Greece's Law 5275/2026 abolished in-country switching for the Greece Digital Nomad Visa, leaving applicants with a single legal route: a Type D national long-stay visa obtained at a Greek consulate or embassy before arrival.1 The income threshold sits at €3,500 per month net, €42,000 annually, with a +20% spouse supplement and +15% for each dependent child. That floor runs roughly 70% above Portugal's D8 figure and roughly triple Italy's, but it now applies without the in-country conversion from a Schengen short-stay that previously distinguished Greece from consulate-only Spain.
An applicant currently in Athens on a tourist stamp must now leave Greece, queue at a Greek mission abroad, and re-enter on the long-stay visa before working. A planned arrival inside the May to June application peak now sits on the wrong side of the rule. The Hellenic Ministry of Migration had not, as of 8 May, published consular processing-time guidance for the new sole route.
Portugal's AIMA cultural-mediator strike cut D8 visa processing capacity above 70% adhesion through the spring, and the agency's pending caseload sits above 300,000 cases in Q1 2026.2 Athens is now running the same calendar with a tighter rule, no in-country safety valve, and no published consular baseline against which an applicant can plan. That sets up a multi-month wait as the probable outcome rather than the four-week turnaround that ran through 2025.
Law 5275 also fits a wider Iberian-Hellenic convergence. Portugal's ten-year naturalisation rule tightened the long end of the residency curve in April; Athens has now tightened the entry. The Ministry of Migration's next move is the test: a published consular processing-time guideline before the application peak, or applicants priced into an unguided queue.
