Greece cuts VAT rates by 30% on small North Aegean, Samothrace and Dodecanese islands from 1 January 2026

What changed in detail

Law 5246/2025 was published in ΦΕΚ Α΄ 198 of 11 November 2025. Its Article 11 rewrites Article 26 of the VAT Code (Law 5144/2024), the article that sets the rates.

New paragraph 4A cuts all VAT rates by 30% on the islands of the North Aegean Region, Samothrace (Regional Unit of Evros) and the Dodecanese that have up to 20,000 inhabitants at the most recent census.

The cut applies to:

• goods that meet the location conditions of paragraph 4(b): goods on the island supplied by a taxable person established there, goods sold from elsewhere in Greece to a taxable person or non-taxable legal person established there, intra-EU acquisitions by persons established there, and imports into the islands;
• services physically performed there by a taxable person established there (paragraph 5).

Paragraph 4B excludes tobacco products and means of transport.

Under paragraph 6, the reduced rates are rounded to the nearest whole number, with 0.5 rounded up. That gives 17%, 9% and 4% in place of 24%, 13% and 6%.

The same article deletes Leros from paragraph 4. That paragraph is the separate ministerial-decision reduction for islands hosting migrant reception centres, which now names only Lesvos, Kos, Samos and Chios. Under the law’s commencement article (paragraph 5), Article 11 applies from 1 January 2026.

What it means

The reduction has applied since 1 January 2026 and is still in force in November 2026. Whether it applies depends on the census population of the individual island, not on the region. A business needs to check its island against the latest census, and a mainland supplier selling goods to a business or other legal person on a qualifying island needs to know where that buyer is established; sales to private individuals there are not covered by that limb.

Article 26(1) also provides a 4% rate for certain Annex III items. Applying the same 30% cut and the paragraph 6 rounding rule, that rate becomes 3% on a qualifying island, a case easy to miss when only the three headline rates are configured.

Paragraph 7 leaves the procedure and implementing details to a decision of the AADE Governor, so AADE’s implementing instructions govern how the reduced rates are applied in practice.