Greece's expat tax regime, explained with numbers: article 5C on an Athens payslip
By Skyler Bissell · September 26, 2026 · 10 min read
€18,412 a year is what Greece's article 5C regime is worth to one person on EUR 100,000 in Athens. Without it the salary keeps €58,642 after income tax and EFKA, an effective rate of 41.4%. With it the same salary keeps €77,054, a rate of 22.9%. The whole gap comes from one line of the payslip, and the EFKA line does not move at all. I ran the same person through EUR 60,000 and EUR 150,000 as well, and through the USD 150,000 salary our ranking pages use, so the shape of the regime is visible rather than asserted.
Greece's expat tax regime for workers is article 5C of the Income Tax Code (Law 4172/2013, inserted in November 2020). It exempts 50% of the income you earn in Greece from employment or from an individual business from income tax, for up to seven consecutive tax years. To use it you must not have been Greek tax resident in five of the six years before the move, you must move from an EU or EEA state or from a state that has an administrative cooperation agreement in tax matters with Greece, you must work for a Greek legal entity or the Greek permanent establishment of a foreign company (or run a business in Greece), and you must declare that you intend to stay at least two years. There is no salary test, no ceiling on the exempt amount, and the regime also switches off the deemed-income presumptions Greece would otherwise attach to your home and your car.
That definition covers what the regime is. The rest of this page is what it does to money, which is the part a person weighing an Athens offer needs and the part most explainers skip.
TL;DR
- The exemption halves the income tax base, and because the exempt half comes off the top of a progressive scale it removes far more than half of the income tax bill. On EUR 100,000 the tax line falls from €28,754 to €10,342. The payslip.
- EFKA is untouched on every salary, and it is a large line: the employee contribution is capped, so it matters most at the bottom of the range. Three salaries.
- There is no salary floor, which makes 5C the easiest regime in Europe to enter and the one whose value grows fastest with pay. The conditions that decide it are about where you lived, and our engine tests none of them. What the engine does not test.
The payslip on EUR 100,000, both ways
A Greek payslip has two deductions that matter here. The first is the employee's EFKA contribution, the social insurance levy, charged on gross pay up to a monthly ceiling. The second is income tax on the 2026 scale, which runs from 9% on the first EUR 10,000 through 20%, 26%, 34% and 39% to 44% on everything above EUR 60,000. Income tax is charged on pay after EFKA has come off, which is how Greek withholding works and how our engine models it. Article 5C takes that post-EFKA base, removes half of it, and runs the scale on the half that remains.
| Line on an Athens payslip, EUR 100,000 | Ordinary tax | Under article 5C |
|---|---|---|
| Athens, EFKA employee contribution (capped) | €12,604 | €12,604 |
| Athens, income tax on the 2026 scale | €28,754 | €10,342 |
| Athens, take-home after both | €58,642 | €77,054 |
| Athens, effective rate on gross | 41.4% | 22.9% |
Engine figures, 2026, one single filer with no children, no voluntary pension contribution, the general scale (the reduced scales for taxpayers under 30 and for parents are not modelled). EFKA is the employee share on gross pay up to the stored ceiling. Income tax runs on gross minus EFKA; the regime halves that base.
Read the second row twice. The exemption is 50% of the base, and the income tax falls from €28,754 to €10,342, which is a cut of well over half. The reason is the shape of the scale. On the ordinary path the last EUR 27,000 or so of the base sits in the 44% bracket. Halve the base and that whole slice disappears first, then the 39% band empties, and what is left is taxed mostly at 9%, 20% and 26%. A flat tax would make a 50% exemption worth exactly half the bill. A progressive one makes it worth more: here the regime is worth 18.4% of the salary, about $21,335 a year in dollars, and the steeper the scale the more it is worth, which is why Greece and Italy, the two half-off regimes, finish at the top of every expat tax regime ranked by take-home even though neither has the lowest headline rate.
The first row is the other half of the story. EFKA is charged on the full salary whether or not you are in the regime, so €12,604 comes off either way. The exemption is written into the income tax article and reaches nothing else. That is worth knowing before an employer's HR summary says "you pay half the tax": you pay half the base on one of two levies, and the other levy is the one with the ceiling.
The same person on EUR 60,000, EUR 150,000 and the dollar salary
Because there is no floor, the regime can be priced at any salary, and the value moves in a way the 50% headline hides. On EUR 60,000 in Athens the ordinary rate is 36.3% and the regime brings it to 21.2%, worth €9,036 a year. That is the figure our page on which countries offer expat tax breaks and at what salary uses to show that Greece's door is open where the Dutch and Danish doors are shut, and it is the smallest of the three values here in euros and the smallest as a share of pay, about 15% of gross. At that salary EFKA is charged on all of it and is the larger deduction, and the ordinary scale has not yet reached its steep part, so there is less for the exemption to remove.
On EUR 150,000 the ordinary path pays €50,754 of income tax on top of the same capped EFKA of €12,604, keeps €86,642 and runs at 42.2%. Under 5C the income tax is €20,527, the take-home is €116,869 and the rate is 22.1%. The regime is worth €30,227 a year, about $35,026, or 20.2% of the salary. Between EUR 60,000 and EUR 150,000 the salary grew two and a half times and the value of the regime grew more than three times, because every extra euro on the ordinary path lands in the 44% bracket and every extra euro under the regime lands there at half weight.
The dollar salary is the one to carry to the other regime pages. A USD 150,000 offer converts to €129,450 at the build's rate, and on that salary Athens keeps €75,134 on the ordinary path and €100,761 under the regime, income tax of €41,712 against €16,085, worth $29,696 a year in dollars. The rate under the regime, 22.2%, is the figure that puts Athens first in the ranking of regimes on that salary, and the ordinary rate of 42.0% is where Greece sits in take-home pay by country with no regime applied, which is the layer a person who fails one of the conditions below falls back to.
Seven years at the EUR 150,000 level is about €212,000 of tax the regime removes, held flat. Our engine prices one steady-state year and never spreads a term, so read that as seven copies of this year rather than a forecast. Where Greece's seven years sit beside Denmark's 84 months, the Netherlands' five years and Italy's five is in how long every expat tax regime lasts.
Three Greek regimes, and which one this is
Greece has three inbound regimes in consecutive articles of the same code, and offers, brokers and forum posts mix them up constantly. Article 5A is the non-dom regime: an annual lump sum of EUR 100,000 in place of Greek tax on all foreign-source income, for up to fifteen years, for someone who invests at least EUR 500,000 in Greece and was non-resident in seven of the previous eight years. Article 5B is for pensioners: a flat 7% on foreign-source income, again up to fifteen years, for someone drawing a pension from abroad who was non-resident in five of the previous six years. Article 5C is the one for people who move to Greece to work, and it is the only one of the three that touches Greek-source salary. Our engine models 5C alone, because it is the only regime of the three that a working professional with a Greek employer can use, and because the other two say nothing about a Greek payslip.
Two amendments changed 5C in 2025 and they both widened it. Law 5222/2025, published on 28 July 2025, removed the condition that the job be a newly created position: an existing role or a vacancy now qualifies. The same law allows a beneficiary to change employer inside Greece during the seven years without losing the regime, provided the gap between jobs is no longer than twelve months. Neither change moves a single figure above, because our engine tests salary only, but both matter to the risk of the offer, since the older version of the regime could be lost by a job move that had nothing to do with tax.
What our engine does not test
Athens is wired in our data with a 50% reduction of the income tax base for seven years and no salary floor, and every figure on this page follows from that. The conditions that decide whether you can use it at all sit outside the calculation:
- Five of six years abroad. You must not have been Greek tax resident in five of the six years before the transfer. A Greek who left eight years ago qualifies; one who left three years ago does not, whatever their passport.
- Where you move from. The transfer has to be from an EU or EEA state or from a state with an administrative cooperation agreement in tax matters with Greece. A move from a jurisdiction on Greece's non-cooperative list does not qualify however long you were away.
- A Greek employer, or a Greek business. The work has to be under an employment relationship with a Greek legal entity or the Greek permanent establishment of a foreign company, or an individual business activity in Greece. A remote contract with a foreign employer that has no Greek presence is outside it.
- Two years, declared. You declare that you will remain in Greece for at least two years from 1 January of the first year of inclusion.
- The application window. Start work by 2 July and apply by the end of the year to be included for that year; start after 2 July and apply by the end of the following year, with inclusion from the year after you started. The seven consecutive years run from the first year of inclusion.
- The exemption is on income tax only. EFKA is unchanged, and income that is not Greek employment or business income, such as rent or dividends, is taxed under the ordinary rules.
One more limit is ours rather than the statute's. Greece's 2026 reform introduced reduced scales for taxpayers under 30 and for parents, with the rate on the first two brackets falling to zero for someone under 25. Our engine runs the general scale for everyone, so a parent or a 27-year-old on the ordinary path pays a little less than the figures above, and the regime is worth correspondingly a little less to them. The direction of the error is conservative and the size is small at the salaries here, since the reduced scales act on the bottom of the ladder and the regime's value comes from the top.
Where the seven regimes our engine can price sit against the six it carries as notes, and why a note is the honest treatment for a regime that does not cut a local payslip, is in expat tax breaks, decoded. The other regime published today, Denmark's flat 27% scheme, has the opposite design to Greece's: a hard salary floor, no deductions, and a flat rate that is a deal only above a certain level, worked through in forskerordningen worth it.
FAQ
Is there a minimum salary for Greece's article 5C regime?
No. Article 5C tests where you lived and where you moved from, and says nothing about pay. Our engine finds no floor and no ceiling for Athens, which is why the regime is open on EUR 60,000 while the Dutch and Danish schemes are closed at that level. The value grows with salary because the exempt half comes off the top of a progressive scale.
Does the 50% exemption cover social security contributions?
No. EFKA is charged on the full salary either way. On EUR 100,000 in Athens our engine's EFKA line is identical with and without the regime; only the income tax line moves. The regime is an income tax exemption and nothing else on the payslip changes.
Can I change jobs in Greece without losing the article 5C regime?
Yes, since Law 5222/2025. The requirement that the job be a newly created position was removed in July 2025, and a beneficiary may change employer within Greece during the seven years as long as the gap between jobs does not exceed twelve months. Before that amendment a job change was a real risk to the regime.
When do I have to apply for article 5C?
It depends on when the job starts. Start by 2 July and you apply by the end of that year for that year's inclusion. Start after 2 July and you apply by the end of the following year, and the regime runs from the year after the one you started in. The seven consecutive tax years count from the first year of inclusion, so a late start costs the first year of the term rather than delaying the clock.
If an Athens offer is on the table, put your own salary and household into the New York to Athens comparison and switch the regime toggle on and off; the difference between the two runs is what article 5C is worth to you this year, on this scale, and if you fail one of the conditions above the ordinary run is the one to plan on.
Sources. The regime: article 5C of Law 4172/2013 (the Greek Income Tax Code); the conditions, the two-year declaration, the application windows and the deemed-income waiver per Iason Skouzos TaxLaw, 5C tax regime; the 2025 amendments (Law 5222/2025, art. 134, Government Gazette A' of 28 July 2025: the new-position condition removed, employer changes within twelve months allowed) per Amoiridis Greek Law Firm, 7 May 2026; articles 5A and 5B per STEP Law Firm, 15 November 2025. The 2026 income tax scale under Law 5246/2025 and the reduced scales by age and children per KPMG Greece, tax updates of 20 November 2025 and PwC Worldwide Tax Summaries, Greece; EFKA employee contributions and the 2026 monthly ceiling per PwC, Greece, other taxes. The tax authority's own pages (AADE) refused every automated fetch, so the statute is cited through dated professional sources; all retrieved 26 September 2026. Greek tax figures are computed by cityparity's engine; per-field provenance is in data/_meta.json, per the methodology.
Figures here come from cityparity's per-city engine and were current at publication; tax scales, contribution ceilings and exchange rates move, so treat any single number as a strong estimate and run your own inputs. Where our comparison pages quote an equivalent salary, it is the bar an offer has to clear in the destination city and it is not a job offer. See the methodology.