Where Greece's €8.8 billion in farm subsidies went, 2023-2025

OPEKEPE, the agency that pays EU farm subsidies in Greece, publishes every payment of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). I downloaded all 6,499,490 rows for the years 2023, 2024 and 2025, from 326 municipalities. €8.76 billion in three years, on average €2.92 billion a year to about 625,000 beneficiaries.

The money moves in both directions. Every year OPEKEPE also asks for amounts back, and the repayments are published as negative rows in the same data.

The fall stopped in 2025, but the mix turned upside down.

Direct payments fall in both years the series covers, −12.5% in total from 2023. Rural development lost €264 million in 2024 and gained back €216 million in 2025.

In 2025, €61 million was asked back

There are recoveries in all three years. In 2025 they changed order of magnitude.

One in three beneficiaries in 2025 had a recovery, 184,390 of 612,043. In 2024 it was 8,302 beneficiaries in the whole of Greece.

€53.2 million of the €60.9 million is a single scheme, "Recoveries – Cross-compliance". It falls almost only on direct payments: €53.4 million in the EAGF against €7.4 million in the EAFRD. By area, recoveries are concentrated in Heraklion (−€7.4 million), Aetolia-Acarnania (−€3.9 million) and Larissa (−€3.3 million).

The average amount per recovery is €318. This is a mass clean-up of small amounts, not a few large repayments.

The average lies

The mean is three times the median in all three years. Whenever this happens, the distribution has a heavy tail and the "average beneficiary" does not exist.

In 2025 the gap widened further. The median fell to €1,367, the lowest of the three years, while the top 1% threshold rose to €43,999 and returned to 2023 levels.

Half of the beneficiaries get less than €1,400 a year.

1,384 beneficiaries, 0.23% of the total, received €485 million. That is 17.1% of all the money in 2025, up from 11.7% in 2024.

At the other end, 287,971 beneficiaries received less than €1,250 and together they take 5.8%.

Where the money goes

In absolute amounts Central Macedonia wins. Per beneficiary the picture changes. Crete has more beneficiaries than any other region, 334,599, but each one gets €3,941. In Thessaly each gets almost twice as much.

The Peloponnese and the Ionian Islands are at the bottom: many beneficiaries, small amounts.

Per beneficiary, Grevena comes first

In the ranking per beneficiary, for regional units with more than 5,000 beneficiaries, the top is not the large farming areas:

In Grevena the largest measure of the three years is organic farming, with €22.4 million of the €108.9 million. That is 20.6% of the regional unit, three times the 6.7% share for Greece as a whole.

Fifth on the list is Central Athens, with €135.8 million to 17,754 beneficiaries. Nobody farms in Kolonaki, the upmarket district in the centre of Athens. The address of the beneficiary is not the address of the field. The large beneficiaries, cooperatives and companies in activity code (KAD) 01, have their registered office where their accountant is.

The top ten regional units by absolute amount over the three years:

What the money is for

The six largest measures of the three years:

Investments in fixed assets stand out: €797.8 million in only 11,443 payment rows. That is an average of €69,720 per payment. Basic income support, by contrast, is spread over 1,165,508 rows with an average of €1,316.

Two completely different tools inside the same fund.

Methodology

The source is the OPEKEPE publication of beneficiaries at transpay.aade.gr, downloaded on 20 September 2026. 6,499,490 payment rows, 326 municipalities, the years 2023, 2024 and 2025. Each municipality file was saved only when the rows I read matched the count that the service itself declares.

The amounts are net: the negative recovery rows are subtracted. The amount before recoveries is in the "payments" column of the first table.

The beneficiary has no VAT number (Greek tax ID) in the public data. OPEKEPE publishes a name and a municipality, not a tax ID. So there is no reliable match with GEMI, the General Commercial Registry, and we do not know how many beneficiaries are companies and how many are individuals. "Beneficiaries" means beneficiary-year, summed per municipality. Someone who receives payments in two municipalities counts twice, so the amounts per beneficiary are slightly underestimated. Beneficiaries under €1,250 are published without a name, under an EU rule. They account for €505.8 million, 5.8% of the three years, and their amounts are fully included in the totals.

The publication is deleted after two years. In September 2026 the year 2023 had already gone from the website, so this collection is the only copy of it.