Hiring employees in Greece in 2026: EOR structure, costs, and compliance

A Greek hire can be running on payroll in weeks rather than the months an entity setup absorbs, but Greece places more of the legal risk on the client company than most European markets do. A business that takes on a worker supplied by a Greek temporary employment agency is jointly liable for that worker’s wages and social contributions, and a placement left to run past 36 months converts into permanent employment with the client itself.

Businesses can hire in Greece without establishing their own entity by using a workforce management platform such as Boundless, a Payoneer company, which supports local employment, onboarding, payroll, benefits, and compliance.

Greece has no employer-of-record licence, and it no longer has a temporary employment agency licence either. Law 3919/2011 abolished the administrative licence that once governed the sector. What replaced it is a notification regime: a provider intending to operate as a temporary employment agency, an Επιχείρηση Προσωρινής Απασχόλησης or ΕΠΑ, notifies the Directorate of Employment at the Ministry of Labour and Social Security and evidences that it meets the statutory operating conditions.

Where the notifying party falls short, the authority can prohibit the operation within three months. Presidential Decree 80/2022 recodified the framework previously set out in Law 4052/2012, which transposed the EU temporary agency work directive, and Presidential Decree 62/2025 carried it into the current Labour Law Code.

Notification is the entry point, not the whole test. Two financial conditions still attach to the activity. An agency must lodge two bank letters of guarantee, one covering employee remuneration with the labour ministry and a second covering social insurance contributions with e-EFKA.

Those amounts are revisable every two years by ministerial decision and scale with the number of temporary employees under contract, with supplementary guarantees due within three months of any increase. An agency is also barred from carrying on business outside a narrow permitted scope covering temporary employment provision, job placement mediation, HR assessment and training, and vocational guidance.

The minimum capital requirement that once applied no longer does. Law 2956/2001 originally set it at €176,083, and Law 4093/2012 abolished it, leaving agencies to follow the ordinary capital rules for whichever corporate form they adopt. Operating outside the notification regime draws administrative fines between €3,000 and €30,000 depending on severity, a separate flat €10,000 penalty with suspension of up to three days for unnotified operation, and criminal exposure of up to two years’ imprisonment.

Two rules sit underneath the structure and both point at the client.

The first is equal treatment. For the duration of an assignment, the basic working conditions of a temporary worker, expressly including pay, must be at least those that would have applied had the worker been recruited directly by the client for the same position. The obligation applies from day one, with no qualifying period in the Greek transposition, and extends the protections covering pregnant and nursing employees and the general non-discrimination rules to temporary workers. A worker between assignments must still be paid no less than the statutory minimum. The Labour Inspectorate publishes the temporary worker rights that follow from it.

The second is liability. Under Article 124(4)(a) of Law 4052/2012, the agency and the client are jointly and severally liable to the worker for satisfaction of wage rights and for payment of social insurance contributions alike. The default position is that a client cannot transfer that exposure to the provider by contract, because the worker holds a direct claim against both.

The same paragraph then supplies the exception, and it is the reason the bank guarantees described earlier matter commercially rather than only procedurally. The client’s liability is suspended, dropping from primary to subsidiary, where two conditions hold together: the contract between agency and client states that the agency is the party liable for paying remuneration and contributions, and the worker’s wage and insurance claims can be satisfied by calling on the guarantees lodged under Article 126. A client that has neither checked the guarantees nor allocated the obligation in writing is exposed on the default footing. Where a role is genuinely independent contracting rather than employment, a contractor arrangement may be considered under a separate framework, subject to the appropriate classification assessment.

Providers can also employ through an owned Greek entity under ordinary labour law instead. That route removes the client-side constructs entirely: there is no client company in the statutory sense, no 36-month ceiling, no automatic conversion, and no joint liability. The employing entity is the direct employer carrying the full statutory load. Which of the two structures a provider uses is therefore the first question to ask, and the research behind this guide found no single source that labels the direct-employment route as an alternative, so the contrast is drawn from the statutory scope of each regime rather than from published guidance.

Sequencing matters more in Greece than in most markets, because one step has to be completed before the employee starts work and another before the employment declaration survives at all.

• Confirm the engagement model: Establish whether the role is structurally employment or genuine contracting, and where an employment relationship is the right answer, decide whether the placement runs through the agency framework or through direct employment by a Greek entity.
• Agree the gross salary against the 2026 floor and the applicable sectoral agreement: The statutory minimum is a floor, not the operative rate where a sector agreement covers the role.
• Submit the employment commencement declaration through ERGANI II: From 16 February 2026 the declaration must be filed exclusively as a Digital Employment Commencement Declaration, carrying the essential contract terms including probation, work schedule, unpredictable working-pattern flags, and managerial status.
• Obtain the employee’s digital acceptance before the start time: Acceptance runs through the myErgani application and is mandatory. Where the employee does not accept before work begins, the hiring declaration is revoked automatically.
• Check whether the Digital Work Card obligation binds the role: Coverage has expanded sector by sector through 2025 and 2026, and once triggered by an employer’s principal activity code it applies to all employees physically present at the workplace.
• Register with e-EFKA and set up monthly payroll: Contributions and income tax withholding run monthly against the progressive scale.
• Budget for 14 payments rather than 12: The statutory bonuses described below fall due on fixed calendar dates and are not discretionary.

The statutory minimum gross monthly salary is €920 for salaried employees and the minimum gross daily wage is €41.09 for wage earners, both effective 1 April 2026 under Joint Ministerial Decision 8934/27.3.2026, published at Government Gazette FEK B’ 1759. The rise of 4.55% over the previous €880 and €39.30 also triggers automatic adjustments across 23 linked social benefits. Because Greek pay runs on 14 payments, the statutory minimum wage works out at an effective average of roughly €1,073 a month.

Three further payments sit on top of the twelve monthly salaries, and all three are statutory rather than customary:

Each bonus prorates where service is shorter than the qualifying window, at 2/25 of monthly salary per completed 19-day period for the Christmas payment and 1/15 of the half-salary per completed 8-day period for the Easter payment. The rules are set out in the ministry’s guidance on holiday allowances.

Employer social insurance contributions to e-EFKA run at 22.29% of gross salary for a standard full-time private-sector salaried employee, against 13.87% on the employee side, under insurance package code 101:

Lower and higher figures both circulate and both are real, which is worth knowing before comparing quotes. An employer rate of 21.79% reflects sectors carrying a 0.50 percentage point reduction under subsidised or regional schemes, and a figure nearer 24.41% reflects heavy and unhealthy occupations, which attract additional pension and hazard surcharges under their own package codes. At 22.29%, a €1,000 gross salary costs an employer about €1,223 a month before bonuses.

Contributions apply up to a monthly ceiling of €7,761.94 for 2026, raised 2.5% from €7,572.62 by ministerial decision published at FEK B’ 318 on 29 January 2026. The ceiling applies to every payroll run subject to contributions rather than to annual earnings, so it applies separately to each of the twelve monthly salaries and to the Christmas, Easter and holiday payments, giving an effective annual cap of €108,667.16.

Personal income tax changed for 2026. Law 5246/2025, gazetted at FEK A’ 198 on 11 November 2025 and effective from 1 January 2026, cut most brackets by two percentage points and inserted a new band:

Age and family status move those rates considerably. Employees aged 25 or under pay nothing on income up to €20,000, and those aged 26 to 30 pay 9% rather than 20% on the band between €10,000 and €20,000. The two lowest bands step down progressively with dependent children, reaching zero in the lower band at four or more. A tax credit runs from €777 with no children to €1,780 plus €220 per additional child at five or more, tapering by €20 per €1,000 of taxable income above €12,000 except for the largest families. The finance ministry publishes the current income taxation framework. The special solidarity contribution was abolished for income earned from 1 January 2023 and remains abolished.

Full-time work is 40 hours a week across all sectors, arranged either as five 8-hour days or six days of 6 hours and 40 minutes, against a hard statutory ceiling of 8 hours a day and 48 hours a week. Overtime runs in tiers rather than at a single premium:

Law 5239/2025, gazetted at FEK A’ 178 on 17 October 2025, permits employees to opt into extended daily hours of up to 13 hours in a single day, counted across one or more employers, capped at 37.5 days a year and compensated at the 40% rate. It expressly prohibits dismissal or adverse treatment of an employee who declines. The 40-hour standard week and the 150-hour annual overtime cap both survive it, and the same law amended the overtime tiers in the table above.

Annual leave scales with service and with the shape of the working week:

From 2026 leave may be split into more than one instalment, where previously it was largely taken as a single block, provided one instalment covers at least five working days on a five-day week or six on a six-day week. Instalments can run to 31 March of the following year.

Severance for dismissal without notice scales with tenure to a maximum of 12 months’ salary at 16 years of service and beyond, calculated on the last month’s regular gross salary. Where an employer observes the statutory notice period, statutory severance is halved. A remuneration ceiling applies for calculation purposes under Article 5 of Law 3198/1955, set at eight times the daily wage of an unskilled worker multiplied by 30. Because that separate reference tier was abolished by Law 4093/2012, the formula now runs on the statutory minimum daily wage of €41.09, putting the 2026 ceiling at €9,861.60 a month. Employees whose service predates 12 November 2012 fall under transitional tenure-freeze and cumulative-cap rules that can add further months.

Two rules govern the opening period and they need reading together. Article 4 of Law 5053/2023 inserted Article 1A into the Individual Labour Law Code, allowing employer and employee to agree a probationary period of up to six months on an indefinite contract, down from the twelve months permitted before. Where the employer judges probation unsuccessful, the contract is dissolved automatically, with no statutory notice period and no severance, and the time served still counts as working time for rights already accrued. Article 19 of the same law then inserted Article 325A, under which an indefinite contract may be terminated without notice and without severance at any point in its first twelve months unless the parties agree otherwise.

The two interlock rather than stack. Where a probationary period has been agreed and completed successfully, Article 325A counts it toward the twelve months, so the opening window is twelve months in total rather than six plus twelve. Every termination, including the automatic dissolution of a probation, must be declared through ERGANI II within four working days. Protected categories include pregnant and nursing employees, employees on parental leave, employees exercising statutory rights, and union representatives.

Several changes land in the same year, and three of them are operational rather than merely fiscal.

The minimum wage rose to €920 and €41.09 on 1 April. Personal income tax was recut by Law 5246/2025 from 1 January. From 16 February, employment commencement must be filed exclusively through the ERGANI II digital declaration with pre-start employee acceptance. The Digital Work Card continued expanding through further pilot phases under Ministerial Decision 18047/29.06.2026, with administrative sanctions for the latest tranche applying from 16 November 2026.

Greece transposed the EU Pay Transparency Directive through Law 5316/2026, passed on 2 July 2026 and gazetted at FEK A’ 105 on 6 July, becoming the fifth member state to complete transposition and the first in southern Europe. Structural provisions took effect on publication, while the employer-facing obligations are deferred to 1 November 2026. Those include pay information to candidates before interview, a two-month deadline to answer an employee’s request for pay information, gender pay gap reporting, and joint pay assessments triggered by an unexplained gap of 5% or more left uncorrected for six months. Reporting thresholds phase in from 7 June 2027 for employers of 250 or more, and every three years from the same date for those between 150 and 249.

Separately, the Action Plan for the Promotion of Collective Bargaining 2026 to 2030 cut the coverage threshold for extending a sectoral agreement to non-signatory employers from 50% to 40% of the sector workforce, and added a route that bypasses the quantitative test where the national union confederation and a national employers’ organisation co-sign. Terms of an expired agreement now continue to apply beyond the three-month post-expiry window until a new agreement or individual contract replaces them, which makes identifying the governing agreement a live question rather than a background one.

• Assuming an indemnity clause is enough: Joint and several liability is the default, and a bare indemnity does not remove the worker’s direct claim. Liability drops to subsidiary only where the contract names the agency as the party liable for pay and contributions and the Article 126 guarantees can actually satisfy the claims. Both limbs have to be true.
• Letting a placement drift past 36 months: The conversion is automatic and it lands with the client, not the agency. Re-engaging the same worker after an assignment ends without a 45-day break triggers the same conversion under a separate provision.
• Budgeting 12 salaries: The Christmas, Easter and holiday payments take annual pay to roughly 14 monthly equivalents. A cost model built on 12 understates the salary line by about 17%.
• Applying the wrong e-EFKA package code: The 22.29% employer rate covers standard salaried employment. Heavy and unhealthy occupations carry surcharges that push the employer side toward 24.41%, and a role misclassified into the standard code understates contributions by more than two percentage points of gross.
• Missing the myErgani acceptance step: Acceptance is required before the employee starts work, and the consequence of missing it is revocation of the hiring declaration rather than a late-filing penalty.
• Assuming the statutory minimum is the operative floor: Where a sectoral agreement covers the role, its rates govern, and the extension threshold dropped to 40% for 2026.