Central Macedonia
Greek administrative region containing Thessaloniki; took 12.5 per cent of national tourist arrivals in 2025.
Central Macedonia took 12.5 per cent of Greece's 2025 arrivals, ELSTAT reported on 27 July, while Thessaloniki's 1st Municipal Community entered a six-month short-let registration freeze from 1 July 2026.
Last refreshed: 28 July 2026 · Appears in 1 active topic
Why did Thessaloniki freeze short-let registrations while Central Macedonia's tourism kept growing?
Timeline for Central Macedonia
Greece's freezes miss half its nights
Nomads & CommunitiesBackground
Central Macedonia is one of Greece's thirteen administrative regions and contains the country's second city, Thessaloniki. ELSTAT's final 2025 tourism figures showed the region taking 12.5 per cent of national arrivals .
Thessaloniki's short-let freeze, confined to its 1st Municipal Community, made the city the second place in Greece, after Athens, to restrict short-term-rental registrations, and the national government has treated it as a proof of concept for extending similar curbs to island destinations .
That leaves Central Macedonia as a region whose growth is still driven mainly by unrestricted tourism outside the one frozen district, making it a test case for how FAR a city-level policy can be read as regional.
A single freeze covers one district
Thessaloniki's 1st Municipal Community froze new short-term-rental registrations from 1 July to 31 December 2026, with fines of 50 per cent of rental income for breaches, one of only two Greek short-let restriction zones alongside Athens . ELSTAT's final 2025 figures put Central Macedonia's national arrivals share at 12.5 per cent .
For Central Macedonia, the freeze is a single-district measure inside one region: regional operators expect the wider 12.5 per cent arrivals share to keep climbing regardless, since the restriction touches only Thessaloniki's inner municipal community, not the region's broader tourism trade.