Greece golden visa process in 2026: the fifty days, the apostille, and three routes the market fuses

Of every English query about the Greek golden visa, the one that has grown fastest is not about thresholds or costs. It is about the process — and it has grown by more than two hundred times.

There is a real reason for that. On 6 February 2026 Greece enacted Law 5275/2026, published in Government Gazette A΄ 17, which rebuilt large parts of the country's admission framework and transposed EU Directive 2024/1233. People started searching because something changed.

What the market then published about that law is, in the part that matters most to anyone reading this page, wrong — though not in the way we first thought. The rest of this piece sets out the process the Greek state actually publishes, and then what the February law did and did not do, alongside the two other Greek routes that keep getting folded into it.

Greece golden visa process: what the state's own registry publishes

Greece maintains a National Registry of Administrative Public Services, which publishes each procedure with its responsible authority, its legal basis, its documents, its fee and its deadline. It is the most useful Greek source on this subject and almost nobody uses it.

For the investor permit under article 100 of Law 5038/2023, as amended by article 64 of Law 5100/2024, the registry records:

• Responsible authority: the Ministry of Migration and Asylum, Directorate for Residence Permits.
• Channel: online only, through the ministry's electronic applications portal. There is no paper route.
• Deadline of completion: 50 days.
• Fee: €2,016 — €2,000 for the permit and €16 for the electronic printout of it.

Two of those deserve emphasis. The fifty days is a published administrative deadline, and it is shorter than the two months article 100 §10 sets in the statute — the state commits itself, in its own procedure registry, to less than the law requires. Against either figure, 13,499 files were queued in November 2025, 10,703 of them in Attica.

And €2,016 is the entire state charge for deciding the application. For comparison, Malta charges €60,000 in administrative fees before its contribution.

The documents, and the two things that stop a file

The registry lists seven to nine documents depending on the route: the travel document with a valid entry visa or proof of exemption; a notarial certificate covering the property transfer and the method of payment; proof of registration at the Land Registry or a lawyer's certificate; on the change-of-use route an engineer's technical report; a copy of the applicant's E9 property declaration; a private insurance policy; and a recent colour photograph in hard copy and in digital JPEG2000 format.

Two conditions decide whether the file moves at all.

The investment must be complete before the application is filed. Article 100 §3 requires the price to be paid in full beforehand, and §5 restricts payment to a crossed cheque, credit transfer or card terminal through a payment provider operating in Greece. A spouse or a relative to the second degree may pay. Cash cannot. On the change-of-use route, §2(c) requires the conversion itself to be finished before filing.

A proxy needs an apostille. The application may be filed by a representative under a power of attorney executed before a Greek consular authority or a foreign notary and bearing the Hague apostille. On the listed-property route the registry records that the application may be made before entering Greece at all. A notarised mandate without the apostille is not the document the procedure asks for, and that is the most common way a proxy filing fails.

What Law 5275/2026 actually changed in February

The law is large. Read against what this site already publishes, three of its articles matter directly.

Article 29 amended article 95 §2 on family members — adding exactly one line, «προστίθεται περ. ε)», point (e), rather than the broad expansion some pages describe.

Article 37 amended article 160 §1 and removed the language requirement for EU long-term resident status in one case: evidence of twelve consecutive years of lawful residence in Greece now substitutes for the language certificate, as does a degree from a Greek higher-education programme taught principally in Greek.

Article 23 added a wholly new article, 79A, to the Migration Code. That is the one the market has misdescribed, and it is the subject of the next two sections.

What the law did not do is touch article 100, or article 100A beside it. Both investor permits — the property one and the startup one — keep the thresholds, payment rules and conditions they had before February.

The €250,000 startup route: real, and fourteen months older than the law it is credited to

Since February a claim has circulated in guide after guide: that Greece added a new golden visa pathway at €250,000 for investing in a startup on the Elevate Greece national registry, with a cap of 33% ownership, an obligation to create two jobs in the first year and keep them five, and a five-year holding period.

Every one of those figures is in Greek law. Not one of them is in the February law.

They are in [article 100A of the Migration Code](/sources#gr-l5038-art-100a), added by article 44 of Law 5162/2024, published in Government Gazette A΄ 198 of 5 December 2024 — fourteen months before the law the market credits for it. It creates residence permit type B.6, «Άδεια διαμονής για πραγματοποίηση επένδυσης σε νεοφυή επιχείρηση», and it sets out:

• €250,000 contributed to the capital of an enterprise on the National Registry of Startup Enterprises, by taking up shares in a capital increase or bonds on a bond issue — §1;
• a holding that must not exceed 33% of the company's capital or of its voting rights — §2(a);
• at least two new jobs created within the first year, and that headcount maintained for five years — §2(b) and §2(c);
• the shares held for five years from acquisition, with a two-month window to reinvest afterwards or to move into one of the permits of articles 96 to 100 — §10;
• a permit of one year, renewed two years at a time, for as long as the investment is certified — §7;
• no right to work, in the same words the property permit uses — §9;
• and a €50,000 administrative fine for breaching the conditions or the holding period — §12.

Two structural points are easy to miss. The money must be remitted from abroad for the purpose, though a spouse, a partner or a relative to the second degree may be the sender — §4. And the investment is certified not by the Ministry of Migration but by the Directorate for Foreign Direct Investment of the Ministry of Development, which is what the consulate and the permit decision wait on — §1 and §5.

The route only became usable at the end of 2025. Article 100A leaves its paperwork to a joint ministerial decision, and that decision is [KYA 216761 of 12 November 2025](/sources#gr-kya-216761-2025), Gazette B΄ 6138 of 18 November 2025. It sets the file: a registry certificate no more than two months old, proof of the shares or bonds, the bank remittance, the ERGANI personnel table evidencing the two new jobs, and a €2,500 electronic fee. Greek market reporting in the months after describes a route that is live and barely used.

So the market did not invent a permit. It took a real one, moved it forward by fourteen months, and attached it to a law that added something else entirely — and gave the result the other provision's name.

What the Tech Visa actually is

The provision the February law did add says what it is in its own title:

> «Άρθρο 23. Εισδοχή πολιτών τρίτων χωρών για εργασία σε επιχειρήσεις του Εθνικού Μητρώου Νεοφυών Επιχειρήσεων — Προσθήκη άρθρου 79Α στον Κώδικα Μετανάστευσης»

Admission of third-country nationals for work in enterprises of the National Registry of Startup Enterprises. Its neighbours in the Code are article 79Β for visiting professors, 79Γ for highly qualified job-seekers and 79Δ for students; it sits in the chapter on employment, not the one on investment. That is the whole reason the two get fused: both instruments point at the same Elevate Greece registry, and only one of them is an investment.

Here is what the employment one actually offers — and the conditions are strict enough that they change the answer for most people.

Article 79A creates a residence title of category «Z.13», called in the provision itself a "Tech Visa". It is a national entry and residence visa valid twelve months, granted by derogation from articles 26 and 27, to third-country nationals coming to work exclusively in enterprises of the Elevate Greece registry established by article 47 of Law 4712/2020.

Beyond the general visa documents, the consulate asks for three things:

• a certificate from the Registry that the company which signed the employment contract is registered and remains an active member;
• an employment contract of at least twelve months whose gross annual salary is at least 1.6 times the average gross annual salary in Greece;
• evidence of high professional qualifications, certified by a tertiary degree or by high professional skills within the meaning of article 4(νγ).

So there is a threshold. It is a salary threshold on the employer, not capital from the applicant.

What it grants is unusual and worth stating plainly: the visa itself confers immediate access to dependent employment, with that one employer only, without any residence permit being issued. Family members may accompany the holder and receive a corresponding twelve-month national visa as family of a Z.13 holder, by derogation from articles 84, 85, 87 and 88.

And what it costs in flexibility is the part no summary mentions:

• the holder cannot change employer while the visa is valid;
• if the employment relationship ends for any reason other than the employer's breach of the contract, the holder must leave Greek territory immediately, and the employer must notify the consular authority at once so that the visa is revoked;
• the holder cannot use article 12, the change-of-purpose route, subject to one exception;
• before the visa expires, the holder may apply for an "E.1" EU Blue Card, but only while still employed at the same enterprise and still meeting the salary condition.

A twelve-month visa that ends the day the job ends is a real instrument with real uses. It is not a residence-by-investment route, and anyone weighing it against the property tiers of article 100 or the startup route of article 100A is comparing instruments that answer different questions.

What we could not establish, and are not printing

Three gaps, stated because a page whose subject is other people's unsourced claims cannot have unsourced claims of its own.

The enacted wording of article 79A was not read in the Gazette. The text quoted above is the Ministry of Migration and Asylum's own published text of the bill, from its public consultation. The law then passed as article 23 of Law 5275/2026. A post-enactment summary by EY matches this text on every point that can be checked against it — twelve months, exclusive employment, family accompaniment, no change of employer, the Blue Card route — but designates the category Z.13A where the bill says Z.13. One character is unresolved, and we are not asserting which is right.

The claim that the February law introduced automatic allocation of applications to the least-loaded migration office appears in several guides and is offered as the reason processing sped up. We did not find such a provision in what we were able to read of the Gazette, and EY's summary does not mention it. We cannot say it is absent — the Gazette PDF could not be read end to end — only that we did not find it.

The enacted wording of article 100A was not read in the Gazette either. The text set out above is the Ministry of National Economy and Finance's own published bill, where the provision is numbered article 41; it was enacted as article 44 of Law 5162/2024. Two independent confirmations exist — the November 2025 joint ministerial decision legislates against «το άρθρο 100Α του ν. 5038/2023» by name, and post-enactment summaries match the bill on the amount, the 33%, the two jobs and the five years — but the Gazette page itself was not opened.

Law 5307/2026 has now been read, and it changes nothing on this page. Gazette A΄ 90 of 11 June 2026 implements the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum. Its table of contents runs to 265 articles, and exactly one of them touches the Migration Code: article 179, amending article 144 on EU long-term resident status. What it does there is replace one word in §1, replace the third sentence of §2 and add a §2A — all of it about how time spent as a beneficiary of international protection counts towards the five years. Article 100, article 100A, article 95, article 79A and the two-month issuing deadline are untouched.

Frequently asked questions

Where this sits in the rest of the site

The Greek permit itself — the €800,000, €400,000 and €250,000 tiers, the zones, the FIP alternative, permanent residence and the 7% pensioner rate — is in the Greece guide. Who may file an application in Portugal, Malta and the UAE, and what stops one, is in the application guide. Whether any of this reaches a passport is in the passport piece. What the country is like to live in is in the living guide. And every act named here, with the date each was read, is on the sources page.

If you are choosing between these three things

We do not sell property and we do not give legal advice. What we do is put a person who knows what they are asking in front of a licensed firm in the right jurisdiction.

If you came here because you read about a €250,000 Greek route, it exists — but it is equity in an early-stage company, locked for five years, with two jobs to keep and no right to work, and that is a different proposition from the apartment the same pages illustrate it with. If you are weighing €250,000 of startup equity against €250,000 of listed building, or either of those against an employment route, the answer differs for an employee, a founder and a passive investor. Send the question through the enquiry form. We take no part in the fee.

Sources: where each figure comes from

• The responsible authority, digital-only submission, proxy filing under an apostilled power of attorney, filing before entry on the listed-property route, the document lists, the €2,000 permit fee plus €16 printout and the 50-day deadline of completion: the National Registry of Administrative Public Services records for the Greek golden visa procedures, read 5 September 2026.
• Article 100 §3, §5 and §10, and §2(c) on change of use; the 13,499 files pending in November 2025 with 10,703 in Attica; and articles 29 and 37 of Law 5275/2026 on family members and on the twelve-year alternative to the language certificate: our verification file for Greece of 28 August 2026, where article 100 was read in full.
• That article 23 of Law 5275/2026 adds article 79A to the Migration Code and is titled as admission for work, and that its neighbours are 79Β, 79Γ and 79Δ: the table of contents of the law as published in Government Gazette A΄ 17 of 6 February 2026, corroborated on two independent legal databases, read 5 September 2026.
• The text of article 79A — category Z.13, twelve months, the Elevate Greece registry under article 47 of Law 4712/2020, the certificate, the twelve-month contract at 1.6 times the average gross annual salary, the qualifications condition, immediate access to employment with that employer only, family accompaniment, the bar on changing employer, the obligation to leave on termination, the bar on article 12 and the Blue Card route: the Ministry of Migration and Asylum's published text of the bill, from its public consultation, read 5 September 2026. The enacted wording in the Gazette was not read.
• The category designation Z.13A, differing from the bill's Z.13, and the extension of the renewal filing window from one month to three after expiry: a post-enactment summary by EY Greece, read 5 September 2026. Reported with attribution, not as established.
• Article 100A — the €250,000, the 33% cap, the two new jobs and the five-year headcount, the five-year holding period, the one-year permit renewed two years at a time, the absence of any work right, the remittance rule, the certifying directorate and the €50,000 fines: the Ministry of National Economy and Finance's published text of the bill, where the provision is article 41, read 5 September 2026. Enacted as article 44 of Law 5162/2024, Gazette A΄ 198 of 5 December 2024. The Gazette wording itself was not read.
• The documents and the €2,500 electronic fee for certifying a startup investment: joint ministerial decision 216761 of 12 November 2025, Gazette B΄ 6138 of 18 November 2025, as published by a Greek legal database and summarised by a Greek law firm, read 5 September 2026. That the route is live and barely used: Greek business press of the same period, read 5 September 2026, reported as market comment rather than as a statistic.
• That Law 5307/2026, Gazette A΄ 90 of 11 June 2026, touches the Migration Code in one place only — article 179, amending article 144 — and the wording that article 144 takes as a result: the law's full table of contents, all 265 articles, on a Greek legal database, together with the Ministry of Migration and Asylum's published text of the bill, both read 5 September 2026.
• Not established and therefore not printed: whether Law 5275/2026 contains a provision on allocating applications between offices by workload.