Greece in 2026 is a straightforward country to hire in and an unforgiving one to hire in late. ERGANI II, built on Law 5239/2025 (“Fair Work for All”), has had full administrative force since 16 February 2026 — one hiring declaration instead of four forms, and the E4 annual staff list abolished outright. The declaration has to be filed before the employee’s first hour, not after it, and a single unregistered worker costs €10,500. The digital work card reached 11 further sectors in two 2026 phases, binding from 12 October and 16 November 2026, taking coverage to roughly 2.5 million employees. Employer e-EFKA contributions run at 21.79% of gross up to a monthly ceiling of €7,761.94, employees pay 13.37%, and both apply to 14 payments a year rather than 12 — which puts the real on-cost about 42% above a naive twelve-month gross. The statutory minimum is €920 a month from 1 April 2026, and from 1 November 2026 Law 5316/2026 layers pay-transparency duties on top of all of it.
What does it actually cost to employ someone in Greece in 2026?
Employer e-EFKA contributions are 21.79% of gross pay, capped at monthly earnings of €7,761.94, plus a €20 per-employee annual contribution to the children’s camps account. The trap is the denominator: Greek salaried employment pays 14 times a year — twelve monthly salaries, a full month at Christmas, half a month at Easter and half a month as a holiday allowance — and contributions apply to all of it. On a €2,500 monthly salary the annual employer cost is about €42,647, roughly 42% more than the €30,000 a twelve-month budget would show.
What must be filed before the employee’s first day?
The ERGANI II hiring declaration and the written statement of employment terms, both before work starts. Since 16 February 2026 that is one declaration rather than the old chain of forms, but the timing rule did not soften — it tightened, because the digital work card now timestamps the first punch and the system compares it against the declaration. If the sector is inside the card’s scope, the card must be live on day one too. The fine for an unregistered worker is €10,500.
Do you need a Greek company to hire in Greece?
No. Four routes work: an IKE or EPE subsidiary, a registered branch of the foreign company, an employer of record, or direct registration of a non-resident employer with e-EFKA and AADE for social security and payroll purposes only. The subsidiary is the default for anything with growth plans because the e-YMS one-stop shop issues the GEMI number, the company AFM, the e-EFKA registration and chamber membership in a single pass. Direct non-resident registration is cheapest on paper and the most fragile in practice, because you still need Greek-resident capacity to answer an inspection.
Greece has spent four years turning employment compliance into a data problem. ERGANI II receives hiring, change and termination declarations; the digital work card streams actual punch-in and punch-out times into the same system; the APD reconciles declared earnings against contributions; and the Independent Authority for Labour Inspection runs its cases off the mismatches. For a foreign employer that is good news and bad news in equal measure. The good news is that almost every obligation is now a defined electronic filing with a defined deadline. The bad news is that the authority no longer needs to visit your premises to find out that your declared schedule and your actual schedule disagree.
This article is written for the employer. It covers the structures available for employing in Greece, incorporation through the one-stop shop, registering as an employer with e-EFKA, the ERGANI II filings, the digital work card timetable for 2026, the monthly APD and AADE calendar, the 14-salary budget, occupational health thresholds, the extra duties attaching to third-country nationals, posted workers and agency labour, and what an inspection actually examines. Figures are the 2026 values; where a 2026 figure has not been published, the text says so rather than guessing.
One framing point before the detail. Almost nothing in Greek employment compliance is discretionary any more. Where a rule used to be enforced by inspection and judgement, it is now enforced by reconciliation between three systems that talk to each other. That makes Greece cheaper to get right and more expensive to get wrong than its reputation suggests.
Which structure should you use to employ someone in Greece?
There are four viable answers, and the right one depends less on headcount than on whether you intend to have a Greek-resident person who can answer a letter.
The IKE subsidiary. The Idiotiki Kefalaiouchiki Etaireia (private company) is the default vehicle for new foreign-owned entities. It was designed to be capitalised at a nominal amount, it can have a single member, and it incorporates through the e-YMS electronic one-stop shop. The EPE (Etaireia Periorismenis Efthynis, the older limited liability company) still exists and still incorporates through the same channel, but it carries more formality for no obvious benefit. The AE (Anonymi Etaireia, the joint stock company) brings a board, a statutory paid-up minimum capital in the tens of thousands of euros and audit exposure — take the current capital figure from GEMI rather than from any guide, because it moves. Corporate income tax is 22% for all of them.
The branch. A foreign company can register a Greek branch in GEMI, obtain an AFM and register as an employer. It avoids a separate legal person but exposes the parent, and it does not reduce a single payroll obligation. Note also that Greek domestic law is more aggressive than the OECD model on permanent establishment: a construction site in Greece creates a PE after three months, not twelve. Employers in engineering, installation and renewables routinely trip over this while thinking they are merely posting workers.
Employer of record. An EOR already holds the e-EFKA employer number, the ERGANI credentials and the digital card infrastructure. For one to three employees, or for a market test, it is the rational choice. It is not a liability shield for the things that actually bite — working time, the card, and whether the person is genuinely an employee of the EOR or effectively yours.
Direct registration of a non-resident employer. A company with no Greek establishment can register with e-EFKA as an employer and with AADE for withholding, and run Greek payroll for a Greek-resident employee. This is legally available and operationally unpleasant. Someone has to hold the e-EFKA certification credentials, submit the APD on time, respond to the Inspectorate within its deadlines, and keep the card data clean. Doing that from another time zone with no local payroll agent is how foreign employers accumulate fines they never saw coming.
How do you incorporate and register as an employer in 2026?
The e-YMS (Ypiresia Mias Stasis, the one-stop shop) run through businessportal.gr covers the AE, OE, EE, EPE and IKE forms. You log in with AADE taxisnet credentials, reserve the company name, complete the articles of association electronically, collect the members’ acceptances, and the system then executes the rest automatically: registration in GEMI, issue of the company AFM, registration with e-EFKA and enrolment in the relevant chamber of commerce. GEMI advertises it as the fastest incorporation system in the EU, and for a standard-articles IKE with Greek-resident members that is credible — same-day is normal. The fee schedule is set by joint ministerial decision 38164/2025 (Government Gazette B’ 2639, 29 May 2025) and the portal’s own calculator prices it by legal form, number of members and capital; use the calculator rather than a published rule of thumb, because the single-incorporation-cost certificate is discounted for electronic filing.
Two things slow this down for foreign shareholders. First, every member and manager needs a Greek AFM before the articles can be completed, and a non-resident AFM is a separate application. Second, if the articles depart from the standard template — and non-standard shareholding, contributions in kind or foreign corporate members usually force that — you leave the fully automated path and enter the slower notarial route. Budget weeks, not hours, for anything other than a plain-vanilla IKE.
Getting the company AFM and the e-EFKA employer number
The company AFM is issued by the one-stop shop on incorporation; a branch or a non-resident employer applies to its competent AADE office. The e-EFKA employer registration (apografi) is the step that actually unlocks hiring, because it produces the employer registration number that every APD and every ERGANI filing references. Through e-YMS the registration is created automatically for a new company, but it is created as a shell — you still have to certify as an employer through the e-EFKA electronic services (pistopoiisi ergodoton) and authorise the external users, typically your accountant or payroll bureau, who will file on your behalf. Do this before you have a start date, not after. Certification is the single most common cause of a first-month filing being late, and lateness is assessed against the filing deadline, not against when your credentials arrived.
What must you file in ERGANI, and what changed in February 2026?
ERGANI is the Ministry of Labour’s employment information system; ERGANI II is the rebuilt version that embeds Law 5239/2025. It went into trial operation on 16 December 2025 and acquired full administrative force on 16 February 2026. The consolidation is genuine and it is worth understanding precisely, because most English-language guidance still describes the old form set.
- Hiring. One digital declaration replaces the old E3 recruitment announcement and the forms that travelled with it — four filings become one. It must be submitted before the employee starts work. There is no grace period.
- The annual staff list. The E4 Etisios Pinakas Prosopikou, the annual staff list that every employer used to file in the October window, is abolished. So is the separate E9 declaration of part-time and rotational contracts. The data now flows from the hiring declaration and the card.
- Termination. The old E5 (resignation), E6 (dismissal) and E7 (expiry of fixed term) are replaced by a single digital termination declaration, filed within four days of the event.
- Changes in terms. Any change to pay, hours or working pattern is declared through ERGANI II; the system also gained a dedicated “change of employee AFM” procedure in late September 2026, which matters for foreign hires whose provisional tax number is later replaced.
What has not changed is the sanction. Employing a worker who does not appear in the system is undeclared work, and the Labour Inspectorate fines it at €10,500 per worker. That is per head, not per inspection, and it is imposed on the spot by the inspector’s finding rather than after a hearing. A reduction mechanism exists where the employer subsequently hires the worker on a full-time contract for a minimum period, but the reduction tiers are set in the implementing framework rather than the statute — get the current schedule before you decide whether to appeal or to hire.
Who needs the digital work card in 2026, and what does it cost to get wrong?
The psifiaki karta ergasias (digital work card) was introduced by Law 4808/2021 and went live on 1 July 2022 in banks and supermarkets with 250 or more employees. It is not a timesheet. It is a real-time feed: the employee marks the start and end of the working day, ERGANI II receives the event as it happens, and the system itself classifies each hour as ordinary time, overtime or flexible-arrangement time, alongside breaks, rest days and leave. The declared schedule becomes a prediction that the card either confirms or contradicts.
Circular 25291 of 23 September 2026 extended the card to eleven further economic sectors in two phases, covering roughly 500,000 additional employees and bringing total coverage to about 2.5 million.
| Phase | Pilot period | Binding from | Sectors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Phase 1 | 2 June – 11 October 2026 | 12 October 2026 | Human health activities (hospitals, therapeutic and diagnostic centres, excluding doctors); employment support activities; telecommunications; hairdressing, beauty centres and dry cleaning; building and outdoor-space services, principally cleaning |
| Phase 2 | 29 June – 15 November 2026 | 16 November 2026 | Consulting services, advertising and office activities; repairs; warehousing and logistics support; water and wastewater management; gambling activities |
Earlier waves are already binding: circular 3496 of 10 February 2025 brought in tourism and catering, and circular 26606 of 13 October 2025 covered utilities, retail trade, financial services and administrative support. The direction of travel is explicit in the Ministry’s own material — the card will extend to all undertakings regardless of size or sector. Treat your sector’s absence from the list as a timing question, not an exemption.
The Ministry’s case for the card is a number worth sitting with: in some sectors, declared overtime rose by as much as 1,200% after the card became binding. That is not a measure of how much more overtime people worked. It is a measure of how much was previously not declared — and therefore of how much contribution and tax was not paid on it. If your Greek operation has been running on informally declared schedules, the card will not reveal a small discrepancy.
On the penalty, be precise about what is published and what is not. The extension circular does not restate a euro amount; the per-worker fine for card breaches sits in the Labour Inspectorate’s categorisation-of-violations decision rather than in the statute or the circular, and the Ministry has not republished a consolidated 2026 figure alongside the new phases. The published comparator is the undeclared-work fine of €10,500 per worker, and in practice a persistent failure to operate the card where it is mandatory is treated as concealment of working time rather than as a paperwork slip. Budget on that basis and confirm the current band in the schedule before any appeal.
The operational problems are narrower and more practical than the headline: horizontal exemptions keyed to activity codes, marking when the employee works away from the employer’s premises or inside a third party’s building, discrepancies between card events and the declared schedule, early arrival and preparation time, missed punches and single-punch days, and the treatment of remote workers, executives and staff with no fixed workplace. Each of those is a real decision your Greek payroll provider has to make, document and defend.
What does the monthly compliance calendar look like?
Three authorities, three rhythms. Get the rhythm wrong and the sanctions stack independently.
e-EFKA: the APD and the contribution payment
The APD (Analytiki Periodiki Dilosi, the analytical periodic statement) is the monthly return that reports each insured person’s days, earnings and contribution branches. It is submitted electronically through e-EFKA, and the exact submission window for each month is fixed annually by an e-EFKA general document — the one governing 2026 was issued on 4 December 2025. Contributions themselves are payable by the end of the month following the month of employment. Two points matter for a foreign employer. First, the APD is what reconciles against the card and the ERGANI declaration; an APD that reports 160 hours against card data showing 190 is an invitation. Second, late payment does not merely attract a surcharge — it suspends your insurance clearance certificate (asfalistiki enimerotita), which you need to collect from public bodies, to tender, and in many cases to be paid by Greek corporate customers at all.
There is also a small annual item that surprises people: an employer contribution of €20 per employee to the special account for children’s camps, notified by e-EFKA in September 2026. It is trivial in isolation and a nuisance if nobody owns it.
AADE: withholding on employment income
Payroll withholding is calculated on the annual tax liability and deducted at one fourteenth per month — the fraction is fourteenths precisely because the year has fourteen payments. The Christmas allowance is withheld at the full monthly rate; the Easter and holiday allowances at half. Overtime and certain other payments are withheld at 20%. The withholding return (FMY) and the payment are due by the end of the second month following the month in which the salary was paid, filed through the AADE electronic system. Annual employee earnings certificates follow in the first quarter of the next year, with 31 March the practical outside date; AADE fixes the precise deadline by annual decision, so confirm it each January rather than carrying last year’s date forward.
The 2026 employment income scale, as amended by Law 5246/2025, is the one your gross-to-net modelling must use:
| Annual employment income (€) | Rate |
|---|---|
| 0 – 10,000 | 9% |
| 10,001 – 20,000 | 20% |
| 20,001 – 30,000 | 26% |
| 30,001 – 40,000 | 34% |
| 40,001 – 60,000 | 39% |
| Above 60,000 | 44% |
Law 5246/2025 also introduced lower scales keyed to the number of children and to age for individuals under 30. That is an employee-side benefit, but it is an employer-side problem: your payroll engine has to hold the dependants and date-of-birth data to withhold correctly, and withholding too much is a complaint your Greek employee will make to you rather than to AADE. The detail of how that lands on individual net pay is covered in the Greek payroll, tax and social security guide.
What does an employee really cost on top of gross pay?
Employer e-EFKA contributions are 21.79% of gross pay; employees pay 13.37%, for a combined 35.16%. These rates have applied since 1 January 2025 and continue through 2026. The monthly earnings ceiling for the main fund is €7,761.94 from 1 January 2026, which caps the employer contribution at about €1,691 a month per head.
| Employer contribution branch | Rate |
|---|---|
| Main pension | 13.33% |
| Supplementary pension | 3.00% |
| Healthcare | 4.05% |
| Unemployment (DYPA) | 1.20% |
| Insolvency protection | 0.15% |
| Social policy | 0.06% |
| Total employer | 21.79% |
Now the fourteen payments. Greek salaried employment carries three statutory allowances on top of twelve monthly salaries: a Christmas allowance of a full month, payable in cash by 21 December; an Easter allowance of half a month, payable before Easter; and a holiday allowance of half a month, payable when annual leave is taken and capped at half a month. All three are pro-rated by days worked in the relevant reference period for anyone who joined or left mid-period, and all three carry full contributions and withholding.
| Worked example | At the minimum wage | At €2,500 a month |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly gross | €920.00 | €2,500.00 |
| Annual gross over 14 payments | €12,880.00 | €35,000.00 |
| Employer e-EFKA at 21.79% | €2,806.55 | €7,626.50 |
| Children’s camps contribution | €20.00 | €20.00 |
| Total annual employer cost | €15,706.55 | €42,646.50 |
| A naive 12 × monthly budget | €11,040.00 | €30,000.00 |
| Understatement | 42.3% | 42.2% |
The statutory minimum itself is €920 a month for salaried employees and €41.09 a day for workers and technicians, effective 1 April 2026 under ministerial decision 8934 of 27 March 2026 (Government Gazette B’ 1759). The rate is now set through the process in Presidential Decree 62/2025, with input from KEPE and a scientific committee; the 2026 consultation closed on 2 March 2026. Expect the same rhythm each spring, and write April reviews into your budget calendar rather than treating the increase as news. For a fuller build-up of relocation, housing and employment-cost assumptions, see the Greek relocation and total cost of employment breakdown.
Occupational health: the thresholds that catch small employers
Under Law 3850/2010 (Government Gazette A’ 84), the codified occupational health and safety law, the thresholds are not where foreign employers assume they are.
- A safety technician (technikos asfaleias) is required by every employer with even one employee. There is no de minimis. In lower-risk category C undertakings with fewer than 50 employees the employer may perform the role personally after training; in category B the self-service option narrows sharply, to around six employees with technical qualifications and at least 35 hours of training, or three with trade credentials.
- An occupational physician (iatros ergasias) is required from 50 employees, and at any headcount where work involves lead, asbestos, biological agents or carcinogens.
- Minimum annual service hours scale with headcount: at least 25 hours up to 20 employees, 50 hours between 20 and 50, and 75 hours above 50, distributed monthly in agreement with the health and safety committee.
A four-person Greek sales office therefore needs a safety technician engagement, a written risk assessment and a logbook. This is the most frequently missed obligation in small foreign-owned entities, and it is one of the first things an inspector asks to see.
What extra duties attach to foreign nationals, posted workers and agency labour?
Third-country nationals
The framework is Law 5038/2023 (Government Gazette A’ 81), the migration code, as amended by Law 5275/2026 (Government Gazette A’ 17). Three employer duties sit on top of the ordinary hiring process.
Check that the permit allows that work. The employer must verify documentation before the employee starts: a residence permit granting access to employment, an entry visa with work authorisation, the blue certificate (vevaiosi ypovolis) confirming a pending residence permit application, or international protection status documentation. “Has a residence permit” is not the test. The test is whether the permit allows dependent employment in your sector, in your region, for you.
The labour-market-needs procedure. Under article 26 of Law 5038/2023 the government issues an annual Presidential Decree setting maximum numbers of positions — by region and specialisation — for dependent employment, seasonal work and high-specialisation employment. An employer recruiting from abroad must have an available position inside those caps. The application goes through the Ministry of Migration and Asylum’s electronic services with the worker’s details, specialisation, sector and duration, a signed contract of at least six months, documentary proof that you can pay the wages, pay at least the unskilled-worker minimum, and a fee of €200 per worker. The statutory processing deadline for the residence permit decision is 40 days.
The penalties are stratified, and the middle band is the surprise. Employing a legally resident foreign national in breach of the conditions attaching to their status draws €1,500 per person. An undeclared worker draws €10,500. Employing a person with no right to reside draws €5,000 per person, doubled on repetition, and carries exclusion from public benefits and subsidies and potential revocation of the business licence. The €1,500 band is where compliant-feeling employers land: the paperwork existed, it simply did not permit that job. The permit routes themselves are set out in the Greece work visa guide.
Posted workers and the A1
An undertaking established in another EU or EEA state that posts workers to Greece in the framework of providing services must guarantee Greek minimum conditions — maximum working time and minimum rest, minimum paid annual leave, the statutory minimum wage, health and safety, and Sunday and holiday premiums. This applies to direct client contracts, intra-group postings and temporary agency postings alike. Procedurally, the posting undertaking files a declaration with the Labour Inspectorate before the posting begins and designates a contact person in Greece who can produce the employment documents on request, under the Greek transposition of the Enforcement Directive.
Separately, and this is the part employers conflate, the posted worker remains in the home social security system only if an A1 certificate has been issued by the home institution under Regulation (EC) 883/2004. The A1 is not a formality the inspector waives. Without it the presumption is Greek insurance from day one, which means a retrospective e-EFKA liability on the whole posting plus the undeclared-work exposure. Obtain the A1 before travel, not after a visit. And remember the three-month construction-site PE rule — a long posting can create a Greek taxable presence while you are still thinking of it as a posting.
Temporary agency work
Supplying labour in Greece is a licensed activity. A temporary employment agency (Etaireia Prosorinis Apascholisis, EPA) needs a licence from the Ministry of Labour and must satisfy capital and guarantee conditions; using an unlicensed supplier is the user undertaking’s problem as well as the supplier’s, because the user is exposed on wages and contributions. Where the agency worker is a third-country national, the indirect employer must itself document financial capacity as part of the recruitment file — the obligation does not sit entirely with the agency. Assignments are also duration-limited, and an assignment that runs past the statutory ceiling converts into an open-ended employment relationship with the user undertaking. If you are using agency labour as a soft landing before incorporating, put a diary note at the ceiling date; the conversion happens by operation of law, not by anyone’s decision. The contractual consequences on the employment side are covered in the Greek employment contracts and labour law guide.
Who polices all this, and what do they examine in 2026?
Equal pay and the pay transparency regime from 1 November 2026
Greece became the fifth EU member state to complete transposition of the Pay Transparency Directive (EU) 2023/970, whose own deadline was 7 June 2026. The Greek instrument is Law 5316/2026, adopted on 6 July 2026, with the main obligations taking effect on 1 November 2026. Two features make the Greek implementation more demanding than a minimum transposition.
- Pre-employment disclosure and a salary-history ban. Candidates must be told the initial salary or salary range for the role before the hiring decision is finalised, and employers are prohibited from asking applicants for their pay history. That changes your Greek job adverts, your recruiter briefs and your interview scripts, not just your HR policy folder.
- The Ombudsperson as enforcer. The law designates the Greek Ombudsperson as the equality and monitoring body. That matters more than it sounds: it puts enforcement with an institution that publishes, rather than solely with the inspectorate that fines.
Under the directive, pay-gap reporting attaches to employers with at least 100 employees, with reporting frequency scaling by size, and a joint pay assessment is triggered where reporting indicates an unexplained gap. Workers also gain a right to information on average pay levels for comparable work. For a foreign employer with a small Greek entity inside a large group, the practical question to settle now is whether the group’s gender pay reporting counts the Greek entity separately or as part of a larger organisation, because gender-neutral job architecture and defensible pay structures take longer to build than a reporting template.
What a labour inspection actually examines, and where foreign employers fail
Labour inspection in Greece is run by the Independent Authority for Labour Inspection, an independent authority rather than a ministry department. Its published remit covers employment relationships and working conditions, compliance with collective agreements, the statutory minimum wage, violence and harassment at work, occupational health and safety, and — seasonally and specifically — payment of the Easter allowance. That last one is instructive about how the authority works: it runs targeted campaigns, publishes the results, and intervenes before fining. In one recent Easter campaign it pursued complaints covering 1,012 workers across 224 companies, and 91 of those companies complied after the authority’s intervention rather than after a penalty.
A typical inspection looks for the documents in this order: the ERGANI II hiring declarations against the people physically present; the written statement of employment terms; the digital work card data against the declared schedule; the APD against both; the payroll records for the Christmas, Easter and holiday allowances; the safety technician engagement, the risk assessment and the occupational physician file; the violence and harassment policy and complaints procedure; and, where foreign nationals are employed, the permits and the A1 certificates.
On the fine ladder, be clear about what is public. Specific amounts are published for the headline offences: €10,500 per undeclared worker, €5,000 per person with no right to reside (doubled on repetition), €1,500 per legally resident foreign national employed outside the conditions of their status. The general labour-law fine schedule runs off a categorisation-of-violations decision that bands offences by severity and sets amounts per band, with escalation for repetition and, at the top end, suspension of operations — the authority has not published a consolidated 2026 table alongside the new digital card phases, so take the current band from the schedule rather than from a secondary source.
The single most common compliance failure foreign employers make in Greece is timing the ERGANI declaration wrong. Not omitting it — timing it. Head office treats employee registration as a post-hire administrative task, filed within a few days like a tax registration in most jurisdictions. Greece requires it before the first hour of work, and since February 2026 the hiring declaration sits in the same system as the digital work card, which timestamps the first punch. A declaration filed at 10am for someone who badged in at 08:30 is not a near miss; it is a dated, machine-generated record of an unregistered worker, and the fine is €10,500. Everything else on this page can be remediated with a late filing and a surcharge. That one cannot.
The second most common failure is financial rather than procedural: the twelve-month budget. It does not generate a fine. It generates a December conversation with the group CFO about a 42% variance that was predictable in January.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it realistically take to incorporate and be ready to run Greek payroll?
For a plain IKE with standard articles and members who already hold Greek tax numbers, the e-YMS one-stop shop can complete incorporation the same day, issuing the GEMI registration, the company AFM, the e-EFKA registration and chamber membership together. The realistic path for a foreign group is longer. Obtaining non-resident AFMs for members and managers, departing from the standard articles, or using a foreign corporate member pushes you off the automated route. Then add e-EFKA employer certification and the authorisation of your payroll provider as an external user. Plan on four to six weeks from decision to first compliant payday, and do not set a start date before certification is confirmed.
Does the digital work card apply to remote workers and senior executives?
These are exactly the categories the Ministry’s guidance treats separately, and the answer is sector-specific rather than universal. The implementing circulars address horizontal exemptions keyed to activity codes, marking when the employee is away from the employer’s premises or inside a third party’s building, and the treatment of remote work, executive staff and employees with no fixed workplace. In practice that means a documented, per-category determination recorded in your ERGANI setup, not a blanket decision that teleworkers are out of scope. Where a sector is in scope and no exemption applies, the card is required and the marking method has to work off premises.
What happens if we pay the Christmas or Easter allowance late, or in vouchers?
Both allowances must be paid in cash and on time — the Christmas allowance by 21 December, the Easter allowance before Easter. Paying in kind, in vouchers or in shares does not discharge the obligation. Non-payment is a labour-law violation that the Independent Authority for Labour Inspection pursues through dedicated seasonal campaigns, and the authority’s practice is to intervene first and fine the employers who do not then comply. It is also a debt the employee can enforce, with interest, long after the season has passed. Treat both as payroll runs with hard dates rather than as discretionary bonuses.
Is a Greek branch taxed differently from a Greek subsidiary?
Not on the headline rate. Greek corporate income tax is 22% for legal entities generally, and a branch is taxed on its Greek-source business profits at the standard rates rather than at a special branch rate. The meaningful differences are elsewhere: a branch does not create a separate legal person, so the parent is exposed; profit attribution between branch and head office is an audit area; and the permanent establishment threshold under Greek domestic law is tighter than the OECD model, with a construction site creating a PE after three months rather than twelve. On the employment side the two are identical — both need an e-EFKA employer number, ERGANI filings, the digital work card where applicable and the APD.
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