Hire in Greece: A Comprehensive Guide for 2026

Introduction

Employment in Greece is governed by statute together with collective labour agreements, and an individual contract cannot fall below either. Companies that hire in Greece register each employee with the Unified Social Security Agency (EFKA) on their first day, and withhold income tax and social security contributions from every payroll run.

Most foreign employers price a Greek role the way they price any other, on a monthly figure multiplied by twelve. Greece pays 14 salaries a year, and the extra two arrive as a Christmas allowance, an Easter allowance, and a leave allowance outside the ordinary payroll cycle. That leaves the salary line roughly 17% short of contributions, and it is the first of several places where the Greek number differs from the one you modelled.

This guide covers entity setup, hiring through an Employer of Record (EOR) or an Agent of Record (AOR), contract types, working hours, payroll and tax rules, and the full cost of a Greek hire.

How to hire remote employees in Greece?

There are three main options available. You can hire employees by setting up a local entity, hire employees through an EOR, or hire contractors via an AOR.

The choice decides who signs the contract, who registers the employee with the Unified Social Security Agency (EFKA), and who carries the risk if a court later looks at the arrangement and calls it something else.

How to hire in Greece by setting up a local entity?

Setting up a local entity denotes establishing a formal business presence in Greece. The usual vehicle is the IKE, the private capital company, and the entry cost is close to nothing.

The IKE requires a minimum capital contribution of just €1, which can be provided in cash, in kind, or as capital contributions in kind, such as intangible assets or services. It can be established by one individual, a Single-Member IKE, or by multiple partners, and it offers its partners limited liability, so a foreign parent is not exposed beyond its contribution.

Registration runs through GEMI, the General Commercial Registry, via the One-Stop-Shop system, after obtaining a tax identification number for the company and each partner or administrator. If you plan to employ staff, you will also need to register with the EFKA.

For a termination to be valid later, the employer must have registered the employee with the competent social security fund, which must take place as of the first day of employment. Register late, and you may find you cannot lawfully dismiss that person at all, whatever the reason.

The €1 capital makes Greece cheap to enter. The day-one registration is what makes it unforgiving to run.

How to hire employees through EOR in Greece?

An Employer of Record acts as a legal employer for all your international employees. The EOR signs the employment contract, completes the EFKA registration on day one, and takes on payroll, income tax withholding, social security contributions, statutory leave, and the severance calculation at exit. Day-to-day direction of the work stays with you, along with the decisions on pay, scope, and headcount.

One euro of capital gets the entity registered. What follows is a set of obligations that start on an employee's first day and stay open for as long as the employment lasts, since a registration missed at hiring is what invalidates a dismissal years later.

Skuad helps remove that dependency. Skuad acts as the legal employer across 160+ countries, so your company can hire, onboard, and pay employees without registering a local entity or building payroll and compliance operations in-house.

Here is what Skuad helps with:

• Employment contract generation across 160+ countries, aligned with local labor laws and statutory requirements
• Statutory contribution workflows across supported markets, covering applicable social insurance and pension obligations
• Payroll processing in 70+ currencies, with tax withholding and statutory deductions applied at the point of payment
• Statutory benefits, paid leave, and parental entitlements administered in line with local requirements across supported markets
• Termination and offboarding support, including notice periods and severance calculations as required locally
• Background verification covering identity, employment history, and criminal records before onboarding

Book a demo to see how quickly Skuad can onboard your first Greece hire.

How to hire contractors through AOR in Greece?

Although not a legal employer, an AOR (Agent-of-record) can be quite advantageous, especially when you hire contractors in Greece. It acts as a third-party intermediary and assumes responsibility for your contractor workforce, covering worker classification, contract administration, payments, and tax compliance.

Classification is where Greece is stricter than most of the European Union (EU), and it turns on one concept. The main characteristic of an employment contract is the element of subordination of the employee to the employer as regards the time, place and manner of work, generally evidenced by the exercise of control by the employer and the provision of guidelines and instructions which are binding upon the employee.

The label on the agreement does not decide it, since distinctions are assessed based on the actual working conditions and not solely contractual terms.

Also there is a rule that catches almost every long-running contractor arrangement. Under Greek law, freelance contracts are presumed to be employment contracts if the freelancer provides his or her services exclusively or mainly to the same employer for nine consecutive months, although this could be overruled if the employer brings evidence to the contrary.

After nine months of a contractor working mainly for you, Greek law assumes employment and you have to prove otherwise. A common legal risk associated with freelance contracts is their re-qualification as employment contracts, and the true nature of the contractual relationship will be determined by the courts based on the facts of each case.

Practically, nine months is the planning horizon. Keep the engagement scoped to deliverables, invoiced against milestones, and genuinely non-exclusive, and keep evidence of other clients. Where a contractor is working mainly for you and the engagement is heading past nine months, converting to employment is usually the cheaper decision than defending the presumption.

Whichever way that decision goes, Skuad supports both models from a single platform, with contractor engagement across supported markets and conversion to employment through EOR where the work changes shape.

Here is what Skuad helps with:

• Contractor onboarding with locally compliant agreements
• Worker classification checks that help flag engagement risk before an agreement is signed
• Invoice generation, approval workflows, and contractor payouts in 70+ currencies
• Contractor records, agreements, and payment history in one dashboard alongside full-time employees
• Conversion from contractor to full-time employee through EOR across 160+ countries

Compare EOR and contractor pricing for your Greek hires.

What type of employment contract do you need in Greece?

There are two main types of employment contracts under Greek law: contracts of indefinite term and contracts of fixed term, and the counterintuitive part is that the fixed-term contract is the riskier one for an employer.

Fixed-term contracts

A fixed-term contract must be justified by the circumstances and the aim of the contract, for example to cover seasonal or temporary needs, to replace an employee on maternity leave.

Without such circumstances, the employee may claim conversion of the contract into one of indefinite terms. An ongoing remote role has no such justification, so a fixed-term contract used to cover one is exposed from the day it is signed.

Early termination of such contracts, that is, termination before the agreed expiry date, is possible only for serious cause, and in general terms, the existence of a serious cause is very difficult to establish. An indefinite contract, by contrast, can be terminated on payment of statutory severance.

Indefinite contracts

For an ongoing remote role, the indefinite contract is both the honest and the safer starting point, and the parties to an indefinite-term contract may agree to a probation period of up to 6 months.

On form, Greece is lighter than most EU markets. An employment contract does not need to be in writing to be valid, as it can also be concluded orally or informally.

The employer is still obliged, within a short period from the commencement of employment, to provide the employee with a written document containing the essential terms of employment, covering job title, salary, working hours, and contract duration.

What are the employment laws in Greece?

Greek employment law runs on statute plus collective labour agreements, and neither can be contracted out of. Minimum standards are set by mandatory statutory provisions, collective labour agreements and, where applicable, internal regulations, from which individual employment contracts may not derogate to the detriment of the employee.

Any less favourable contractual provision is considered null and void, so a clause below the statutory floor simply does not exist.

What are the working hour rules in Greece?

Work on Sundays and public holidays is not simply premium-rated, because as a general rule, work on Sundays and public holidays is prohibited, with exemptions for listed categories or by permit.

And the sixth-day premium does not make the practice lawful, since the payment of this premium does not release the employer from possible administrative sanctions related to the violation of the 5-day week.

Sunday work also costs you time as well as money. Where an employee works more than five hours on a Sunday, they are entitled to a full compensatory day of rest within the following week.

Managerial employees are in principle not subject to statutory working time restrictions and are not entitled to the above-mentioned premiums for work performed beyond normal hours, on weekends, at night or on public holidays. A role's actual duties and level of responsibility determine whether it qualifies, regardless of the job title stated in the contract.

Two of the three managerial categories are also defined by salary, calculated as multiples of the statutory minimum. From 1 April 2026, the threshold is 4 × statutory minimum salary, or €3,680 per month for department and unit heads, and 6 × statutory minimum salary, or €5,520 per month on remuneration alone.

Both thresholds rise every time the minimum wage does, so a role that qualified last year may not qualify this year without a raise.

The night rate is the one that matters for a distributed team. An Athens-based employee covering US afternoons is working inside the 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. window and is owed 25% on those hours before any overtime premium is considered.

How is overtime paid in Greece?

Greece splits extra hours into two legally distinct categories, and using the wrong word gets the rate wrong.

Overtime is permitted only on an exceptional and short-term basis, for unexpected workload, urgent tasks, unforeseeable events, and is capped at 4 hours per day and 150 hours per year.

The last row is the one that catches foreign employers, and it is a paperwork failure rather than a pay failure. The employer is obliged to notify the authorities about the conduct of overtime at the latest on the effective date and in any case before the commencement of such work.

Miss that, and the overtime becomes illegal by operation of law and costs 120% instead of 40%, tripling the premium on hours that were otherwise perfectly lawful. There is one relief, since undertakings operating under the Digital Work Card system may declare overtime retrospectively.

What are the probation and termination rules in Greece?

Probation is contractual rather than automatic. The parties to an indefinite-term contract may agree to a probation period of up to 6 months. Separately and more usefully, during the first 12 months of employment, no severance indemnity is due to the employee, so the first year is materially cheaper to exit than anything after it.

On termination, the widely repeated claim that Greece allows dismissal at will is wrong. Greece is not an employment-at-will jurisdiction.

No upfront written justification is required, but three things are:

• Handing of a written termination letter to the employee
• Simultaneous payment of the legal severance indemnity
• Prior registration of the employee with the social security fund

Miss any one and the termination is invalid. Notice is optional, and it halves the bill:

The employer is not obliged to give prior notice of termination, but immediate termination requires payment of the full statutory severance, while termination with notice results in half of the statutory severance being payable. Serving notice cuts the severance in half, which is unusual and worth modelling both ways.

Some people cannot be dismissed at all while a protected condition lasts. The dismissal of members of the board of directors of a trade union, pregnant employees during pregnancy and for a period of 18 months as of the birth date, fathers for a period of six months as of the birth date, and employees serving in the military is prohibited and considered null and void.

Termination is also prohibited during an employee's annual leave. In the event of a judicial challenge, the employer must justify the dismissal, demonstrating that the reason either pertains to the employee, such as inadequate performance or misconduct, or derives from the business's operational needs, such as restructuring or position elimination.

No reason needs to be stated in the dismissal notice, but the employer must be able to justify the decision in court.

What are the payroll and tax rules in Greece?

Employers must pay all their employees in Greece's official currency, the Euro (EUR, €). Depending on the fund they belong to, employers and employees must contribute to the social security system.

Two of the three numbers below moved recently, since contribution rates were cut in January 2025 and the income tax scale was rewritten for 2026, so a payroll setup carried over from an earlier year is out of date in more than one place.

What is the minimum wage in Greece?

Since 1 April 2026, Greece implemented a new increase to the statutory minimum wage, raising it from EUR 880 to EUR 920 gross per month, and the daily wage for skilled workers also increased, moving from EUR 39.30 to EUR 41.09.

The rise follows Ministerial Decision 8934/2026 published on 27 March 2026, with the increase determined at 4.55%. The Government's stated target is for the minimum wage to reach €950 by 2027, so budget for an April increase rather than a flat figure.

Remuneration is, as a general rule, freely determined by agreement between the employer and the employee, subject to compliance with statutory minimum standards and any applicable collective labour agreements, and only in the absence of an applicable collective agreement does the statutory minimum apply.

Check whether a sectoral agreement covers your activity before you set a band, because it can set a higher floor.

What are the social security contribution rates in Greece?

The monthly social security contribution cap for the primary social security fund (EFKA) is set at EUR 7,761.94 from 1 January 2026, so above that monthly salary the contribution does not rise, and the effective employer rate falls away on senior hires. The cap is indexed, so pull the current figure each January.

How much income tax is withheld in Greece?

Greece rewrote its income tax scale for 2026, and the change is material for mid-range salaries. For tax years 2026 onwards, taxable income from employment and pension is taxed according to the following scale:

The comparison matters because for tax years up to and including 2025 the scale ran 22%, 28%, 36% and reached 44% from 40,001. The top rate now starts at €60,000 rather than €40,000, and a new 39% band falls in between, so a net salary quoted from a 2025 calculation understates take-home pay for most professional roles.

Greece is unusual in one aspect, and it affects payroll setup directly. The rate depends on the employee's age and family circumstances

Rates by number of dependent children:

The relief stops at €30,000. From the 30,001 band upwards, every column is identical, so family circumstances change net pay on junior and mid salaries and make no difference at senior level.

Rates by age, applied on top of the above:

Two employees on identical gross salaries can therefore take home materially different amounts. Model net pay per person rather than per band, and expect the offer conversation to turn on it.

The tax resulting from the above scale is reduced by 777 euros for the taxpayer without dependent children, rising to 900 euros for one dependent child, 1,120 for two, 1,340 for three, 1,580 for four and 1,780 for five.

It tapers away with income, since for taxable income from employed services and pensions exceeding 12,000 euros, the amount of the deduction is reduced by 20 euros per 1,000 euros of taxable income.

As stated, two employees on the same gross salary can take home different amounts in Greece, and the payroll run has to reflect that per person rather than per band.

Skuad supports global payroll processing in 70+ currencies, with tax withholding and statutory deductions applied at the point of payment, alongside statutory contribution workflows across supported markets.

The calculation still has to be right in the month it is issued. What changes is who rebuilds it when the scale moves.

What is the cost of hiring remote employees in Greece?

Salary is the smallest surprise in a Greek cost model. Employees are paid 14 salaries a year rather than 12, employer contributions add roughly a fifth on top, and one compliance appointment is triggered by your first hire rather than your fiftieth.

What mandatory costs come on top of salary in Greece?

Employees are legally mandated to receive 13th and 14th month salaries every year.

The precise position is that employees are entitled to 14 salaries per annum (14.0625 to be precise), paid in 15 instalments:

A quoted monthly salary in Greece therefore costs you roughly 17% more across the year than twelve months of it, before EFKA. Budget three distinct payment dates on top of ordinary payroll, and note that Easter moves each year on the Orthodox calendar.

Three more items belong in the same model, two of them costs and one of them a saving:

• Paid annual leave runs from 20 to 26 days, based on years of service. It does not roll indefinitely, since the employer is obliged to grant the full annual leave to its employees up to the end of March of the next calendar year.
• The employer must engage a Safety Technician regardless of workforce size and an Occupational Physician once the workforce reaches 50+ employees. A one-person Greek entity carries the Safety Technician obligation in full, so it lands hardest on a small team and is an ongoing service cost rather than a one-off filing.
• When the contractual salary is higher than the statutory minimum, the employer is entitled to set off the difference against employee claims for compensation relating to overwork (not overtime), night work, work on Sundays, public holidays, the sixth weekday and off-base compensation, provided there is a relevant prior agreement with the employee. The exception is absolute, since the compensation for overtime work cannot be validly set off against the excess part of the employee's salary.

What does it cost to end an employment relationship in Greece?

The first year is free. During the first 12 months of employment, no severance indemnity is due to the employee, which is a wider window than the six-month probation cap and worth knowing separately from it.

After that, severance scales steeply with tenure:

Three adjustments apply around that table, and two of them cut the bill:

• Upward, severance is increased by one-sixth to account for proportional holiday and Christmas benefits, which follows from the 14-salary structure above.
• Downward, there is a ceiling. Severance is calculated on full-time regular pay, up to €2,000 per month, so a senior engineer on €80,000 and a mid-level hire on €24,000 generate the same statutory severance for the same service. The cost of a Greek exit stops scaling with seniority at that point.
• Downward again, notice halves it. Immediate termination requires payment of the full statutory severance, while termination with notice results in half of the statutory severance being payable. Serving the notice period set out in the employment laws section cuts the cash cost of the exit by 50%, which is unusual and worth modelling both ways before you decide.

Who pays when an employee is off work in Greece?

Sick leave starts on your payroll and is bounded. Employees are entitled to their normal remuneration during the period of absence on condition that they have been providing their services to the employer for at least ten days before their illness.

The employer's obligation ranges from 15 days to one month, depending on the employee's years of service, and you can offset the state's share, since the employer has the right to deduct from the amount payable to the employee any amounts which the latter received from the social security authorities.

Maternity is long and mostly funded elsewhere, with a short employer-paid window at the start. Leave totals 17 weeks, of which eight weeks are mandatorily granted before the expected date of childbirth and nine weeks after childbirth, and it is followed by a special maternity protection leave of nine months, part of which, up to seven months, may be transferred to the father.

Up to fourteen months of absence for a total employer salary cost of two weeks to one month is a genuine advantage over markets where the employer funds parental leave.

Paternity is the opposite, and it is short but fully on you. Every employed father is entitled to paternity leave of 14 working days with full pay, and the leave is mandatorily granted by the employer and is not subject to any requirement of prior employment, length of service, or the marital or family status of the employee. A new hire in week one qualifies.

Childcare leave is the item most cost models miss entirely, because it is a permanent reduction in hours at unchanged pay. Following maternity leave, employees may arrive one hour late or leave one hour early for up to 30 months, or reduce daily working hours by two hours for the first 12 months and by one hour for the subsequent six. Over 30 months, that is roughly three and a half months of paid time.

Parental leave, by contrast, costs you little. It runs to four months per child, eight months for single parents, for employees who have completed at least one year of continuous service, until the child turns eight, and the first 2 months of the leave are paid by DYPA with a subsidy equal to the minimum legal salary.

Two smaller paid absences are worth a line each. Employees with sole custody of a child get six days of paid leave per year, or eight days per year in the case of three or more children, and there is leave for monitoring school performance of up to four paid working days per year per child under 18 years of age.

Absences priced this way never appear in a salary band, and the Skuad employee cost calculator helps you model total employment cost before an offer goes out, using the market and the salary figure you enter. Treat the output as a budgeting estimate.

Estimate the total cost of a Greece hire before you make the offer.

What are the challenges of hiring in Greece?

Greece is straightforward to hire into. The exposure falls in three places: a termination that fails on a registration you made on day one, a contractor arrangement where the burden of proof flips against you after nine months, and a labour inspectorate that can suspend your operations. Each one carries a number or a named consequence you can plan against.

1. A termination that fails on paperwork you filed years earlier

This is the exposure most foreign employers never see coming, because the failure happens at hiring and surfaces at firing. For a termination to be valid, the employer must have registered the employee with the competent social security fund, which must take place as of the first day of employment. A late registration on day one can invalidate a dismissal years later, whatever the reason for it.

Employees have three months from their termination date in order to challenge the validity of the dismissal, and a further six months from the termination to file a claim regarding the non-payment or incorrect payment of severance compensation.

If the dismissal is challenged based on one of the specific grounds explicitly prohibited by law, then the burden of proof is reversed, and the employer is required to provide substantial evidence in court.

Lose, and the employee is entitled to all wages accrued as of the date of termination, compensation for moral damages, and reinstatement to their former position within the company. Where compensation is awarded instead, it cannot be less than the employee's regular emoluments for three months or more than double the legal severance indemnity.

Scaling down has its own trigger. Where an employer employs between 20 and 150 employees in each calendar month, the collective redundancy regime is triggered if more than six employees are dismissed within that month. Miss the consultation and filing steps and the dismissals will be deemed null and void.

2. Contractor status flips against you at nine months

Greece does not wait for a court to characterise the relationship. Freelance contracts are presumed to be employment contracts if the freelancer provides his or her services exclusively or mainly to the same employer for nine consecutive months, and while this could be overruled if the employer brings evidence to the contrary, you are the one bringing it.

The consequence compounds with the first exposure. A contractor reclassified as an employee was never registered with the social security fund on day one, because you engaged them as a contractor. That means the reclassified employment cannot be validly terminated either, alongside the back contributions and entitlements owed for the whole period.

Nine months is short enough to be a planning horizon rather than a distant risk. Track it from the engagement start date and decide before it arrives.

3. A labour inspectorate that can stop the work

Greek enforcement runs through the Labour Inspectorate, and its powers go beyond fines. It has the power to carry out inspections, issue recommendations, impose administrative sanctions and, where necessary, order the suspension of operations in cases of serious and imminent danger.

The most likely trigger is a filing failure rather than a pay failure. Where overtime is worked without prior notification to the authorities, the overtime is characterised by law as illegal overtime and must be compensated with the employee's hourly wage increased by 120%, three times the lawful 40% premium, on hours that were otherwise legitimate.

And paying a premium does not cure a breach. On sixth-day working, the payment of this premium does not release the employer from possible administrative sanctions related to the violation of the 5-day week. Paying correctly and filing incorrectly still leaves you exposed.

Each of these is decided by a filing rather than by a judgment call, and Skuad Shield supports compliance monitoring across supported markets, so your team is not following regulatory change on its own.

Here is what Skuad helps with:

• Compliance monitoring across supported markets, with updates as local employment requirements change
• Employment contract generation across 160+ countries, aligned with local labor laws and statutory requirements
• Termination and offboarding support, including notice periods, documentation, and severance calculations as required locally
• Statutory benefit and leave administration in line with local requirements across supported markets
• Worker classification checks that help flag engagement risk before an agreement is signed

Hire in Greece without setting up an entity

In Greece, the mistakes that cost you the most are made on someone's first day. Miss the social security registration then, and you cannot legally dismiss that person years later, whatever they do. Keep a contractor working mainly for you for nine months, and the law treats them as an employee unless you can prove otherwise.

Neither one shows up as a problem at the time. You find out when you try to end the relationship, and by then no payment closes it.

An entity puts every one of those filings on your own team from the first hire. An EOR signs the contract and completes the registrations for full-time employees. An AOR does the same for contractors.

Skuad acts as the legal employer across 160+ countries and supports contract generation, worker classification checks, payroll in 70+ currencies, and compliance monitoring from a single platform.

Book a demo to see how quickly Skuad can onboard your first Greece hire.

FAQs

1. What does it mean to hire in Greece through an EOR?

To hire in Greece through an Employer of Record means the provider acts as the legal employer on its own Greek registration, without you setting up an entity. It enrols the employee with EFKA from day one, processes euro payroll, withholds tax, and pays the 13th and 14th salaries, while you direct the work.

2. Can a foreign company hire in Greece without a local entity?

A foreign company can hire in Greece through an EOR, since it employs the person on its own Greek registration and handles EFKA enrolment before the start date. Setting up directly means registering with EFKA and the tax authority and running Greek payroll, which is why an EOR onboards in days against weeks for an entity.

3. How much does it cost to hire in Greece beyond gross salary?

Employer EFKA contributions run to roughly 22% of gross salary for pensions, healthcare, and related funds, subject to a monthly ceiling. On top comes the mandatory 13th and 14th month salaries, which add close to two months' pay a year, so the budget is well above the headline contribution rate.

4. What are the 13th and 14th month salaries when you hire in Greece?

They are mandatory extra payments beyond the twelve monthly salaries: a Christmas bonus of a full month, an Easter bonus of half a month, and a holiday allowance of half a month. Together they add roughly two months' pay annually, so annual cost is best modelled on fourteen months.

5. What are the work permit rules for non-EU hires in Greece?

EU and EEA nationals need no permit. Non-EU hires generally require a combined work and residence permit, and under Law 5275/2026 the sponsoring employer carries an active, ongoing duty to ensure the hire's legality. Where an EOR is the legal employer, the sponsorship remains with the EOR rather than with your company.

6. What are the misclassification risks when you hire contractors in Greece?

Greek courts weigh the real relationship over the contract label, and there is a hard trigger: a freelancer working exclusively or mainly for you for nine consecutive months is presumed an employee unless you prove otherwise. Reclassification brings back EFKA contributions, unpaid tax, and the 13th and 14th salaries retroactively.