Greece’s Golden Visa approvals nearly doubled in 2025 as applications fell

The ministry reports Golden Visa decisions by the month in which a permit decision was issued. Its December 2025 report recorded 620 initial approvals in January, 640 in February and progressively larger monthly totals through much of the year. July was the busiest month, with 916 initial permits approved.

The pace slowed in August, then rose again. October produced 875 initial approvals, while December added 828. Together, the 12 monthly figures produced the 8,879 total later highlighted by Enterprise Greece.

Those numbers were not limited to applications submitted during 2025. The same report showed 9,958 initial investor applications still pending at year-end, including 4,437 filed in 2024 and 4,846 filed in 2025.

The queue has since fallen. By July 2026, the ministry reported 6,315 pending initial investor cases, with 1,902 dating from 2024 and 1,965 from 2025. That is consistent with a higher case-clearing volume, not proof that every file was being processed faster or that new demand was accelerating. The Aegalis processing and backlog tracker (opens in a new tab) compiles the official monthly counts without turning them into a national processing-time estimate, which the ministry does not publish.

The underlying tables are live administrative records and are revised as cases are updated. A January 2026 edition, for example, revised several of the 2025 monthly totals and lifted the calendar-year count to 9,017. Enterprise Greece’s February newsletter retained the 8,879-versus-4,535 comparison. The small discrepancy is a useful warning against treating a rolling permit database like a fixed census.

Nationality figures answer a different question again. They show the stock of active initial investor permits at a point in time, not how many people from each country were approved during the year.

At the end of 2025, Chinese nationals held 9,926 active initial investor permits, or 47.9% of the total. Turkish nationals were second with 3,291, equal to 15.9%. Lebanon, Iran, the United Kingdom, Israel and the United States followed.

The year-over-year changes were large. Turkey’s count rose from 1,268 in December 2024 to 3,291 in December 2025, an increase of about 160%. Israel rose from 332 to 636, up 91.6%. China increased from 6,457 to 9,926, up 53.7%, while Iran rose 52.5% and the United States 49%.

The trend continued into 2026. By July, Chinese nationals held 12,485 active initial investor permits and Turkish nationals held 4,975. China’s share was 47.5%, while Turkey’s had reached 18.9%.

This is where the figures are often misread. Saying Turkish investors held 3,291 active initial permits at the end of 2025 is not the same as saying Greece approved 3,291 Turkish applications during 2025. The first number is a live stock. The second would be an annual flow, and the ministry’s nationality table does not present it that way.

Family permits also sit outside the main-investor count. At the end of 2025, the ministry listed 40,902 active initial permits for investors’ family members, compared with 20,732 for investors themselves. Combining the two without a label would more than double the apparent size of the investor population.

The 2024 application surge came as Greece changed the property rules and closed a transition window for purchases under the previous thresholds. Applicants who met the transition conditions could retain the older terms. The deadline likely encouraged some applicants to bring qualifying transactions forward, contributing to the 2024 filing surge.

Under the current property framework, the standard minimum is €800,000 in Attica, the Thessaloniki regional unit, Mykonos, Santorini and Greek islands with more than 3,100 residents. It is €400,000 elsewhere. The €250,000 property route is limited to qualifying commercial-to-residential conversions and listed-building restorations; it is not a nationwide price tier for an ordinary apartment.

The standard €400,000 and €800,000 routes require one property with at least 120 square metres of main space. Short-term letting and subleasing are prohibited for a property used to qualify for the permit.

Movingto’s Greece Golden Visa guide (opens in a new tab) places the property thresholds alongside the available financial-investment routes and family rules. Eligibility still depends on the route, asset and evidence in an individual file.

The strongest conclusion is about administrative volume. Greece issued far more initial investor permits in 2025 than it had in 2024, while fewer new applications entered the system. By July 2026, the stock of pending initial investor applications was lower than it had been at the end of 2025.

The nationality data shows a second change. China remained the dominant source country, but Turkey’s share rose quickly and continued to increase in the first seven months of 2026. Israel, Iran and the United States also recorded sizable gains in active initial permits during 2025.

What the data does not establish is why any individual applied, which property was purchased or whether the higher approval count will persist once older cases are cleared. Those questions require different evidence.

For now, the apparent contradiction is the point: Greece could nearly double approvals in a year when applications fell because the two figures measure different stages of the same process.

• Greek Ministry of Migration and Asylum, Legal Migration statistics archive (opens in a new tab)
• December 2024 legal-migration annex (opens in a new tab)
• December 2025 legal-migration annex, including Golden Visa applications, decisions and nationality tables (opens in a new tab)
• January 2026 legal-migration annex, including revised 2025 monthly decisions (opens in a new tab)
• July 2026 legal-migration annex, including revised application and active-permit totals (opens in a new tab)
• Enterprise Greece, News in brief, February 2026 (opens in a new tab)
• Official final text of Law 5100/2024 (opens in a new tab)