Greece taxes a charter week at 5.2pc, against 22pc in Italy

The cheapest charter tax in the Mediterranean

Under Law 5073/2023 a crewed charter running more than 48 continuous hours is taxed in Greece at 13 per cent. Anything shorter, along with static charters and bareboat arrangements, sits at the full 24 per cent. That 13 per cent headline is already the lowest of the big Mediterranean charter markets: France applies 20 per cent, Spain 21, Italy 22, and Croatia matches Greece at 13. On a EUR 200,000 week the difference between Athens and Naples is EUR 18,000 before anyone has bought a litre of fuel.

The 13 per cent is not where a large yacht lands. A vessel holding a Protocol of General Inspection for international voyages has 60 per cent taken off the taxable base, which produces an invoiced rate of 5.2 per cent. A vessel certified for Greek waters gets 50 per cent off and invoices 6.5 per cent. George Yachts, an Athens brokerage, also records 7.8 per cent on some short-range Argosaronic itineraries and 12 per cent for motor yachts that hold no lower certification, where the 50 per cent reduction is applied to the 24 per cent base instead. The spread between the top and bottom of that range is wider than the entire VAT rate in most competing countries.

The rate follows the papers, not the boat

This is the part that costs owners money, and it is not a subtlety. The rate is a property of the individual yacht's certification and itinerary, not of her size or her type. Two 45-metre motor yachts running the same week out of Athens can invoice 5.2 per cent and 12 per cent, and the only difference between them is which inspection protocol sits in the ship's papers. A broker who quotes a flat rate before reading those papers is guessing, and the guess is settled at the owner's expense when the invoice is issued.

It matters for what the money is charged on, too. VAT attaches to the base charter fee, to the delivery fee, and to extras invoiced through the yacht's own operating company. It does not attach to the APA reconciliation itself, because those expenses already carry local VAT where they were incurred; it does not attach to gratuities; and it does not attach to money the charterer pays direct to an outside vendor. Owners who route everything through the boat to keep the accounting tidy therefore widen the taxable base by doing so. George Yachts puts the practical scale of the certification question plainly: on a EUR 150,000 week, 6.5 per cent instead of 13 per cent is EUR 9,750 back.

How a foreign flag gets 28 days

For years the structural problem in Greece was not the rate but the door. A yacht flagged outside the European Union could not simply take a Greek charter, and the alternative was a full Greek licence with a branch office, a PEXEPA certificate and a permanent local presence behind it. Law 4926/2022, implemented through a ministerial decision of 21 October 2022 and running on a digital platform since the end of 2023, opened a second route. The e-Charter Permission lets a yacht that is already commercially registered on a foreign flag work Greek water without establishing anything in Greece beyond a VAT registration for the owning company.

The gate is narrow and worth reading carefully. The yacht must be over 35 metres, and her hull must be steel, glass-reinforced plastic or aluminium, which puts wooden hulls out at any length. The permission runs to 21 days in a calendar year, extendable by a further seven to 28 in total. That is four charter weeks, which is a useful supplement to a season spent elsewhere and is not a season in itself. Below 35 metres a non-EU flag does not qualify for this route at all, and for a yacht that intends to work Greece properly the full licence remains the only answer.

What the permission costs, and when you pay it

The permission fee is called TEPADACH and it is built the same way every time: a flat EUR 500 for the permission itself, plus a daily rate set by gross tonnage and multiplied by the charter days. The daily rate runs at EUR 30 up to 150 GT, EUR 40 from 150 to 250, EUR 45 from 250 to 500, EUR 100 from 500 to 1,000, EUR 115 from 1,000 to 2,000, EUR 130 from 2,000 to 5,000 and EUR 150 above that. A 600 GT yacht taking a 12-day charter therefore pays 12 multiplied by EUR 100, plus the EUR 500 base, for EUR 1,700. Against a charter fee measured in six figures, the permit itself is a rounding error.

Where a charter begins or ends outside Greek waters, the calculation becomes TEPADACH Plus and a length-based surcharge is added to the tonnage rate before the EUR 500 base is applied. Agents quote that surcharge across a very wide range and calculate it per yacht rather than from a published table, which is one of the few numbers in this system nobody will give you in advance. The cash-flow item is separate and larger: 70 per cent of the Greek VAT on the charter fee has to be paid before the charter starts, with the balance settled at the end of the applicable quarter. That is working capital committed weeks ahead of the charterer's money arriving, and it is the reason a Greek programme needs a fiscal agent rather than a spreadsheet.

TEPAI, and what actually limits a Greek season

Separately from anything to do with chartering, every vessel over seven metres in Greek waters owes the cruising tax, TEPAI, whatever flag she wears and whether she is earning or not. Below 12 metres it is a flat monthly figure: EUR 16 from seven to eight metres, EUR 25 from eight to ten, EUR 33 from ten to 12. Above 12 metres it is EUR 8 per metre per month, so a 40-metre owes EUR 320 a month to be in the country and a 50-metre owes EUR 400. It is paid through the AADE e-TEPAI portal, and one payment covering the whole calendar year, made in December of the previous year or January of the current one, carries a 10 per cent reduction. Nobody in the market treats it as the obstacle it was once billed as: when the tax came in, Victor Kalauzis of the agency G&K Yachting told SuperyachtNews that the trade had worried about the effect on visiting numbers and then found that nobody complained about it, while Mike Brewer of A1 Yachting called it more of a confusion than an objection, and a lot of extra work for agents. Superyacht arrivals rose 10.75 per cent in the first year it applied, with Crete up by half.

The tax position explains why the boats are there, but it does not tell an owner what a Greek season returns. Greece takes roughly 30 to 31 per cent of Mediterranean charter bookings on George Yachts' figures, inside a region that carries 65 to 70 per cent of the world's summer charter weeks, and the global charter fleet has grown 7.4 per cent year on year to about 3,830 vessels. Demand is concentrated and supply is rising, which is a good position for a well-run boat with a good crew and a difficult one for anything average. George P. Biniaris, the brokerage's managing broker, writes that July and August tighten earlier each year, that six to nine months ahead is sensible for a specific yacht and that anything over 40 metres is often taken a full year out, with June and September holding the last-minute room. He also names the real cost line: a Mediterranean-wide crew shortage pushed operating costs up 15 to 20 per cent in 2024, and service quality now varies more than it used to, so vetting the captain and the chef matters as much as choosing the hull. An owner can save 7.8 points of VAT on a certificate and give all of it back on a crew that does not hold up.