# First Home Tax Rebate



## Cairokid (Sep 15, 2009)

Those of you living and working in Greece might like to know that it is possible to get this tax rebate, even if you have previously owned a house in your home country. It is a rebate on purchase tax you would have to pay when buying your first home in Greece.

You can only apply if you are an EU citizen and you must have proper residency and have completed tax returns for a few years - I think it was five but you should check as it may have been only three. (Its 2 years since we got it so I don't remember all the details)

There is the typical Greek paperchase to do, including getting a letter from the Consulate to say the UK does not have the equivalent of the marriage status document which mayors in most European countries can issue.

It is well worth it though. The amount of the rebate depends on a number of things but to give you an idea we saved about 7000 euro when we bought our house and that was much more than we had paid in tax at the time!

A friend of ours who has just completed building his house did not have to pay any purchase tax at all on either the land he bought or the house he built on it.

Few people seem to know that ex-pats are just as entitled to this as Greek citizens are. If you are buying or building a house and live & work here ask at the tax office what you have to do.


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## expat914 (Oct 9, 2009)

This sounds really interesting to me. Can you send me more information on this. Any websites that go into this topic further? 
thanks


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## Cairokid (Sep 15, 2009)

amis914 said:


> This sounds really interesting to me. Can you send me more information on this. Any websites that go into this topic further?
> thanks


There may be information in Greek on it but I don't think there will be anything in English. 

We were told about it by Greek friends when we were about to buy our home. Although you pay purchase tax on houses, you can get a rebate on the first one, and it can be quite substantial. You may need to apply for the rebate before you sign the final purchase documents.

The agent we found our house through told us foreigners could not get the rebate so we almost didn't try. But a number of other people said we should be eligible as we had lived and worked here for several years. We decided to go and ask at our tax office ourselves.

They looked up the regulations and found that we were eligible. Unfortunately, now I think about it, it may only be for EU citizens living in Greece, not all foreigners. You have nothing to lose by asking though as I am not sure about that. 

We were the first foreign couple (as opposed to a foreigner married to a Greek) to get it at our tax office.

From what I remember you need to prove how long you have been resident in Greece and possibly your tax office must not be the aliens one. You submit copies of your tax returns (I can't remember if it was 3 or 5 years). There were various other documents required, one of which we had to go to the Consul to get. I think we visited our tax office every day for about 10 days! It was definitely worth it though.

If you want to find out if you are eligible I suggest you go to your tax office with your residence permit and tax returns and information on the property or land you want to buy and ask them to check the regulations.


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