Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis announced on Saturday that Greece will raise its property transfer tax from 3% to 15% for third-country nationals, effective January 1, 2027.
“We are promoting incentives, but I also want to tell you about a disincentive,” he told the audience at the 90th Thessaloniki International Fair, before unveiling the fivefold increase for buyers “from third countries outside the EU.”
Interest from buyers from countries such as China, Turkey, and Israel “may, to a degree, be welcome,” the Prime Minister remarked, but argued it has made it much harder for Greeks in several areas to acquire homes of their own.
The measure forms part of a €2.2 billion package that also includes a €2 billion subsidized mortgage program, phased cuts to electricity costs, and the abolition of the ENFIA annual property tax in small settlements.
Under the current regime, the transfer tax stands at 3% (an effective 3.09% including the municipal surcharge) of whichever is higher: the agreed sale price or the property’s state-assessed “objective value.” The buyer pays it before signing the notarial deed.
Saturday’s speech was Mitsotakis’s last TIF address before national elections due in spring 2027, when the government’s four-year term expires. Mitsotakis said it was still “too early” to choose between March and May. If legislated as announced, the 15% rate would apply from January 1, 2027, shortly before Greeks head to the polls.
What It Means for Golden Visa Investors
Every real estate investor in the Greece Golden Visa is, by definition, a third-country national. Unless the implementing legislation carves out an exemption for the program, the new rate would apply to its entire real estate route.
As it stands, an €800,000 purchase in Athens or Thessaloniki, the minimum in the program’s high-demand zone, carries approximately €24,000 in transfer tax; from 2027, that bill would reach €120,000.
A €400,000 acquisition elsewhere in Greece would see its tax rise from €12,000 to €60,000, and a €250,000 conversion or restoration project from €7,500 to €37,500.
The timing compounds a separate cliff. Greece’s suspension of 24% VAT on new-build purchases, which has channeled foreign buyers toward the 3.09% transfer tax instead, is currently slated to lapse at the end of 2026 unless extended again.
Open questions remain until the bill is published: whether third-country nationals who already hold Greek residence permits fall within scope, how purchases made through Greek or EU companies will be treated, and whether transactions already underway receive transitional protection.
“A Convenient Explanation” for a Supply Problem
For Alexander Risvas of Athens-based Risvas & Associates, the measure aims at the wrong target.
“Foreign investment should not become the convenient explanation for a structural housing problem,” he says to IMI, pointing to IMF findings that approximately 35% of Greece’s housing stock is not used as a primary residence.
“Greece does not simply have a foreign-buyer problem. It has an available-housing problem,” he continues, explaining that hundreds of thousands of properties remain vacant, unrenovated, or entangled in inheritance and fragmented-ownership disputes, while Greek housing investment runs at roughly 60% of the EU average.
Price growth, in his reading, also needs context. Apartment prices rose 8.1% in 2025 and a further 5.7% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2026, per Bank of Greece figures he cites, yet Eurostat data show Greek housing costs have moved from 8% below the EU average in 2010 to approximately 29% below it in 2024.
Risvas considers it “an oversimplification to attribute Greece’s housing crisis, a nationwide and multifactorial phenomenon, principally to golden visa purchasers,” particularly given the restrictions the program has already absorbed.
The minimum real estate investment was raised to €800,000 in Attica, Thessaloniki, and other high-demand areas precisely to redirect capital away from the ordinary housing stock, while the remaining €250,000 route centers on commercial-to-residential conversions and listed-building restorations.
The distinction matters because the €250,000 route works differently from an ordinary home purchase. An investor who buys an old office building and turns it into apartments creates homes that did not exist before. As Risvas puts it, that buyer “is not reducing the available housing stock. He or she is increasing it.”
From 2027, however, that same investor would pay the 15% rate. Risvas warns this risks choking off one of the few channels currently bringing Greece’s abandoned buildings back into residential use.
A Measure That May Not Survive Legal Scrutiny
The scale of the change also raises constitutional questions. A regime under which two individuals buy the same property, for the same price, on the same date, but pay 3% and 15% respectively based solely on citizenship “raises legitimate questions of equal treatment, tax equality and proportionality,” in Risvas’s assessment.
Article 4(5) of the Greek Constitution requires that public burdens be shared according to economic capacity and without discrimination.
Under the European Convention on Human Rights, Strasbourg case law holds that differences in treatment based exclusively on nationality require “very weighty reasons” to be justified, even given the broad margin states enjoy in economic policy.
The proportionality problem, as Risvas frames it, is that nationality is a poor proxy for the harms the government wants to address. If the concern is “speculative acquisitions,” he asks, why not target the number of properties acquired rather than the buyer’s passport?
He concedes that a definitive legal assessment must await the final legislation, its exemptions, and its stated justification. Even so, he expects the measure to sit “uncomfortably close to the boundaries of discriminatory treatment.”
His prescription runs in the opposite direction: incentives to return vacant homes to the long-term rental market, faster renovation and change-of-use procedures, resolution of “inheritance deadlocks,” and more construction. “The real challenge for Greece is not to determine how to keep foreign capital out of its property market. It is to determine how to bring hundreds of thousands of unused properties back into it.”
