Μake us preferred on Google The Golden Visa program is losing steam as the government moves ahead with a major change to how foreign property purchases are taxed. Finance Minister and Eurogroup President Kyriakos Pierrakakis announced that starting July 1, 2027, the property transfer tax will rise from 3% to 15% for third country nationals, meaning citizens of countries outside the European Union and European Economic Area.
Pierrakakis said that the increase is designed to act as a strong brake on large scale property purchases by investors from outside the EU, citing Turkey, China and Israel among the countries driving demand.
Currently, the property transfer tax is 3% of a property’s taxable value. That rises to an effective 3.09% once a municipal surcharge, set at 3% of the tax itself, is added.
Who is exempt
Greece already exempts first home purchases from the transfer tax entirely, but only for a defined set of buyers: Greek citizens, members of the Greek diaspora from Albania, Turkey and former Soviet countries, citizens of EU and EEA member states, recognized refugees, and third country nationals who already hold long term resident status or a second generation residence permit in Greece.
For those buyers, the exemption covers a first home valued at up to 200,000 euros for a single buyer or 250,000 euros for a married buyer, with the threshold rising by 25,000 euros per child, and by 30,000 euros from the third child onward.
Anyone buying a home who does not fall into one of those groups, meaning most third country nationals without long term residency in Greece, will now have to pay the new 15% rate regardless of the property’s value or whether it is their first home. That rate rises to an effective 15.45% once the municipal surcharge is included. It applies only to homes, not commercial properties, land or other real estate.
The rationale: cooling a red hot housing market
The government says the higher tax on third country buyers is meant to ease the surge in housing demand that has been pushing up prices and squeezing out permanent residents.
Third country nationals invested 1.2 billion euros in Greek real estate in 2025, according to data from the Bank of Greece. Tax records show that roughly 800 million euros of that went toward homes specifically.
Demand for Golden Visa already cooling
Demand for the Golden Visa has already started to cool this year. The government raised the minimum investment threshold to 800,000 euros in high demand areas, including Attica, Thessaloniki and islands with more than 3,100 residents, and to 400,000 euros everywhere else, and applications have fallen off since.
The Ministry of Migration and Asylum recorded 2,551 new initial residence permit applications in the first half of the year, 395 of them in June alone. That is down 44 percent from the 4,553 applications filed over the same period last year.
Permits actually issued told a different story. Authorities granted 4,919 new permits in the same period, up 21 percent year over year, as officials worked through a backlog of applications filed in previous years.
Source: OT.gr
