Which Greek businesses get the €32 billion of public contracts

The Greek state signed 364,930 clean public contracts in two years, with a total value of €32.3 billion. That is about €16 billion a year.

The question that interested me was not how much, but to how many.

One in 28 businesses

The vast majority of Greek businesses have no contact at all with a public contract. The more structured the company, the more likely it is to have a public-sector client. But even there it is one in 16.

Where the money goes

Here the picture splits in two. The number of contracts lives below €30,000. The money lives above €1 million.

89% of contracts are below €30,000, and together they take 9% of the value. At the other end, 4,141 contracts, 1.1% of the count, share €23.4 billion of the €32.3 billion.

The €30,000 mark is not a random limit. It is the threshold for direct award in Greece. HSPPA, the Hellenic Single Public Procurement Authority, reports that 73% of awards in 2023 were direct awards, by count.

Who lives off the state

I took the 87,310 companies with known revenue for the 2024 financial year and calculated what share of their revenue came from public contracts.

94% get nothing. Of the 6% that do, most get a little.

But the tail is there: 521 companies draw over 60% of their revenue from public contracts. They live off the state.

The 222 with "over 100%" are not an error. The value of a contract is recorded once, at signing, so a multi-year contract exceeds the revenue of a single year. The same happens with a newly founded company whose revenue covers a first, partial year.

Which sectors

Construction, trade and IT together take 63% of the money.

IT punches far above its weight. 1,718 companies, €4.79 billion. That is one third of the number of construction companies, and they take half the money.

Methodology

The source is KIMDIS, the Greek public contracts registry, snapshot of 28/06/2026, period 2024-2025. The series is complete from January 2024, so the analysis does not go further back.

We count only clean contracts. We exclude cancelled contracts, outliers, and contracts that were amended or replaced by a newer record. Without this filter the total comes out about double, because the same contract counts many times.

Revenue comes from analysis of the filed 2024 financial statements. 2025 cannot be included: 502 financial statements have been filed, against 111,532 for 2024.

Validation

The 2024 total in my data is €15.75 billion. The official HSPPA figure for 2024 is €16.0 billion. A 98% match.

In count, however, I capture 176,584 contracts against 246,086 official ones, which is about 72%. The missing contracts are the smallest ones, of negligible value. That is why the value matches and the count does not.

What these numbers do not say

"As recorded", not "as paid". The value is that of the signed contract. A multi-year contract appears in full in the year of signing.

A stricter deduplication gives a different number. If I merge every repeat of the same contractor, public body and amount, the total falls to €23.7 billion. I do not use it, because some of these repeats are genuine annual or call-off contracts, and the result departs from the official measurement. I give it only as a conservative lower bound.

The sector is the company's, not the contract's. It is classified by the main activity code (KAD, the Greek extension of NACE) of the contractor. A trading company can well carry out technical work.

Which public bodies spend what, by contracting authority, is on the public bodies page.