Rishta in Greece

What a Pakistani family in Greece should settle first

This is not immigration or legal advice and it does not replace the Greek authorities or a Greek lawyer. Greece has changed its immigration law repeatedly, most recently in February 2026, so check every figure and rule here against the current position before you act on it. What follows is the set of facts that decides, in practice, whether a rishta between a family in Pakistan and a man in Greece works at all.

Two years on the right permit, before anything else

In most countries on this site the first question is what he earns. In Greece it is how long he has held his card. A third-country national sponsoring a wife is expected to have resided legally in Greece for the preceding two years, on a permit of a type that permits family reunification. Not two years in the country. Two years of lawful residence, on the right permit.

That single rule reorders the whole conversation. A man who arrived four years ago but only regularised eighteen months ago cannot yet sponsor anyone, however good his job is. A man with a steady two-year permit on a modest wage can. So the first thing a family in Pakistan should ask for is not a salary slip. It is the residence card itself, shown on a video call, with the type and the issue date readable.

Ask it kindly and ask it early. A man in this position usually knows exactly where he stands and will tell you honestly if you give him the chance. The damage is done by families who do not ask, agree the nikah, and then discover there is a two-year wall in front of them that nobody can climb.

The income figure, and the wage it is pegged to

Greece does not publish a single euro threshold the way Britain or Denmark do. The requirement is expressed as a proportion: the sponsor’s income must be no lower than the annual figure based on the statutory minimum wage, increased by twenty per cent for a spouse and fifteen per cent for each child.

That peg moved this year. From 1 April 2026 the statutory minimum monthly salary rose to 920 euros gross, from 880, with the skilled daily wage going to 41.09 euros. Because Greek private-sector pay is normally reckoned over fourteen salaries rather than twelve, the annual base the authority uses is not simply twelve times the monthly figure — which is precisely why you should ask the Decentralised Administration for the number in writing rather than work it out at home and trust your own arithmetic.

Alongside the income, two requirements that are easier to satisfy but easier to forget. Adequate accommodation for everyone who will live there, evidenced by a registered lease or a title deed in his name together with a utility bill at that address. And full medical cover for every family member — for the entry visa that means proper private health insurance covering hospitalisation and emergency care in Greece, not a travel policy, with the public insurance system taking over once she is registered in employment.

February 2026 changed the rules, and mostly in your favour

If your information about Greece is more than a year old, it is out of date. A new immigration law was passed in February 2026 restructuring the permit categories, and several of its changes matter directly to a married couple.

The most important is work. A residence permit granted for family reasons that carries the right to work is now classed as a single permit, which means it gives access to the labour market without a separate work authorisation. Holders of single permits are entitled to equal treatment with Greek nationals on working conditions, vocational training, recognition of qualifications, and access to goods and services including housing. The exclusions are specific and should be understood rather than glossed over: family benefits, unemployment benefits, study loans and certain tax advantages are not included.

Three more provisions worth holding on to. Single-permit applications are to be decided within ninety days of a complete submission, which gives a family something concrete to measure a delay against. Renewal applications are due within the two months before expiry, with late renewal now possible for up to three months after expiry subject to a fine, where the old grace period was one month. And a new long-term permanent residence permit has been created for family members of Greek citizens.

For the many younger men here on student status, the same law raised permitted term-time work to twenty hours a week and created a one-year permit allowing graduates to remain and look for work or start a business. That is the bridge from studying to the kind of permit that can actually carry a wife.

The harder side of the last two years, said plainly

We would rather tell you this than let you find it out. Greece ran a regularisation scheme from December 2023 which gave three-year residence and work permits to undocumented migrants who met minimum residence criteria. It operated only until the end of 2024, and there is no replacement scheme in 2025 or 2026. Anyone still waiting for that door to reopen is waiting for something that has not been announced.

The law has moved in the other direction since. In September 2025 Greece introduced a penalty of two to five years’ imprisonment for a third-country national who remains in the country after a final rejection, unless they take voluntary return, with a default departure window of seven to fourteen days. Housing support for recognised refugees was abolished in mid-2025 and financial assistance for asylum seekers was cut substantially.

The honest conclusion for a rishta family is short. In Greece, status comes before the proposal, not after it. A marriage cannot create a residence right that does not otherwise exist, and arranging a nikah in the hope that it will fix a status problem exposes a daughter to a situation no family would choose for her. If a man’s papers are not in order, the kind thing and the correct thing is to wait until they are. Many do, and succeed — the permit numbers above are rising for a reason.

The route that runs through the children, and the one through the exam

Two pieces of good news that families rarely hear, both from 2025 legislation.

First, children. A foreign minor who has completed nine years of schooling in Greece, or six years of secondary education, can acquire Greek citizenship by declaration and application, with a fee of one hundred euros. A graduate of a Greek university who also holds a Greek secondary school diploma can apply within three years of graduating. In other words a child raised and schooled here has a route that is far shorter and far more certain than the parents’. Families planning a life in Greece should treat the children’s schooling as part of the immigration plan, not separate from it.

Second, parents of Greek minor children. The requirement of seven years of continuous residence for that permit category was removed in 2025, replaced with a one-time three-year permit carrying labour market access, granted on proof of the parental relationship. An earlier proposal to abolish the category altogether was withdrawn.

For the adults themselves, ordinary naturalisation takes seven years of lawful residence and a pass in the citizenship examination. That exam is set at B1 level and covers Greek language alongside history, political institutions, geography and culture. It is scored out of a hundred — sixty for language and forty for general knowledge — with a pass requiring seventy overall and minimum scores in both parts, it costs around one hundred and fifty euros, and it is held twice a year. The spouse of a Greek citizen has a shorter route of about three years. Naturalisations in Greece ran to 14,896 in 2024, against 13,875 the year before, so this is a road people do finish.

One city here, and three countries across the water

Athens is the Greek pool and there is no second Greek city to widen into, so widening from Greece means widening outward. The nearest substantial Pakistani communities are in Italy, reachable by ferry to Bari or Ancona and then north, and in Türkiye across the Aegean. Spain is further but on the same southern European circuit, and our Barcelona and Madrid pages carry their own profiles.

Be aware that none of those countries runs Greek rules. Italy and Spain each have their own residence periods, income tests and timetables, and a family that has learned the Greek system will have to learn theirs from scratch. Our Italy, Spain and Türkiye pages set out what each one actually asks for.

And the most common search made from Greece is the one straight back to Pakistan. That is what most of this page is about, and it is the one where the two-year rule above decides everything.