Payment Processing · Buyer guide
Greece has spent a decade pushing payments off cash, and the law now does most of the pushing. Shops that sell to consumers must accept cards and IRIS instant payments, link their card terminals to their cash register, and refuse cash altogether on a sale of €500 or more. Individuals, for their part, have to spend 30% of their income electronically or pay extra tax. Cash still leads at the till: in the European Central Bank's 2024 survey of how people pay, it made up 53.9% of point-of-sale payments in Greece by number and cards 37.2%, though by value cards were ahead, at 47.4% against 42.3%.
Here is what taking a card or an IRIS payment costs a Greek business, read from the providers' own Greek pages on 27 October 2026, and the rules that decide what you must accept and what you may charge.
Greece applies the EU Interchange Fee Regulation, which caps the interchange a card issuer receives at 0.2% of a consumer debit card payment and 0.3% of a consumer credit card payment. Business cards are not capped. Card scheme fees come on top, and everything else is the provider's margin. For small payments at small shops, Greece goes further than the EU, as explained below.
Each of the big four Greek banks has sold or spun off its card-acceptance business, so a terminal from your bank is now usually a terminal from a payment company. Alpha Bank's acquiring business is majority-owned by Nexi (our grade: B). National Bank of Greece sold 51% of NBG Pay to EVO Payments in 2022, and EVO has been part of Global Payments (C) since 2023. Piraeus Bank's acquiring went to Euronet, which trades as epay, and Eurobank's to Worldline (B-), which also owns the terminal network Cardlink. Nexi, NBG Pay and epay quote card rates individually; Worldline publishes its rates. Alongside them sit app-based providers that publish everything, led by Viva.com, which was founded in Greece.
Stripe (A) does not sell its card readers in Greece: its Greek Terminal page says the product is not available in the country. Larger merchants can negotiate interchange-plus pricing from Adyen (A-).
Take a clothing shop, outside the small-retail categories, that takes 1,000 card payments a month of €20 each, all on Greek consumer debit cards: €20,000 of takings. On the published prices, before VAT on any subscription:
Two things stand out. Fixed per-payment fees hurt on small tickets: on its published table, Everypay's 14 cents turns a 1.30% rate into the most expensive option here at €20 a sale, though on a €100 sale it would cost €1.44, less than Viva.com's €1.69. And Viva.com's price list shows its 0.50% small-payment rate on all domestic consumer card payments up to €20, without repeating the law's limit to 15 small-retail categories. Confirm in writing that your business gets it before you count on it. The Easy and POS Economy bundles only pay off if your card takings sit close to the volume you buy; they are built for shops much smaller than this one.
IRIS is the Greek banks' instant-payment system, run by the interbank company DIAS. A customer pays from their bank app, for example by scanning a QR code at the till, and the money arrives in seconds. At providers that price it separately, the published prices for a business to receive an IRIS payment are 0.55% at Everypay (minimum €0.01), 0.57% at Worldline's merchant shop and 0.60% at Viva.com, which caps it at €0.50 a payment for individuals, sole proprietors and freelancers on up to €5,000 a day. SumUp charges IRIS at its card rate, 1.95%, or 0.89% on Payments Plus. Banks set their own IRIS prices, which we could not confirm from their own pages. On the €20,000 example above, IRIS at 0.55% to 0.60% would cost €110 to €120 a month, against €197 to €400 for the cards (€100 if Viva.com's small-payment rate applies).
Accepting it is not optional for most businesses that sell to consumers. Joint ministerial decision 119899/2023, in force since the end of January 2024, requires businesses that provide services to consumers, and those in a list of some 280 activity codes covering most shops, food outlets and personal services, to accept payment by card and by IRIS, with a €1,500 fine for not doing so. Freelancers and sole traders with a business account have had to accept instant payments since 1 January 2024, and Law 5193/2025 extended the duty to companies and other legal entities, from 1 December 2025 after Law 5246/2025 put back the original 31 October date. Businesses must also show that they accept cards and IRIS at the entrance, at the till and on their website, or face a €1,000 fine.
Article 64 of Law 5108/2024, raised from €10 to €20 by Law 5167/2024, caps the fee a provider may charge on a payment of up to €20 made with a Greek-issued consumer card at 0.50%, in 15 small-retail merchant categories, including grocers and mini-markets, kiosks, bakeries and taxis. It also caps the interchange on those payments at 0.10% on debit cards and 0.15% on credit cards. Public limited companies (AE) and businesses with more than three terminals from the same provider are excluded, and the cap runs for three years from May 2024, so until around May 2027; the €20 limit has applied since January 2025. NBG's own page still describes the older €10 limit.
Any business that must use a cash register has to connect every card terminal that takes its retail payments to the register or to its accounting software, so that each card payment is matched to a receipt reported to the tax authority, AADE. The deadlines for most businesses passed during 2024. Not accepting card or IRIS payments through a connected terminal carries fines under article 63 of the Tax Procedure Code of €10,000 for businesses keeping single-entry books and €20,000 for double-entry, doubled for a repeat offence and tripled for further repeats within five years.
Article 62(4) of Law 4537/2018 says a merchant may not request or impose charges for the use of any payment instrument. The EU minimum bans surcharges only on consumer cards whose interchange is capped and on SEPA transfers and direct debits; Greece's ban also covers business cards and American Express.
A sale to a consumer of €500 or more must be paid by card or another electronic means, never in cash, under article 20 of Law 3842/2010. A business that takes cash for such a sale is fined twice the amount of cash taken.
Other southern European countries price cards differently; see our guides to Italy, Spain and Portugal.
