-month lease is, in substance, a three-year lease the tenant can rely on and cannot casually walk away from. And where a lease shorter than three years contains no adjustment clause, the rent is automatically adjusted each year by 75% of the change in the consumer price index. Deposits are typically one or two months’ rent. Agency fees are not regulated at all; the Athens market norm is a fee of around one month’s rent plus VAT at 24%, charged to the tenant, and it is negotiable in a way most arrivals never test.

What does a month actually cost — for a single professional and for a family?

Rent is the variable that swamps everything else, so the honest way to build a Greek budget is to range the rent and fix the rest. The non-rent figures below are user-reported Athens data from 2,177 entries by 269 contributors over the preceding twelve months, last updated 2 October 2026; the transport pass is the official OASA tariff.

The energy question, answered properly

Greek expatriates talk about electricity more than any other bill, and the reason is not the unit price. Greek households paid roughly €0.240 per kWh all-in including taxes and network charges, on data collected in June 2025, against an EU average of €0.2896 per kWh in the second half of 2025. Greece is, in absolute terms, below the EU average. The pain is relative: that unit price sits on top of Greek net wages, and it is consumed in a climate where air conditioning runs from May to September. The €187 monthly utilities figure for an 85 m² flat is an annual average; the July and August bills are not, and a budget built on the average will be wrong twice a year in the same direction.

Transport is the one genuinely cheap line

OASA’s urban-zone 30-day card is €27.00 at full fare and €13.50 reduced; 90 days is €78.00, 180 days €155.00 and 365 days €300.00. A 90-minute single ticket is €1.20. Adding the airport routes roughly doubles the pass — €45.00 for 30 days, €446.00 for a year — and the airport metro single is €9.00 one way or €16.00 return. For anyone living inside the metro and tram footprint, an annual pass at €300 is the single best-value line in a Greek budget and makes a company car a poor trade.

Which school, and what will it cost?

Greek public schooling is free, well regarded in parts, and taught in Greek. That last fact is the whole decision. A child arriving at six will absorb the language; a child arriving at fourteen into a Greek-language curriculum with national examinations ahead of them is being asked to do something very difficult, and reception-class support varies considerably by school and municipality. Families with older children almost always end up in the international or bilingual sector, and the cost of that decision is the largest single number in most Greek relocation budgets.

The headline tuition is not the cost. Byron College charges an admission test fee of €150 for Years 4 to 12, holds a €1,500 advance deposit to secure the following year’s place, and prices school transport at €1,200–2,600 a year by zone, with external examination fees, uniform, textbooks and trips all excluded from tuition. ACS Athens charges €1,400 for the two-year full IB Diploma, €1,576 for its EFL/ESL programme, €2,386 for standard learning support and €1,627 for Greek isotimia equivalency, and sets payment deadlines of 26 August 2026 and 8 January 2027 for the two semesters. Budget €8,600–16,400 in tuition per child and then add 10–20% for the compulsory extras; two children in upper secondary is a €30,000-plus line before anyone has paid rent.

What happens to your healthcare and your driving licence?

Healthcare runs through two layers. The first is ESY, the national health system, accessed via EOPYY, the national organisation for healthcare provision, and funded out of the EFKA contributions withheld from your pay. Entitlement is tied to insured status and, for third-country nationals, to holding a Greek residence permit — which is the practical reason the PAAYPA exists. The second layer is private: group medical cover supplied by the employer is close to standard practice in professional roles in Greece, typically an in-patient and diagnostic policy with a named clinic network, and it is what buys the appointment speed and the choice of consultant that ESY cannot always deliver. Individual premiums are not published centrally in Greece and depend on age, deductible and whether out-patient cover is included, so treat any single quoted figure with suspicion and get the policy schedule in writing before you accept an offer that leans on it.

Driving licences split three ways. An EU or EEA licence is recognised across the Union and you are not normally required to exchange it, though you may choose to, and an exchange subjects you to Greek rules on validity periods and medical checks from then on. For licences from a short list of countries with which Greece has a reciprocal arrangement, exchange is administrative; the UK is one such case, and the British government advises its nationals resident in Greece for six months or more to exchange a UK, Jersey, Guernsey, Isle of Man or Gibraltar licence for a Greek one. For everyone else there is no exchange: applying for a Greek licence means sitting both the theory and the practical driving test in Greece. Check which of the three you are in before you sell the car at home, because the third category costs months.

Learning Greek is the other long-horizon item. Greek is not optional in the way English-speaking arrivals hope. Administrative Greek — the vocabulary of the tax office, the lease, the utility bill — is a different register from conversational Greek, and the public university language centres and the Hellenic-language certification system are both inexpensive relative to private tuition. Employers that fund language training are buying compliance capability, not a cultural perk; an employee who can read their own EFKA statement generates fewer HR tickets.

What will the tax office assume about you?

Greece taxes what you appear to spend as well as what you declare. The system is known colloquially as the tekmarta: notional income is calculated from the taxpayer’s and dependants’ living expenses — property, vehicles, acquisitions of assets — and where that presumed income exceeds the income you actually reported, the difference is taxed. The mechanism is not aimed at expatriates, but expatriates trigger it more often than residents do, because the first Greek tax year is frequently a part-year with a small declared Greek income and a large visible set of new acquisitions.

On property specifically, ENFIA is the annual tax on real estate rights. Individuals’ main residences have attracted a reduction — 20% where the property value does not exceed €500,000 and 10% above it, conditional on having held insurance cover for at least three months in the prior year — and Law 5219/2025 has consolidated what was a scattered body of real estate tax law into a single Property Tax Code, also rewriting inheritance rules and their taxation. Rental income, if you end up letting a property out, is taxed on its own 2026 scale running from 15% on the first €12,000 to 45% above €36,000, entirely separately from the employment scale. The detail of how all of this interacts with payroll withholding is covered in our piece on how Greek payroll tax and social security actually work.

What does the Greek offer cost the employer, and why are there 14 salaries?

Greek private-sector pay is quoted monthly and paid over fourteen instalments: twelve monthly salaries, a Christmas bonus equal to one month, an Easter bonus of half a month and a holiday allowance of half a month. This single convention explains most of the confusion in cross-border offer negotiations. The statutory minimum wage shows it cleanly: €920 a month from 1 April 2026 becomes €1,073.33 on a twelve-month averaging basis, because 14 payments are being spread over 12 months — an uplift of 16.7% that an employer multiplying by twelve will have left out of the budget.

On top of that sits social security. Employee contributions are 13.37% and employer contributions 21.79%, a combined 35.16%, and from 1 January 2026 the monthly contribution cap for the primary EFKA fund is €7,761.94 — so contributions on the portion of a package above that monthly base stop accruing, which materially changes the economics of senior hires. Here is the full reconciliation for a €3,000-a-month role.

The general 2026 scale runs 9% on the first €10,000, 20% to €20,000, 26% to €30,000, 34% to €40,000, 39% to €60,000 and 44% above. That is the headline, and for many households it is not the applicable one: Law 5246/2025, in force from 1 January 2026, introduced lower scales varying with the number of dependent children and a separate, lower treatment for individuals under 30. The tables for those reduced scales were not published in the sources consulted here, so the €7,670.76 above should be read as the ceiling of the tax line for a single taxpayer with no children, before the personal tax credit and before any of the special regimes for new tax residents.

A typical Greek relocation package for a professional hire covers the visa and permit filings, temporary accommodation for four to eight weeks, the agency fee and deposit on the first lease, a shipping or settling-in allowance, group private medical cover, and — for families — a contribution to international school tuition that is very often capped below actual fees. The two items most frequently missing are Greek-language training and tax-return preparation for the first filing year, and both are cheap relative to the cost of getting them wrong. Employers should read this alongside Greek employment contracts and labour law, and anyone building the compliance checklist for a first Greek hire should start with employer compliance when hiring expats in Greece.

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