🇬🇷Greece · Banking
Greece — Banking
Greek banking 2026: the AFM number banks require, monthly fees at NBG, IRIS payments without an IBAN, cash limits, and TEKE deposit protection.
A Greek bank will turn away a salaried professional with a valid passport in hand, because the document that opens an account is the tax number, not the passport. Get the AFM first and the rest is ordinary paperwork. Get it late and nothing moves: no salary, no rent, no deed.
Greece’s four systemic banks and who actually supervises them
Greek retail banking is a four-name business: Alpha Bank, Eurobank, National Bank of Greece (NBG), and Piraeus Bank — the four Greek banking groups classified by the ECB as significant institutions under direct SSM supervision. Everything else authorised in the country is smaller and supervised nationally by the Bank of Greece rather than from Frankfurt. For a new customer the practical difference between the four is thinner than the branding suggests.
Direct ECB supervision is not a badge. It puts the four inside the same capital, reporting and resolution machinery as the largest banks in Germany or France, so a Greek account sits under EU-wide rules rather than purely national ones. Harmonised deposit protection and a statutory ceiling on transfer fees both follow from that.
Scale, meanwhile, is modest. The Hellenic Bank Association counts 24 members, ten of them full and the rest associated, and by its own end-2024 tally those members employ almost the whole domestic banking workforce and run almost every branch in the country.
Concentration is the number nobody official will confirm. Business-press and advisory overviews put the four systemic banks at roughly 90 % of the market between them, a figure that recurs consistently and has no Bank of Greece publication behind it. Read it as roughly nine in ten, not as a statistic.
What that concentration produces is uniformity: four apps, four tariff sheets, and one shared rail that changed Greek banking more than any of the four did alone.
Sources: ECB Banking Supervision, list of supervised entities, February 2025 edition; Hellenic Bank Association member statistics as at 31 December 2024. The Bank of Greece website was unreachable throughout research, and nothing in this chapter is taken from it.
IRIS: how Greece replaced the transfer form with a phone number
The everyday Greek transfer no longer needs an IBAN. IRIS addresses payments by the recipient’s mobile phone number or AFM, not an IBAN, moving money 24/7/365 between participating Greek banks in real time. Personal registration in is keyed to a mobile number; professional registration, for freelancers and sole traders, is keyed to the AFM. Two people banking at two different Greek institutions settle in seconds, at midnight, on a Sunday.
The daily limits are where most guides go wrong. You can send € 2,000 in a day in total, built from two separate legs of € 1,000 each: one to individuals, one to professionals and sole proprietorships.
Receiving works on different arithmetic. An individual takes in up to € 1,000 a day; a registered professional or sole proprietorship receives without a published limit. Pay a plumber and a friend on the same afternoon and it is the combined ceiling that governs, not the single leg.
On price, IRIS is free for personal-to-personal transfers at both banks whose tariffs were checked directly (NBG and Piraeus). One of those two caps its free tier per transfer and charges a small commission above it. Professional-registered payments are not free at either bank, which is tariff policy rather than statute.
The statutory ceiling underneath all of it is wider than the IRIS tariffs suggest. Article 48 §2 of law 5167/2024 caps the fee on a domestic transfer at € 0.50 going out and the same again coming in, counted separately.
It applies to individuals, sole traders and freelancers alike, on ordinary and instant transfers between two Greek banks made through web, mobile or internet banking, on daily amounts up to five thousand euro. It is not an IRIS-only rule and not a rule about professional receipts, which is how it is usually summarised.
Adoption is why the mechanics matter. The scheme operator’s 2025 review reports 111.4 million IRIS P2P transactions in 2025 (+90% year-on-year), 4.3 million registered users; IRIS P2Pro (business) reached 583,445 registered professionals; instant payments overall reached 122.1 million transactions in 2025 (+72.8%) and now account for 27% of all credit transfers processed by DIAS. A rail that barely existed a few years ago now carries something close to a quarter of every credit transfer in the country.
Acceptance stopped being optional for merchants on December 2025. Any Greek business already obliged to take card payments must take IRIS as well, wired into the cash register and reported to the tax authority in real time. For a resident that mandate is the difference between carrying cash to a taverna and never thinking about it. The date itself rests on business reporting and compliance guidance rather than on a statute opened directly, so treat it as reported rather than certain.
- Total you can send in a dayacross both legs below
- € 2,000verif. · 2026-08-18
- Per leg: to an individual, and to a professionalan individual also receives up to this much a day; a registered professional or sole proprietorship receives without limit
- € 1,000verif. · 2026-08-18
- Statutory fee ceiling per transfern.5167/2024 art.48 §2 — outgoing and incoming separately, individuals and freelancers alike, up to €5,000/day
- € 0.50verif. · 2026-08-18
- Mandatory for card-accepting businesses from
- December 2025verif. · 2026-08-17
Opening an account: the AFM comes before everything else
The order matters more than the paperwork. A Greek AFM has to exist before any bank will open an account, even though the letter of the rules does not strictly demand one from an applicant who already holds a tax number in a country inside the automatic-exchange system. Branch practice and statute part company here, and branch practice wins.
The number can be obtained before the account and before arrival, online or through a Greek tax representative at , the tax administration; what it does afterwards is the subject of the taxes chapter. Non-EU nationals need a temporary residence permit before they can get an , the social-security number, while EU citizens need no permit for it.
The pack a branch asks for is consistent across every guide that describes it: a valid passport or EU national ID with a copy, the AFM or an accepted foreign tax number, proof of an address at home or in Greece issued within roughly the last three months, and, very often, a Greek mobile number for two-factor confirmation.
Non-residents can usually start remotely, by video identity check or by giving a Greek lawyer or accountant power of attorney, though a branch visit is commonly still needed to finish, more often for non-EU applicants than for EU ones. None of that is law. It is what banks do, it varies by branch, and the only reliable move is to ask before booking a flight around the answer.
Sourcing: the AFM-first sequence and the document list rest on five independent relocation and tax-advisory guides that agree with one another. ΑΑΔΕ’s own site returned an access block on every attempt during research, so neither point is confirmed against a first-party source.
What a Greek account costs in 2026, now that “free” has ended
Start with what costs nothing, because that half of the law goes unmentioned almost everywhere. Under article 48 §1 of law 5167/2024, no fee of any kind may be charged for: payment orders and standing orders made through digital channels to the State, social-insurance funds, local authorities and other general-government bodies, and to electricity, gas, water, telecoms and insurance companies; balance and transaction enquiries at another bank’s ATM; cash withdrawal at another bank’s ATM in a municipal unit served by only one bank’s ATM; and prepaid-card top-ups and unloads up to €100 per day through digital channels. For a new arrival that covers the tax office, the social-insurance fund, the municipality and every utility bill, paid from the app at no charge, and it binds every payment service provider supervised by the Bank of Greece.
2026 is the year the free current account ended. Greek retail banking had never charged a monthly maintenance fee before this year, and the largest banks introduced one within weeks of each other.
The rollout, as reported: Greece’s major banks introduced monthly current/savings-account maintenance fees in 2026 for the first time — NBG and Alpha Bank at €0.80/month, Eurobank’s “My Blue Advantage” tier at €0.60/month (with a payroll/pension exemption) — covering an estimated 35.6 million active accounts nationwide.
Only the NBG figure rests on a document opened directly. Its own tariff sheet sets € 0.80 a month on basic savings, current and payroll accounts, waived in the month of opening or conversion, with an unpaid balance quietly downgrading the account. Alpha’s and Eurobank’s numbers come from business press, because both banks blocked access to their tariff PDFs throughout research.
Exemptions matter more than the headline rate. At least one of the three ties its waiver to a payroll or pension credit, so a salary landing in the account can cancel the charge, while a dormant account held by a non-resident pays in full.
Cards are the other standing charge. Both banks whose tariffs could be read price a debit card identically: € 6 a year at NBG and € 6 at Piraeus, charged on issue and then on each anniversary, with the first card on a new Piraeus account free. Transfers stay bounded by the € 0.50 statutory ceiling in either direction.
The amounts are trivial next to what the account does. The change is not. An account that had cost nothing for a generation stopped being free inside a single year, across essentially every active account in the country, and the annoyance it generated in Greece ran far ahead of the euro amounts involved.
- NBG basic account, monthly
- € 0.80verif. · 2026-08-17
- NBG debit card, annual
- € 6verif. · 2026-08-17
- Piraeus debit card, annual
- € 6verif. · 2026-08-17
Cash limits, the real-estate payment ban, and where Greek mortgage rates actually sit
Cash stops working at € 500 in Greek retail. A sale or service invoice to a private individual at or above that figure has to be settled by card or another electronic instrument, a ceiling cut from a considerably higher one by the 2016 amendment that set it.
The obvious workaround closed on May 2026. From that date the threshold applies to the total value of a transaction rather than to each receipt or instalment, so splitting a payment into smaller cash tranches no longer keeps it lawful. A business that accepts an over-threshold cash payment is fined double what it took.
Property is stricter again: since December 2023 a purchase price must move entirely through bank payment instruments, and a deed recording any cash instalment is void by operation of law. Note the year. Several English-language property-law sites date the same rule to December 2024, a transcription error that has propagated between them, while the statute and its reference are unambiguous.
Mortgage pricing needs two numbers rather than one, and in the first half of 2026 the two moved in opposite directions. On the ECB series covering all initial-fixation periods, new Greek housing loans averaged 3.23 % in June 2026 against 3.48 % for the euro area as a whole. That pairing is like for like, and on it Greece is the cheaper market.
The floating-rate series tells a different story. Greek variable-rate loans fixed for up to a year stood at 3.56 % in June and were rising, while the blended figure fell every month of the same half-year. Quoting the floating Greek rate against the euro-area blended average would manufacture a gap the data does not show.
Borrowing capacity is capped by regulation rather than by the bank: loan-to-value at origination capped at 90% for first-time buyers and 80% for second/subsequent buyers; debt-service-to-income at origination capped at 50% for first-time buyers and 40% for second/subsequent buyers, applicable from 1 January 2025. That measure is a numbered Bank of Greece executive act, although no primary copy of it could be opened during research.
Foreign applicants rarely see those ceilings. What brokers report is narrower: mortgage-broker guidance (not a regulatory rule) reports non-resident and foreign buyers typically obtaining lower LTV than the 80-90% regulatory ceiling — commonly cited at 50-65%, sometimes split EU residents (up to ~60-70%) vs non-EU (as low as 50%) — with a 35-50% deposit, a heavier documentation burden, an interest-rate premium of roughly 0.3-0.8 percentage points over resident pricing, and banks commonly declining mortgages under €50,000-75,000. Every source behind that sentence sells mortgage introductions, so read it as the direction of travel and not as a schedule of terms.
Deposit protection today, and the capital-controls history that still shapes habits
Deposit protection runs through , which covers € 100,000 per depositor per credit institution, whatever the number of accounts, the currency, or the branch. It is a private-law body supervised by the Ministry of Finance rather than a government agency, a distinction worth keeping straight against state-run schemes elsewhere.
A second layer catches the awkward month after a house sale. A temporary high balance of up to € 300,000 is covered on top of the standard limit, for six months, on funds traceable to a listed life event: sale of a private residence, a pension lump sum, an inheritance, a division of property between spouses. Payout on a failure runs within 7 days, and those are working days rather than calendar ones.
Investments sit under a separate roof on far less generous terms. The investor-compensation scheme covers eligible investment services up to € 30,000 per investor per institution, on a timeline measured in months rather than days, and it answers for a failed institution rather than for a bad investment. At the end of 2025 the fund reported €1.84 billion (€1,837.3 million) in readily available resources as at end-2025.
The last piece of Greek banking anxiety is a closed file. Greece imposed capital controls by legislative act on July 2015, after roughly three weeks of bank holidays and cash queues, and repealed them in full on September 2019. Just over four years of restrictions, closed for more than six.
Older guides still describe withdrawal ceilings that no longer exist, and some older residents still bank as though they might return. Neither is a constraint on an account opened today.
What survives is the sequence: the AFM first, then the account, then everything the account unlocks. The Greece landing checklist sets those steps in the order a branch will accept them, so open the Greece checklist next, or go back to the country overview if the country itself is still an open question.
Frequently asked
What do I need to open a bank account in Greece as a foreigner?
In practice a Greek AFM before anything else. The letter of the rules is looser, but no branch behaves that way. Beyond the AFM: a passport or EU national ID, proof of address issued within about three months, and often a Greek mobile number for two-factor confirmation.
Is banking still free in Greece in 2026?
No. 2026 is the first year Greek retail banking has charged a monthly maintenance fee. NBG’s basic savings, current and payroll accounts cost € 0.80 a month, waived in the month of opening, on the bank’s own published tariff. Alpha and Eurobank were reported at similar levels, neither verified directly.
What is IRIS, and do I need an IBAN to use it?
IRIS is Greece’s instant-payment scheme, and no IBAN is involved: payments go by mobile number, or by AFM for registered professionals, and settle in real time. You can send € 2,000 a day in total, made of € 1,000 to individuals and the same again to professionals. An individual receives up to € 1,000 a day; a registered professional receives without a published limit.
Which Greek bank transactions are free by law?
Article 48 of law 5167/2024 bans any fee on digital payments to the State, social-insurance funds, local authorities, and to electricity, gas, water, telecoms and insurance companies. Balance enquiries at another bank’s ATM are free too. Transfers between two Greek banks are capped at € 0.50 outgoing and the same incoming, for individuals, sole traders and freelancers alike.
Are Greece’s 2015 capital controls still in effect?
No. They were imposed by legislative act on July 2015 and repealed in full on September 2019, which puts the episode more than six years in the past. Nothing about opening or running a Greek account today is affected. Older guides listing daily withdrawal ceilings describe a regime that no longer exists.
How much of my deposit is protected if a Greek bank fails?
€ 100,000 per depositor per credit institution through ΤΕΚΕ, whatever the number of accounts, the currency or the branch. Compensation is paid within 7 days of deposits becoming unavailable, counted in working days. A temporary top-up to € 300,000 covers funds traceable to a listed life event, such as a home sale, for six months.
Can I pay for a Greek property purchase in cash?
No. Since December 2023 the whole purchase price must move through bank payment instruments, and a deed recording any cash instalment is void by operation of law. The general retail cash ceiling of € 500 is a separate, much lower bar. Several English-language property sites wrongly date the ban to 2024.
Are Greek mortgage rates higher or lower than the euro-area average?
Lower, on the only comparison that is like for like. New Greek housing loans across all initial-fixation periods averaged 3.23 % in June 2026 against 3.48 % for the euro area on the identical ECB series. A separate Greek floating-only series stood at 3.56 % and was rising, so the answer depends on which series is quoted.
Verified · 2026-08-17