Greece's 90% remote-work wage subsidy is for registered unemployed people only, and DYPA still has not published terms
Labour Minister Niki Kerameos gave the clearest account yet of Greece’s planned telework wage subsidy in a television interview on 1 October 2026, and the detail narrows it considerably. The scheme would cover 90% of salary and social security contributions for twelve months where a private-sector business hires a registered unemployed person aged 18 or over, resident in a municipality classified as mountainous or remote, to work fully remotely.
The eligibility condition is the news. Earlier coverage, including the ministerial announcement of 22 September, described the scheme as applying to workers living in mountain and island areas without specifying employment status. On the minister’s account it is a subsidised-employment programme aimed at the registered unemployed, which excludes people already in work who want to move to a remote arrangement, and excludes the self-employed.
The state employment agency DYPA has still published nothing. As of 5 October its announcements page carries no call, no budget, no place count, no list of eligible municipalities and no application dates. Every Greek report describes these as awaited in the forthcoming prosklisi.
Why this matters
If you live in a Greek mountain or island municipality and are registered unemployed, this would make you substantially cheaper to hire than a comparable candidate anywhere else in the country, for a year. That is a real advantage and worth preparing for by making sure your DYPA registration is current.
If you already have work and hoped to use the scheme to shift to remote, or you are self-employed, the minister’s description does not cover you. Nothing can be applied for today in either case.
Context
Kerameos set the scheme alongside an extension of the women’s employment programme, which subsidises 70% of cost and 80% for mothers of children under 15, by 5,000 places, and cited Greek unemployment at 7.4%. It also runs in parallel with the separate €10,000 relocation grant for eight regional units, which pays a household to move rather than paying an employer to hire where someone already lives, and which is itself still waiting on its joint ministerial decision.
What to watch
The DYPA call. Until it is published, the 90% figure and the twelve-month duration are an announcement rather than a scheme, and the eligible-municipality list is the detail that will decide who this actually reaches.