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Thousands of foreign investors, including many Turkish nationals, are still waiting for decisions on their Greek residence permits, as a large backlog continues to weigh on the country’s Golden Visa program.
Official data show that more than 10,500 applications remain pending, most of them submitted during the surge years of 2023 and 2024, when demand for the scheme peaked.
The Golden Visa is a residency-by-investment program that grants non-EU nationals a renewable residence permit in return for qualifying investments, mainly in real estate. The permit allows holders and their families to live in Greece and travel freely within the Schengen Area, making it especially attractive to investors from outside Europe.
According to figures from the Ministry of Migration and Asylum, 10,613 applications are still under review. Authorities have yet to clear the backlog created during the two-year investment boom, when interest intensified following repeated changes to the minimum investment thresholds required to qualify for a permit.
During 2023 and 2024 alone, foreign investors brought in about €4.93 billion ($5.76 billion) to the Greek property market, with a significant share linked directly to Golden Visa purchases. The scale of the inflows underlined how central the program had become to overseas demand for Greek real estate.
Since its launch in mid-2014, the Golden Visa scheme has been taken up by an estimated 39,490 investors, excluding family members who are also entitled to residence rights.
Nearly half of these investments were recorded in the short window of 2023 and 2024, highlighting how sharply demand accelerated once changes to the rules were announced.
Government efforts to curb foreign demand for housing by raising the minimum investment amounts appear to have triggered the opposite reaction at first.
Many investors rushed to file applications before the higher limits came into force, seeking to lock in residency under more affordable terms.
In the first 11 months of 2025, authorities approved 7,875 new initial investor permits, almost doubling the number recorded in the same period of the previous year. Officials expect approval volumes to stay elevated as pending cases continue to be processed.
At the same time, data indicate a clear slowdown in new applications since April 2025. By November 2025, only 377 new requests had been filed, representing a sharp annual decline. This drop suggests that the stricter investment thresholds are now having their intended effect, cooling fresh demand even as older applications move through the system.
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