The 18-Month Window

A relocation at this level is not one decision. It is roughly forty, taken over about eighteen months, and the ones that go wrong are almost never the ones people worry about. Nobody chooses the wrong country. They choose the right country and then do things in an order that costs them a year.

What follows is the sequence, with a distinction that matters more than any individual item: some of these deadlines are statutory and some are merely sensible. The statutory ones are marked, and they are the only ones that cannot be recovered with effort.

Months −18 to −12: the decisions that are not about Greece

The comparison comes first, and it is a comparison of jurisdictions rather than of houses. Greece against Portugal, Italy and the Gulf is the actual question at this stage, and three of those four changed materially in the last eighteen months.

Retain advisers in both jurisdictions at the same time, not in sequence. This is the single most repeated error in the process. A Greek adviser will not raise the UK inheritance tax tail, because it is not their jurisdiction; a UK adviser will not raise the Greek filing window. Excellent advice on each side of a move and none about the join is how a well-advised household ends up with an avoidable bill.

And establish the departure clock. UK inheritance tax now follows a leaver for between three and ten years, scaled to how long they were resident, with a split year counting as a full year. That number is fixed by history rather than by planning, and everything downstream is priced against it.

Months −12 to −9: the two that gate everything else

• The AFM, the Greek tax number. It gates the bank account, the utilities and the purchase itself. It is not difficult and it is not fast, and nothing else can start without it.
• The bank account. Source-of-funds review asks for the origin of funds traced to a specific event, prior filings and structure documents — not a general description of wealth. In August Greek institutions thin out and a review that takes ten days in October can take a month.

Opening a Greek account with foreign wealth is slower than the size of the transaction suggests, and it is the step that most often stalls a timetable that was otherwise fine.

Months −9 to −6: the school, before the house

This is the item that is almost always taken too late, and it is the one that reorganises the map. There is no international school on the Athens Riviera — not in Vouliagmeni, Voula, Kavouri or Varkiza, and not inside the Municipality of Glyfada. Every family drives inland.

Choose the curriculum before the school, because switching mid-secondary is genuinely damaging. Then apply, and apply before you buy. The strong schools run waiting lists and admission cycles that do not accommodate a family arriving in March, and several households have chosen a neighbourhood for a school that then had no place in the relevant year group.

The school is the fixed point and the house is the variable. Almost every family gets that the wrong way round, and discovers it after completion.

Months −6 to −3: the statutory one

The non-dom application under article 5A closes on 30 September of the year you arrive or the year after. Supporting documents are accepted until 31 October, a decision comes by the end of November, and the tax is payable in a single instalment by the last working day of December. If you arrived after 2 July, you are applying next year rather than this one.

Miss that window and you spend a full year on ordinary Greek taxation before you can try again. For someone whose foreign income runs to seven figures, it is the most expensive administrative error available in this process. The 2026 reform softened it in one useful way — the application is now accepted without documents, so an incomplete file no longer costs the year — but the date itself is not negotiable. Which of the three regimes applies to you should be settled well before it.

Months −3 to 0: the house, and the questions about it

Only now. By this point the regime is chosen, the adviser is retained, the bank is open and the school is provisional, which is why the house is the sixth thing that happens rather than the first.

• If it is a Golden Visa purchase, the Attica threshold is €800,000 on a single unit of at least 120 square metres of main areas, and parking and storage do not count towards that 120 even though they count towards the money.
• A Golden Visa property cannot be let short-term. The prohibition covers lets under sixty days whether or not a platform is involved, and the penalty is revocation plus a €50,000 fine.
• Ask about escrow before you ask about finishes. Greek off-plan sales carry no mandatory escrow, and the protection you may be assuming from a UK or US contract is not automatically present.
• Drive the school run at eight on a Tuesday in term time before you commit to the address or the school.

Months 0 to +6: the part nobody schedules

Healthcare, before you need it. The first relationship to establish is a coordinating physician rather than a specialist, and it is worth confirming in writing that your insurer settles directly with the named Greek hospital.

And the circle. Relocations at this level rarely fail on tax, property or schools. They fail eighteen months in, when the household has a beautiful house and nobody to have dinner with on a Wednesday, and that part is entered through people rather than institutions. Everyone plans the first three. Almost nobody plans the fourth, and it is the one that decides whether the move survives.

The three that cannot be taken late

If the rest of this piece disappeared, these would be the ones to keep: the tax filing window, because it is statutory and annual; the school application, because places are finite and the year group is finite; and the advisers on both sides at once, because the gap between two jurisdictions is where the money is lost.

Everything else on this list can be recovered with effort and expense. Those three cannot, and none of them is about the house.

Sources

1. AADE Decision A.1147/2026: the article 5A application window, documents and payment
2. HMRC Inheritance Tax Manual IHTM47020: the three-to-ten-year departure tail
3. Article 100 of Law 5038/2023 as amended: Golden Visa thresholds, the 120 m² main-areas rule and the letting ban
4. Edison Investment Research on Lamda Development, 25 June 2025 — the absence of mandatory escrow in Greek off-plan sales