Country-wide policy
The Immigration Code Was Signed in 2023, Postponed Before It Started, and Rewritten Twice in the First Four Months of 2026
Law 5038/2023 was published on 1 April 2023 and article 179 set it to come into force on 1 January 2024. It never did on that date: article 97 of Law 5079/2023, passed on 22 December 2023, replaced article 179 and moved commencement to 31 March 2024, taking the regulatory decisions issued under article 176 with it. Since then the Code has been amended at least three times in ways that reach the routes in these records. Article 64 of Law 5100/2024 replaced the investor article in April 2024 and reset the property thresholds. Law 5275/2026, on 6 February 2026, transposed the recast single-permit Directive and reworked some forty articles, among them the admission-volume procedure, the employer-call procedure, the student permit and its hours cap, the ten-year permit, the residence card for the family of a Greek, and article 3 of the free-movement decree. Law 5307/2026, on 11 June 2026, amended the long-term residence article. Anything written about Greek immigration law between April 2023 and March 2024 describes rules that had not started, and anything written before February 2026 describes work and study provisions that have since changed.
Topics it changes
- Visiting as a tourist
- Residency on passive income
- Residency through work
- Residency through investment
- Residency as a student
- Residency through marriage
- Residency through ancestry
- Residency under a regional treaty
What it requires
- Treat 31 March 2024, not 1 January 2024, as the date the Code began to apply
- Check the investor article against Law 5100/2024, not against the 2023 gazette
- Check the work and study articles against Law 5275/2026
- Check long-term residence against Law 5307/2026
At a glance
- Date the Code was published
- 1 April 2023, in ΦΕΚ Α' 81
The gazette issue's own masthead.
- Date it was first set to start
- 1 January 2024
Article 179(1) of Law 5038/2023 as enacted.
- Date it actually started
- 31 March 2024
Article 179(1) as replaced by article 97(3) of Law 5079/2023.
- Regulatory decisions under article 176
- May be issued from publication, but take effect no earlier than 31 March 2024
Article 179(2), final paragraph, as replaced by article 97(3) of Law 5079/2023.
- Amendments reaching these records
- Law 5100/2024 for the investor article, Law 5275/2026 for work, study and family, Law 5307/2026 for long-term residence
Article 64 of Law 5100/2024; articles 17, 18, 21, 25, 30, 31, 32, 38, 39 and 53 of Law 5275/2026; article 179 of Law 5307/2026.
- When Law 5275/2026 took effect
- On publication, 6 February 2026
Article 69 of Law 5275/2026, except where its individual provisions say otherwise.
What the law says
«η ισχύς του παρόντος αρχίζει την 1η Ιανουαρίου 2024»The commencement date as enacted, which never took effect.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
Greece's official publisher, a public service under the Presidency of the Government. It prints and circulates the Government Gazette, the Εφημερίδα της Κυβερνήσεως, in numbered series - Α' for laws, presidential decrees and acts of the Cabinet, Β' for ministerial decisions - and that is the whole of what it publishes. The address that matters is not et.gr. Its search application at search.et.gr builds every PDF link against an Azure storage account, and the live form is https://ia37rg02wpsa01.blob.core.windows.net/fek/<SS>/<YYYY>/<YYYY><SS><NNNNN>.pdf, where SS is the series number zero-padded to two digits, YYYY the year and NNNNN the issue number zero-padded to five: ΦΕΚ Α' 81 of 2023 is /fek/01/2023/20230100081.pdf, and ΦΕΚ Β' 3056 of 2013 is /fek/02/2013/20130203056.pdf. Every issue is a digitally signed PDF naming ΕΘΝΙΚΟ ΤΥΠΟΓΡΑΦΕΙΟ as its author, so what is served is the publisher's own artefact and not a mirror.
Standing: Issues the instrument
Cannot be cited for: It consolidates nothing. There is no official edition of any Greek statute as it now stands, no cut-off date to cite, and no address at which the Immigration Code, the Income Tax Code or the Code of Greek Nationality can be read as currently in force. The practical substitute is a drafting convention rather than a service: an amending Act usually reprints the whole amended article under the formula 'και το άρθρο N διαμορφώνεται ως εξής', so the current text of a provision lives in whichever issue last changed it, and the reader has to know which that is. It cannot be cited for the text of any article without first establishing that nothing has amended it. Two mechanical limits matter as well. The gazette has been set in two columns for most of its history, and the project's PDF extraction preserves the physical layout, so in a stored reading a line of the left column is followed immediately by a line of the right one - a quotation taken from an issue of 2024 or earlier has to fit inside a single line of a single column, around fifty characters. The layout changed to a single full-width column during 2025: the 2026 issues read as continuous prose and can be quoted at length. And issues from before roughly 2007 are set in fonts with a non-Unicode encoding: ΦΕΚ Α' 217 of 2004, which carries the Code of Greek Nationality, extracts entirely as Latin-1 mojibake and cannot be quoted at all. Gazette issues also carry one or two physically blank pages before the colophon, which a page-coverage check reports as empty. The host et.gr itself cannot be used: a request for the old /api/DownloadFeksApi/ endpoint is redirected to a bare IP address whose certificate no client can verify.
We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source
«αρχίζει την 31η Μαρτίου 2024»The replacement, in the Act that made it, three months into the Code's own transition and nine days before the original date.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
Greece's official publisher, a public service under the Presidency of the Government. It prints and circulates the Government Gazette, the Εφημερίδα της Κυβερνήσεως, in numbered series - Α' for laws, presidential decrees and acts of the Cabinet, Β' for ministerial decisions - and that is the whole of what it publishes. The address that matters is not et.gr. Its search application at search.et.gr builds every PDF link against an Azure storage account, and the live form is https://ia37rg02wpsa01.blob.core.windows.net/fek/<SS>/<YYYY>/<YYYY><SS><NNNNN>.pdf, where SS is the series number zero-padded to two digits, YYYY the year and NNNNN the issue number zero-padded to five: ΦΕΚ Α' 81 of 2023 is /fek/01/2023/20230100081.pdf, and ΦΕΚ Β' 3056 of 2013 is /fek/02/2013/20130203056.pdf. Every issue is a digitally signed PDF naming ΕΘΝΙΚΟ ΤΥΠΟΓΡΑΦΕΙΟ as its author, so what is served is the publisher's own artefact and not a mirror.
Standing: Issues the instrument
Cannot be cited for: It consolidates nothing. There is no official edition of any Greek statute as it now stands, no cut-off date to cite, and no address at which the Immigration Code, the Income Tax Code or the Code of Greek Nationality can be read as currently in force. The practical substitute is a drafting convention rather than a service: an amending Act usually reprints the whole amended article under the formula 'και το άρθρο N διαμορφώνεται ως εξής', so the current text of a provision lives in whichever issue last changed it, and the reader has to know which that is. It cannot be cited for the text of any article without first establishing that nothing has amended it. Two mechanical limits matter as well. The gazette has been set in two columns for most of its history, and the project's PDF extraction preserves the physical layout, so in a stored reading a line of the left column is followed immediately by a line of the right one - a quotation taken from an issue of 2024 or earlier has to fit inside a single line of a single column, around fifty characters. The layout changed to a single full-width column during 2025: the 2026 issues read as continuous prose and can be quoted at length. And issues from before roughly 2007 are set in fonts with a non-Unicode encoding: ΦΕΚ Α' 217 of 2004, which carries the Code of Greek Nationality, extracts entirely as Latin-1 mojibake and cannot be quoted at all. Gazette issues also carry one or two physically blank pages before the colophon, which a page-coverage check reports as empty. The host et.gr itself cannot be used: a request for the old /api/DownloadFeksApi/ endpoint is redirected to a bare IP address whose certificate no client can verify.
We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source
«Η ισχύς του παρόντος αρχίζει από τη δημοσίευσή του στην Εφημερίδα της Κυβερνήσεως»The February 2026 rewrite applied at once, except where its individual provisions provide otherwise. There was no transition for the twenty-hour student cap or the six-month contract.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
Greece's official publisher, a public service under the Presidency of the Government. It prints and circulates the Government Gazette, the Εφημερίδα της Κυβερνήσεως, in numbered series - Α' for laws, presidential decrees and acts of the Cabinet, Β' for ministerial decisions - and that is the whole of what it publishes. The address that matters is not et.gr. Its search application at search.et.gr builds every PDF link against an Azure storage account, and the live form is https://ia37rg02wpsa01.blob.core.windows.net/fek/<SS>/<YYYY>/<YYYY><SS><NNNNN>.pdf, where SS is the series number zero-padded to two digits, YYYY the year and NNNNN the issue number zero-padded to five: ΦΕΚ Α' 81 of 2023 is /fek/01/2023/20230100081.pdf, and ΦΕΚ Β' 3056 of 2013 is /fek/02/2013/20130203056.pdf. Every issue is a digitally signed PDF naming ΕΘΝΙΚΟ ΤΥΠΟΓΡΑΦΕΙΟ as its author, so what is served is the publisher's own artefact and not a mirror.
Standing: Issues the instrument
Cannot be cited for: It consolidates nothing. There is no official edition of any Greek statute as it now stands, no cut-off date to cite, and no address at which the Immigration Code, the Income Tax Code or the Code of Greek Nationality can be read as currently in force. The practical substitute is a drafting convention rather than a service: an amending Act usually reprints the whole amended article under the formula 'και το άρθρο N διαμορφώνεται ως εξής', so the current text of a provision lives in whichever issue last changed it, and the reader has to know which that is. It cannot be cited for the text of any article without first establishing that nothing has amended it. Two mechanical limits matter as well. The gazette has been set in two columns for most of its history, and the project's PDF extraction preserves the physical layout, so in a stored reading a line of the left column is followed immediately by a line of the right one - a quotation taken from an issue of 2024 or earlier has to fit inside a single line of a single column, around fifty characters. The layout changed to a single full-width column during 2025: the 2026 issues read as continuous prose and can be quoted at length. And issues from before roughly 2007 are set in fonts with a non-Unicode encoding: ΦΕΚ Α' 217 of 2004, which carries the Code of Greek Nationality, extracts entirely as Latin-1 mojibake and cannot be quoted at all. Gazette issues also carry one or two physically blank pages before the colophon, which a page-coverage check reports as empty. The host et.gr itself cannot be used: a request for the old /api/DownloadFeksApi/ endpoint is redirected to a bare IP address whose certificate no client can verify.
We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source
«άρθρου 100 και παρ. 49 άρθρου 176»From the heading of the amending article, which names what it replaces: article 100 of the Immigration Code and paragraph 49 of article 176.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
Greece's official publisher, a public service under the Presidency of the Government. It prints and circulates the Government Gazette, the Εφημερίδα της Κυβερνήσεως, in numbered series - Α' for laws, presidential decrees and acts of the Cabinet, Β' for ministerial decisions - and that is the whole of what it publishes. The address that matters is not et.gr. Its search application at search.et.gr builds every PDF link against an Azure storage account, and the live form is https://ia37rg02wpsa01.blob.core.windows.net/fek/<SS>/<YYYY>/<YYYY><SS><NNNNN>.pdf, where SS is the series number zero-padded to two digits, YYYY the year and NNNNN the issue number zero-padded to five: ΦΕΚ Α' 81 of 2023 is /fek/01/2023/20230100081.pdf, and ΦΕΚ Β' 3056 of 2013 is /fek/02/2013/20130203056.pdf. Every issue is a digitally signed PDF naming ΕΘΝΙΚΟ ΤΥΠΟΓΡΑΦΕΙΟ as its author, so what is served is the publisher's own artefact and not a mirror.
Standing: Issues the instrument
Cannot be cited for: It consolidates nothing. There is no official edition of any Greek statute as it now stands, no cut-off date to cite, and no address at which the Immigration Code, the Income Tax Code or the Code of Greek Nationality can be read as currently in force. The practical substitute is a drafting convention rather than a service: an amending Act usually reprints the whole amended article under the formula 'και το άρθρο N διαμορφώνεται ως εξής', so the current text of a provision lives in whichever issue last changed it, and the reader has to know which that is. It cannot be cited for the text of any article without first establishing that nothing has amended it. Two mechanical limits matter as well. The gazette has been set in two columns for most of its history, and the project's PDF extraction preserves the physical layout, so in a stored reading a line of the left column is followed immediately by a line of the right one - a quotation taken from an issue of 2024 or earlier has to fit inside a single line of a single column, around fifty characters. The layout changed to a single full-width column during 2025: the 2026 issues read as continuous prose and can be quoted at length. And issues from before roughly 2007 are set in fonts with a non-Unicode encoding: ΦΕΚ Α' 217 of 2004, which carries the Code of Greek Nationality, extracts entirely as Latin-1 mojibake and cannot be quoted at all. Gazette issues also carry one or two physically blank pages before the colophon, which a page-coverage check reports as empty. The host et.gr itself cannot be used: a request for the old /api/DownloadFeksApi/ endpoint is redirected to a bare IP address whose certificate no client can verify.
We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source
Practical notes
The practical effect of the postponement is that the old immigration law, Law 4251/2014, governed applications until 31 March 2024, and article 177 of the Code keeps permits issued under it alive until they expire.
The February 2026 Act also created permit categories that did not exist before: a Talent Visa of type Z.15, a startup-employment permit, a visiting-professor permit, a permit for British citizens under the Withdrawal Agreement, a second-chance permit, and a post-study job-search permit of type H.11.
What was read for this record: article 179 of Law 5038/2023 as enacted, article 97 of Law 5079/2023, the heading of article 64 of Law 5100/2024, and the contents and commencement articles of Law 5275/2026 and Law 5307/2026.