Employer of Record (EOR) & PEO Services in Greece: 2026 Hiring Guide

Hiring in Greece without a local entity usually means choosing between an Employer of Record (EOR) and a Professional Employer Organization (PEO). An EOR becomes the legal employer of your Greek hire on your behalf — handling payroll, tax, social security, and compliance — so you can be running payroll within days instead of the months it takes to incorporate a subsidiary. A PEO, by contrast, co-employs staff alongside an entity you already operate in Greece, which only works if you’ve already set one up locally. For most companies testing the Greek market or hiring a handful of specialists, an EOR is the faster, lower-risk route; a PEO only makes sense once you already have a registered Greek entity and simply want payroll and HR support layered on top of it.

Why Greece Is Attracting International Employers

Greece has become a increasingly common stop on EU expansion roadmaps — not just for tourism and shipping, the sectors it’s traditionally known for, but for technology, renewable energy, and business process outsourcing. The country offers EU market access, a well-educated, multilingual workforce, and labor costs that remain lower than Western Europe, while Athens and Thessaloniki have developed real tech and BPO hiring pools. Greece’s own government has leaned into this with a Digital Nomad Visa and a 50% personal income tax relief scheme aimed specifically at attracting relocating professionals and remote workers (more on both below). For a fast-facts snapshot of Greece’s employment landscape, see our Greece country overview; this guide goes deeper into the EOR-vs-PEO decision, current 2026 statutory costs, and work-permit routes it doesn’t cover.

EOR vs PEO in Greece: Timeline to Hire

Setting up a Greek subsidiary (most commonly an EPE or an IKE, Greece’s limited-liability structures) typically takes 4 to 8 weeks once you account for notarization, tax registration, EFKA (social security) enrollment, and opening a local bank account — and that’s before you’ve hired anyone. Working through an Employer of Record instead, a new hire in Greece can typically be onboarded and running payroll within 3 to 7 business days, since the EOR’s Greek entity and registrations are already in place. That speed matters most when you’re testing market fit, hiring a single specialist, or need to move faster than a competitor doing it the traditional way.

Statutory Employer Costs in Greece (2026)

Greece’s national minimum wage rose to €920 gross per month effective 1 April 2026, up from €880 — a roughly 4.5% increase set by ministerial decision. On top of gross salary, employers in Greece pay social security contributions to EFKA (the unified social security fund) at approximately 21.8% of gross pay, while employees contribute roughly 13.4% from their own salary — contributions on both sides are capped once monthly gross pay passes a ceiling (around €7,762/month in 2026). So budgeting for a Greek hire means adding roughly a fifth of base salary again in employer-side statutory cost, before bonuses, 13th/14th-month payments, or private benefits.

Personal income tax in Greece is progressive: broadly, 9% applies to income up to €10,000, 22% from €10,001–€20,000, 28% from €20,001–€30,000, 36% from €30,001–€40,000, and 44% above €40,000, with a tax credit available at the lower end. Employers aren’t directly responsible for these employee-side brackets, but they shape take-home pay expectations in salary negotiations — something a PEO and payroll partner handles as part of running compliant Greek payroll. These figures move with each year’s ministerial decisions and should be verified before finalizing an offer; this is general guidance, not tax or legal advice.

Probation, Notice Periods, and Severance

Greek labor law sets the standard probation period for an indefinite employment contract at up to six months. During probation, either the employer or the employee can end the relationship without notice or severance — a meaningfully longer trial window than in several other EU markets.

Once probation ends, notice periods and severance both scale with tenure. Employer-initiated notice generally runs: 1 month after 1–2 years of service, 2 months after 2–5 years, 3 months after 5–10 years, and 4 months after 10+ years. Severance pay (calculated on monthly salary, excluding bonuses) follows a similar escalating schedule — roughly 2 months’ pay after 1–4 years of service, rising through 3, 4, 5, and 6 months at later tenure brackets, and up to around 12 months’ pay for employees with 16 or more years of service. Critically, giving an employee the full statutory notice period in advance of termination halves the severance obligation — a structural incentive Greek employers use regularly, and one an EOR will apply correctly on your behalf without you needing to track Greece’s specific notice-vs-severance tradeoff yourself.

Working Hours, Leave, and Public Holidays

The standard Greek working week is 40 hours (8 hours/day), though employers can extend this to 45 hours a week (9-hour shifts over 5 days) with a statutory overtime premium of at least 20% above the normal hourly rate for the extra time. Statutory paid annual leave scales with length of service, and maternity leave runs 17 weeks, split before and after birth, with additional job-protection rules for roughly 18 months after a child’s birth. Greece observes the standard mix of EU/Orthodox Christian national holidays — including Greek Independence Day (25 March), Easter Monday (on the Orthodox calendar, which doesn’t always align with Western Easter), Labour Day (1 May), the Assumption (15 August), and Christmas — plus regional and optional observances employers should build into their annual calendar.

Work Permits and Visas for Hiring in Greece

EU/EEA/Swiss nationals can work in Greece without a permit. For non-EU hires, Greece participates in the EU Blue Card scheme for highly skilled workers, which requires a qualifying job offer above a minimum gross salary threshold set by the Greek government (thresholds are reviewed periodically, so confirm the current figure before extending an offer — Greece has historically sat among the lower-threshold EU states, which can make it a comparatively accessible Blue Card route). Outside the Blue Card, standard non-EU work permits require a labor-market test and employer sponsorship through Greece’s immigration authorities.

Greece has also built a dedicated Digital Nomad Visa, aimed at remote workers and freelancers employed by companies outside Greece, alongside a 50% personal income tax relief scheme for up to seven years for employees and self-employed professionals who relocate their tax residence to Greece — a notable incentive for companies looking to relocate international talent into the country rather than merely hire locally. None of this removes the underlying work-authorization and payroll-compliance requirements, which is exactly the administrative load an EOR absorbs for a company without its own Greek entity or in-country HR/legal team.

How an EOR Simplifies Compliance in Greece

Between EFKA registration, progressive income tax withholding, mandatory 13th/14th-month salary payments, tenure-based notice and severance calculations, and immigration sponsorship for non-EU hires, Greek employment compliance has real complexity for a company without a local HR and legal presence. A WeHireGlobally Employer of Record engagement means your Greek hire is legally employed on compliant local payroll, with HR compliance, contracts, and termination handled correctly from day one — while you keep full day-to-day operational control over their work. That’s particularly valuable in a market like Greece, where termination rules reward precise notice timing and getting it wrong can meaningfully increase severance cost.

Greece’s EU Pay Transparency Directive implementation deadline (June 2026) adds another compliance layer worth tracking if you’re hiring there — see our country-by-country Pay Transparency Directive guide for how Greece’s implementation compares to its EU neighbors. If you’re also evaluating other Balkan or Southern European markets, our Bulgaria EOR & PEO guide offers a useful statutory-cost comparison for the region.

What Makes Greece a Strong EOR Market

Beyond its EU membership and currency, Greece has quietly built specific industry strengths that make it more than a budget-hiring destination. Shipping and maritime services remain a genuine national specialty, Greece’s renewable-energy sector has expanded rapidly on the back of EU green-transition funding, and Athens and Thessaloniki have each developed real software and IT-services talent pools, often at a meaningful cost advantage to Western European hiring. Tourism and hospitality remain large employers too, but for most companies reading this guide, the more relevant draw is Greece’s growing technology and business-services workforce, paired with EU-standard data protection, contract law, and intellectual-property frameworks that reduce the legal friction of hiring there compared to many non-EU alternatives.

A Worked Example: Budgeting a Greek Hire

Say you want to hire a mid-level software engineer in Greece at a gross monthly salary of €2,800. Layer on employer EFKA contributions at roughly 21.8% (~€610/month), and your all-in monthly employment cost before any EOR service fee is approximately €3,410 — plus the 13th and 14th salary payments Greek employment custom and, in many cases, collective agreements require (effectively one extra month’s pay spread across Christmas, Easter, and summer, pushing the annualized employer cost higher than simply multiplying the monthly figure by twelve). An EOR quote will typically bundle the gross salary, statutory employer contributions, and a flat per-employee service fee into one predictable monthly invoice — which is also why it’s worth asking any EOR provider for a full cost breakdown up front rather than a single bundled number, so you can see exactly what’s statutory cost versus service margin.

Employee Benefits and Market Practice in Greece

Beyond the statutory minimums, Greek market practice includes the customary 13th and 14th salary payments noted above, and employer-provided supplementary health insurance is common, particularly once an employee has completed roughly 50 days of service within the prior 15 months — though Greek labor law does not mandate private health coverage outright, since employees are covered through EFKA’s national health system by default. Additional benefits such as meal vouchers, transportation allowances, and (less commonly) company vehicles or housing allowances appear in competitive offers, especially in Athens where cost of living is highest. None of these supplementary benefits are legally required, so what you offer is a market-competitiveness decision rather than a compliance one — but it’s worth benchmarking against local norms if you’re hiring in a competitive specialty like software engineering.

Step-by-Step: Hiring Your First Employee in Greece via EOR

In practice, hiring through an Employer of Record in Greece follows a consistent sequence: you and your candidate agree terms (salary, role, start date); the EOR drafts a compliant Greek employment contract reflecting those terms plus Greek statutory minimums; the candidate signs and completes any required documentation (tax registration number, EFKA enrollment, bank details for salary payment); and the EOR runs payroll from the agreed start date, withholding income tax and social contributions correctly and remitting them to the Greek authorities on schedule. For non-EU candidates, a work-permit or EU Blue Card application is layered into this timeline before the start date, which is the one step genuinely outside an EOR’s direct control — Greek immigration processing times, not the EOR’s own onboarding speed, become the limiting factor in that scenario.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does an Employer of Record cost in Greece?
EOR pricing is typically a flat monthly fee per employee plus the employee’s gross salary and Greece’s roughly 21.8% employer social security contribution — total cost is usually lower than the overhead of incorporating and running a Greek subsidiary for a small headcount.

Do I need a local entity to hire employees in Greece?
No. An Employer of Record lets you hire compliantly in Greece without registering a subsidiary — the EOR is the legal employer of record while you direct the employee’s day-to-day work.

What is the minimum wage in Greece in 2026?
Greece’s national minimum wage is €920 gross per month, effective 1 April 2026.

How long is the probation period in Greece?
Up to six months for an indefinite employment contract, during which either party may terminate without notice or severance.

Can a US or other non-EU company hire remote employees in Greece?
Yes — through an EOR, a non-EU company can hire Greek residents without establishing a local entity, and Greece’s EU Blue Card and Digital Nomad Visa programs offer routes for bringing foreign talent into the country as well.

Does Greece require 13th and 14th month salary payments?
Greek market custom and many collective agreements provide for extra salary payments around Christmas, Easter, and summer holidays — effectively an additional month’s pay spread across the year on top of the 12 regular monthly salaries. An EOR or PEO partner will budget and administer these correctly as part of running compliant Greek payroll.

Ready to hire in Greece without the setup overhead? Talk to WeHireGlobally about compliant EOR and PEO options for the Greek market.