Two Years in Greece Before You Can Send for Anyone, Unless the Person You Married Is Greek
Answer
The general rule applies to you
No exception is recorded for citizens of Costa Rica on this topic. That is the answer, not a gap - everything below is the rule you get, unchanged.
147 exceptions recorded across 54 countries · none match Costa Rica to Greece · Residency through marriage
Greece draws a hard line between joining a third-country national and joining a Greek. Article 84 of Law 5038/2023 gives the right to family reunification to a third-country national who has lived lawfully in Greece for two years, and the application is made and examined while the family members are still abroad. The sponsor has to show accommodation adequate for the household, full sickness insurance covering the family, and a personal income that is stable, regular and not drawn from social assistance, not below the annual net income of a minimum-wage earner raised by twenty per cent for a spouse and fifteen per cent for each child - with the child uplift dropped where both spouses already live lawfully in Greece. The permit granted to a family member expires with the sponsor's. Marrying a Greek is a different file entirely: article 93 gives a Residence Card for a family member of a Greek, valid five years, applied for within three months of entry or of the marriage, with a fifty euro fine for leaving it more than a year, and no income or housing test at all. Law 5275/2026 added article 93A, under which five continuous years living in Greece with the Greek spouse give a right of permanent residence and a card renewed automatically every ten years.
At a glance
- Waiting period before you can apply
- Two years of lawful residence, for a third-country sponsor
Article 84(1) of Law 5038/2023.
- Income test
- The annual net income of a minimum-wage earner, plus 20% for a spouse and 15% for each child
Article 84(2)(b) of Law 5038/2023. The 15% is not required where both spouses already reside lawfully in Greece.
- Where the family must be when you apply
- Outside Greece
Article 84(1), which adds that an earlier stay in Greece is no obstacle to the application.
- Length of the family permit
- The same expiry date as the sponsor's permit
Article 87(1) of Law 5038/2023; three years at a time once the sponsor is a long-term resident.
- Decision deadline
- Nine months from the application, extendable by three in exceptional cases
Article 86(3) of Law 5038/2023.
- Spouse of a Greek
- A Residence Card valid five years, with no income or housing condition
Article 93(1) and (7) of Law 5038/2023. Article 93(3) requires the application within three months of entry or of the marriage or civil partnership.
- Late application by the spouse of a Greek
- A 50 euro fine after one year
Article 93(3) of Law 5038/2023.
- Permanent residence for the spouse of a Greek
- After five continuous years living in Greece together
Article 93A of Law 5038/2023, added by article 28 of Law 5275/2026; the card is then renewed automatically every ten years.
- Fee
- 150 euro for family permits of types O.1 and O.2; none for the family of a Greek
Article 171(1)(b) and 171(2)(e) of Law 5038/2023.
Requirements
- Two years of lawful residence in Greece before applying, if the sponsor is a third-country national
- Accommodation adequate for the sponsor and the family members
- Stable and regular personal income at or above the stated multiple of the minimum wage
- Full sickness insurance covering the family
- Family members outside Greece when the application is made and examined
- If the spouse is Greek, an application within three months of entry or of the marriage and nothing more
Country-level policy
The National Printing House issues the Government Gazette and nothing else. There is no official consolidated edition of any Greek statute, no cut-off date to cite, and no address at which the Immigration Code or the Income Tax Code or the Code of Greek Nationality can be read as it now stands. What there is instead is a drafting convention that does half the job. When a Greek Act amends an article, it usually says which words are replaced and then reprints the whole amended article under the formula "and article N is formed as follows" - so the amending Act carries the current text, and a reader who finds the right amending Act gets a reliable reading of the provision. The cost is that the reader has to know which Act that is. Every record for Greece in this corpus is quoted from the gazette issue that last moved the provision, which is why the Immigration Code is quoted here from four different issues: the 2023 Act for the articles nothing has touched, the 2023 Act that postponed its own commencement, the 2024 Act that replaced the investor article, and the two 2026 Acts that rewrote the work, student, family and long-term residence articles. The ministry's own copy is no help: the PDF of the Code on migration.gov.gr is byte for byte the gazette file.
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.
What applies to you
Nothing changes for a citizen of Costa Rica
We have no rule recorded that treats your citizenship differently here, so the general rule above is the one that applies to you. That is an answer, not a gap.
What the law says
«Ελλάδα για διάστημα δύο (2) ετών»The waiting period. The sentence it sits in gives the right to a third-country national lawfully resident for that time, and the next sentence requires the family members to be outside Greece when the application is made and examined.
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
«αμειβόμενου με τον κατώτατο μισθό, σύμφωνα με την
εθνική νομοθεσία, προσαυξημένο κατά είκοσι τοις εκατό»The income benchmark and the spousal uplift. The clause continues with fifteen per cent for each child, waived where both spouses are lawfully resident in Greece.
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
«διαθέτει κατάλυμα ικανό να καλύψει τις ανάγκες»The accommodation condition, which is cumulative with the income and insurance ones rather than an alternative to them.
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
«Το Δελτίο Διαμονής έχει διάρκεια πέντε (5) έτη.»The card for a family member of a Greek. The same paragraph says continuity is not broken by absences of up to six months a year, nor by military service, nor by one absence of up to twelve consecutive months for serious reasons.
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
«Τα μέλη οικογένειας Έλληνα τα οποία διαμένουν νομίμως στην Ελλάδα μαζί του για συνεχές χρονικό
διάστημα πέντε (5) ετών, έχουν δικαίωμα μόνιμης διαμονής στη χώρα.»Permanent residence for the family of a Greek, new in February 2026. A break of up to two consecutive years after the card expires does not destroy the right.
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 two-year wait applies to the sponsor, not to the marriage, and it is the clearest divergence between the Greek rule and the Union minimum in Directive 2003/86, which the chapter transposes.
A Greek spouse is outside the family reunification chapter altogether. There is no income test, no housing test, no waiting period, and the application is made in Greece within three months of entry or of the marriage.
What was read: articles 83 to 93 of Law 5038/2023 and articles 27 and 28 of Law 5275/2026. The joint ministerial decision under article 176(1) that lists the documents was not read, so nothing here describes what an office actually asks for.
- issuesΝόμος 5038/2023, Κώδικας Μετανάστευσης, ΦΕΚ Α' 81/01.04.2023
Εθνικό Τυπογραφείο (National Printing House), Εφημερίδα της Κυβερνήσεως
About 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
- issuesΝόμος 5275/2026, ΦΕΚ Α' 17/06.02.2026, amending the Immigration Code
Εθνικό Τυπογραφείο (National Printing House), Εφημερίδα της Κυβερνήσεως
About 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