Living in Greece as an American: the 1950 tax treaty and the social security agreement

Search for what it is like to live in Greece as an American and the first screen gives you Reddit three times, three YouTube videos, a Facebook group, a Quora thread and an international shipping company.

Some of it is good. People who have actually done it are worth reading, and the light on Crete really is like that.

But between them those pages mention neither of the two instruments that decide an American's position in Greece more than anything else on the list — and one of them is old enough to be a surprise.

Greek immigration law has no American category

There is no US-specific route. Greek immigration law divides the world into EU/EEA/Swiss citizens and third-country nationals, and an American is in the second group along with everyone else outside the Union. That means a national visa first, then a residence permit, on one of the ordinary routes.

Which route, and what each actually costs and requires, is set out with the article numbers in our Greece residence guide — the investor permit under article 100 with its thresholds by zone, the financially independent route, and the rest. The procedure and the statutory decision deadlines are in the Greek procedure. None of that changes because the applicant is American, and this page will not repeat it.

What does change is everything below.

The tax treaty between the United States and Greece was signed in 1950

Not amended in 1950. Signed on 20 February 1950, and operative from 1 January 1953.

It has been touched once since: a protocol of 20 April 1953, which deals with mutual assistance in collecting taxes. Since then, nothing. The convention that governs how the two countries divide the right to tax an American living in Athens is seventy-six years old and predates essentially every feature of modern tax treaty practice.

That is a fact about the instrument, not an opinion about it, and it is checkable in one click: the IRS publishes the text.

And it contains a saving clause. Article XIV(1) reserves to each country the right to tax its own citizens and residents as though the convention had not been made. This is standard in US treaties and it is the sentence that surprises people: the treaty does not stop the United States taxing an American who lives in Greece. It allocates and relieves, within limits; it does not release.

Which leads to the thing every American already half-knows and often underestimates.

American citizenship is taxed, not American residence

The United States taxes its citizens on worldwide income regardless of where they live. Moving to Greece does not end a US filing obligation; it adds a Greek one.

This is not a Greek problem and there is nothing in Greek law that addresses it. It is why an American's arithmetic in Greece is different from a Briton's or a German's, and it is the single largest reason to take advice from someone licensed in both systems rather than from a page like this one.

We are not tax advisers and this page does not tell you what to do. What it can do is name the instruments precisely, so that the questions you ask a professional are the right ones.

Greek special tax regimes are worth less to an American than to a European

Greece runs three attractive regimes for new tax residents, and every relocation page mentions them: the flat charge on foreign income, the 7% rate for foreign pensioners, and the 50% exemption on Greek employment and business income. Their conditions, article by article, are in our Greek material.

Here is the part that goes unsaid. Those regimes reduce Greek tax. An American's total burden is not the Greek tax alone: it is the interaction of the Greek charge with a US return that continues to arrive every year, mediated by foreign tax credits and by a treaty from 1950 that contains a saving clause.

Reducing the Greek side of that equation does not automatically reduce the total, and in some configurations reduces the credits available on the other side rather than the tax paid. Whether a Greek regime leaves an American better off is a computation on that person's own figures, in two systems, and we are not going to pretend a web page can do it.

What we will say plainly is this: a Greek non-dom regime is not the same offer to an American as it is to a European, and the pages listing those regimes as an unqualified benefit are not writing for you.

The US–Greece social security agreement and certificate of coverage GR/USA 1

The United States and Greece have a totalization agreement — one of about thirty the US maintains. It is the instrument that stops a person paying into two social security systems for the same work.

The rule that matters to most people who move:

A self-employed worker who resides in Greece is assigned Greek coverage. Not American. So an American freelancer or remote contractor living in Greece contributes to the Greek system, and to establish the exemption from US Social Security the certificate of coverage — form GR/USA 1 — is requested from the Greek agency that collects the contributions where they live.

An employee taken on by a Greek employer is in the same position, with the employer requesting the certificate.

This is one of the few genuinely mechanical answers in the whole subject, and it appears on none of the pages ranking above this one.

Greek citizenship for an American takes seven years, not three

If the plan runs that far: Greece sets three different naturalisation periods, and an American gets the middle one.

Three continuous years is for nationals of an EU member state and three narrow family categories. Seven continuous years applies to everyone else holding a residence title on the Code's closed list — the investor permit is on it. Twelve years applies to a holder of some other valid title.

The whole structure, with the article numbers and the exact categories, is in Greek citizenship law. The point here is only that an American should read the seven-year row and not the three-year one, which is the row most summaries print.

The cost of living in Greece, from Greek statistics rather than from Numbeo

Every page on that results screen prices Greece. Almost all of them price it from crowd-sourced submissions.

Greece's own statistical authority publishes household expenditure and rents, and those figures are what our guide to living in Greece uses. They say something different from the advertisements, and they say it with a release name and a date attached.

What this page will not tell an American about Greece

It does not compare Greece to the United States as a place to live. That is what the Reddit threads are for, and they are better at it than we would be.

It does not compute anyone's tax. See above.

It does not tell you the American filing thresholds or the foreign bank account reporting limits. Those are US rules, published by US authorities, and this site verifies European immigration and tax instruments rather than the Internal Revenue Code. Naming them is useful; reciting figures we have not read at their source is exactly what we criticise other pages for.

Frequently asked questions about living in Greece as an American

More on Greek residence, citizenship and costs

The residence routes and their thresholds are in the Greece residence guide. The procedure and the deadlines are in the Greek procedure. The naturalisation periods are in Greek citizenship law. What Greece costs, from official statistics, is in living in Greece.

Every Greek instrument named here has its own line, with the date it was read, on our sources page.