The Greek Golden Visa and a mortgage: what UK buyers need to check first

Why this route is open to you at all

Greece's residence-by-investment permit, known everywhere as the Golden Visa, is for non-EU nationals. While Britain was in the EU, a British buyer could live in Greece as of right and had no use for it. Since 2021 UK citizens are third-country nationals in Greek law, which closed the easy route and opened this one. As our guide to what Brexit actually changed for UK buyers sets out, the same reclassification that moved you into a tighter lending category also made you eligible for a programme you could not have used before.

It matters that the route still exists at all. Spain closed its property-based investor residence programme and Portugal removed real estate from its qualifying list. Greece kept property, tightened it, and raised the price. The legal basis is Article 100 of the Migration Code, Law 5038/2023, substantially amended by Law 5100/2024, and the Ministry of Migration and Asylum issued an explanatory circular numbered 1/2026 in April 2026 to settle how the amended rules are applied in practice. A further consolidating migration law, reported as Law 5275/2026, came into force earlier in 2026. The programme is therefore live but genuinely moving, which is the first reason not to plan around a figure you read in an older article.

What the 2024 reform did to the threshold

Until 2024 the headline number was a single nationwide minimum. It is now tiered by where the property is, and the gap between the tiers is wide enough to change which regions you look at.

In the Attica region, the regional unit of Thessaloniki, Mykonos, Santorini and islands with populations above roughly 3,100 inhabitants, the qualifying real estate investment is €800,000. In the rest of the country it is €400,000. There is a third, lower tier of €250,000, but it is narrow: it applies where a property in lawful non-residential use is converted to residential use, or where a listed or preservable building is restored or rebuilt. The conversion or restoration has to be finished before the permit application is submitted, not promised, and the concession is commonly described as available once only for a given property, so a buyer purchasing it afterwards cannot claim the same tier.

Two further conditions sit on top of the money. For the €400,000 and €800,000 routes the property must be a single unit with a main living area of at least 120 square metres, and the thresholds now refer to one property rather than a basket of smaller ones, so combining two apartments to reach the figure no longer works. The 120 square metre condition does not apply to the €250,000 conversion and restoration route. Treat all of these as the shape of the rules and have a Greek immigration lawyer confirm the current figures and the tier for your specific address before you commit, because the tier boundaries have been redrawn more than once.

The question the brochures skip: can a mortgage count?

This is the point where a mortgage site has something to add that a general Golden Visa page does not. The short answer, as the rules are commonly applied, is no. The qualifying investment has to be your own money, and the borrowed part of the price does not count toward it.

The clearest evidence of that is in the paperwork Greece asks for. The official description of the permit application requires proof that the agreed price has been paid in full before the application is submitted, through traceable channels: a crossed bank cheque or a credit transfer to the seller's account at a Greek institution, or a card payment through a Greek payment provider, evidenced by a notarial certificate from the notary who drew up the transfer deed stating the parties, the property, the agreed consideration, the method of payment and the details of how it was executed. There is no version of that certificate that says a bank advanced part of the price and the rest is outstanding.

Greek immigration lawyers answering this question publicly are consistent about the consequence. The qualifying amount is expected to arrive from the applicant's own funds rather than from borrowing, and the property is expected to be clear of mortgages and prenotations of mortgage when the application is made. A Greek lender, meanwhile, will register exactly such a prenotation as its security, which is the direct collision: the lender's charge is the thing the application needs the title to be free of. Because this rests on administrative practice and on lawyers' reading of it rather than on a single published sentence, it is a point to get in writing from a Greek immigration lawyer for your own purchase, not a point to assume from this guide.

The planning consequence is blunt. If residence is the reason you are buying, the cash requirement is not a deposit, it is the whole qualifying amount plus the purchase costs. At the €400,000 tier that is €400,000 of your own money before taxes and fees, and the purchase costs for a Greek property commonly land in the region of 7 to 10 per cent of the price on top of it. If you had assumed a 70 per cent Greek mortgage would cover most of that, you are roughly €280,000 short.

One caveat on that range: it assumes today's 3.09 per cent transfer tax. In early September 2026 the Greek government announced that transfer tax on homes bought by individuals from outside the EU and EEA would rise to 15 per cent (about 15.45 per cent with the municipal surcharge) from 1 July 2027. As reported, the exemptions cover long-term residents, Greek expatriates and EU and EEA nationals, and do not single out residence-by-investment buyers. As of 10 October 2026 it is an announcement, not law, so ask your lawyer how it would apply to a purchase you expect to complete after June 2027.

Where borrowing still fits

None of this means a mortgage is irrelevant to a Golden Visa purchase. It means the borrowing has to sit either above the threshold or after it.

Above the threshold is the simpler case. If the property costs more than the tier requires, the part of the price above the qualifying minimum is a different question from the part below it, and some buyers finance that excess. Whether a given structure is accepted depends on the file and on how the payment is evidenced, so it is a question for the lawyer handling the application rather than a general rule to rely on.

After the permit is the more common answer. Greek lawyers describe mortgaging the property once the residence permit has been issued as possible, on the bank's ordinary terms, which releases capital against an asset you have already bought outright. That is a refinancing conversation rather than a purchase one, and it depends on a Greek lender being willing to lend to a non-resident third-country borrower on that property at that time, which is not guaranteed.

There is a third route that sidesteps the conflict entirely, and for British owners it is often the practical one: raise the money in sterling before you buy. Borrowing against a UK home through a remortgage, further advance or second charge produces cash in your own hands, which then arrives at the Greek notary as your own funds rather than as a Greek bank's charge on the Greek title. It carries its own risks, including putting your UK home behind the borrowing and taking on euro exposure on an asset financed in sterling, and it should be assessed on those terms rather than chosen only because it is administratively tidier.

What the permit gives you, and what it does not

The permit is granted for five years and is renewable while the qualifying investment is maintained, and renewal is not automatic. There is generally no minimum number of days a year you have to spend in Greece to keep it, which is unusual among residence permits and is much of its appeal to people who want the option rather than the move.

What it is not is a work permit. The permit does not ordinarily give unrestricted access to salaried employment in Greece, which catches out buyers who assume residence and the right to earn are the same thing. Nor is it citizenship. Naturalisation is a separate process under Greek nationality law with its own residence, language and integration requirements, commonly described as needing in the region of seven years of continuous lawful residence, and years spent holding a permit you rarely use are not the same as years of residence. Anyone buying with a passport in mind should test that assumption with a Greek immigration lawyer before, not after, spending the money.

One condition deserves naming on its own because it is easy to miss and expensive to breach. Selling the property during the validity of the permit causes the permit to be revoked at the same time. The investment is not a position you can trade out of while keeping the residence.

The letting restriction changes the investment case

Property bought to qualify for the permit may not be let on a short-term basis through the sharing-economy platforms, which rules out the Airbnb-style letting that a great many buyers of Greek holiday property have in their spreadsheet. Long-term letting is not caught by the restriction. Breach puts the permit at risk of revocation, and a substantial administrative fine is reported alongside that, so this is not a rule to test.

For a UK buyer this is where the two halves of the decision meet. A mortgaged holiday property let out in high season has rental income that helps service the loan. A Golden Visa property is bought with your own capital and cannot be let on the basis most holiday-home projections assume. Those are different investments with different returns, and the one you can afford may not be the one you wanted. Work out which you are actually buying before you choose a region, because the regional tier, the 120 square metre condition and the letting restriction together narrow the field considerably.

If you do not take this route

Most British buyers of Greek property will not qualify, and will not want to tie up that much capital. That is a perfectly reasonable answer, but it leaves the time limit in place, and the time limit is the thing people underestimate.

As a third-country national without a residence permit or national visa you may spend up to 90 days in any rolling 180-day period across the Schengen area. Owning the house does not extend that by a single day, and the allowance is consumed by any Schengen travel, not only time in Greece, so a spring week in France comes out of the same budget as August in the Peloponnese. For a family used to spending the spring and most of the summer at their place, that is a real change in what the property is for.

If the honest answer to how much of the year you intend to be there is more than three months, then the immigration question and the finance question have to be solved together, and the immigration one should be solved first. National visa and residence routes other than investment exist, and some of them do not require you to put €400,000 of cash into a house. A Greek immigration lawyer is the right first call, before a lender and before an offer.

Questions UK buyers ask

Continue your research

• Brexit and Greek mortgages: what actually changed
• The cost of buying property in Greece: a realistic budget
• Using UK home equity to buy in Greece
• Start a personal Greek mortgage scan