Profit margin and profit by sector in Greece, financial year 2024

In 84,494 sets of 2024 financial statements, the median Greek company kept 7.34% of its revenue as pre-tax profit. In euros that is €21,720 for the whole year.

The two numbers do not rank the sectors in the same order, and the gap between them is the subject of this article. The percentage says how much a business keeps of what passes through its hands. The euros say what is left at the end.

The sectors with the highest margin

Ten of the twelve sell hours. They hold no stock, they have no shop window, they pay no rent for a space where customers come in. The two exceptions are 35, where the margin comes from fully depreciated solar and wind plants, and 42, civil engineering, which works with machinery and construction sites.

Sector 66 needs a careful reading: it consists mainly of insurance agents and brokers, where revenue is already the commission and not the premium that passes through. The 24.89% is measured on a different base from the 2.05% of a retailer.

The sectors with the highest profit in euros

The list changed almost completely. Of the twelve sectors with the highest margin, only one is also here, civil engineering. Manufacturing and construction rose to the top, businesses that work with a low percentage on large revenue.

The six largest moves between the two rankings:

The clearest pair is wholesale trade against legal and accounting activities. The accountant keeps 20.20% and the wholesaler 4.80%, four times less. At the end of the year the wholesaler has €39,483 and the accountant €18,946.

All 55 sectors

Sectors with at least 200 companies in the sample. The sector code is the two-digit activity code (KAD, the Greek extension of NACE).

The median and the weighted margin do not measure the same thing

The weighted margin is the profit of the whole sector divided by the revenue of the whole sector. It measures the sector as one unit, so one company with a large enough number turns the whole of it.

In sector 74 the weighted margin of the 389 companies is −80.26%. One record causes it: ELLINIKO METRO reported revenue of €854,807 and a loss of €188.6 million. Without this line the weighted margin becomes 13.51%. The median of the sector stays at 15.97% in both versions. The same happens in 90, where ARIONA ELLAS, with a loss of €28.7 million, pulls the weighted margin down from 15.99% to 2.72%.

Neither of the two records is a reading error. They are infrastructure companies with large depreciation and very little commercial revenue, and they have every right to be there. That is why the number published on this page is the median everywhere.

The gap between the two measures is useful information in itself. In food service the median is 0.82% and the weighted margin 4.96%: the sector as a whole makes a profit, but a few large chains make it. In wholesale trade the two numbers almost match, 4.80% and 4.61%, so the margin there does not depend on size.

How many companies closed the year with a loss

In the whole sample, 26.74%. The eight sectors with the highest shares:

The share of loss-making companies and the median margin are not the same measure. Sector 68 has a median of 9.90%, in the top half of the table, and at the same time 38.22% loss-making: inside it there are companies that collect rent and companies that build, and the second group records a loss as long as the property is not sold. Sector 43, specialised construction, has a higher margin with far fewer losses, 16.94%.

Trade is two different businesses

In the two-digit table, wholesale trade makes 4.80% and retail 2.05%. Wholesale is the largest sector in the sample with 13,726 companies, retail the fourth with 5,209. In euros the gap opens further, €39,483 against €9,486.

Petrol stations keep 0.55%. It is the lowest positive percentage in the whole article, and it comes from the price structure: most of the retail price of fuel is taxes and supply cost that pass through them. Their revenue ranks them among the largest businesses in their area, and the result is that of a small business.

Food service and accommodation

In beverage serving, that is cafés, bars and snack bars, the median is negative in both measures: more than half the businesses of the subsector closed financial year 2024 with a loss. Restaurants make 1.91% and €5,955 a year.

Next to them, hotels make €35,579, with almost one in three reporting a loss. The wide spread in accommodation is already known from revenue per night spent.

The percentage peaks early, the euros always rise

The margin forms a hump with size. In the first band, with revenue below €40,000, the median is −3.20% and half the companies record a loss, 52.21% exactly. It peaks in the next band at 11.77%, and from there up it falls steadily to 4.12%.

Profit in euros rises at every step, from −€580 to €3,601,609.

The 12,115 companies of the first band are the reason the median of the whole sample sits low. They are not inactive, they have revenue above €5,000, but at a small scale the owner's pay, the rent of the premises and the decisions of the year move the result much more easily than they move the financial statements of a company with an accounting department.

How many reach €10,000 a month

The threshold is arbitrary, so it was also measured at half and at double:

More than one in five companies with financial statements makes more than €120,000 in pre-tax profit a year. The number must be read together with the previous one: most of those that reach it are companies with revenue above €1 million, where the share rises to 52.90%.

Methodology

Margin = pre-tax result divided by revenue. The median profit is the same pre-tax result in euros, on exactly the same sample. After-tax profit is missing from many published financial statements, pre-tax is everywhere. It is not a gross margin and it is not EBITDA.

The source is the 2024 financial statements as published in GEMI, the Greek General Commercial Registry, read by analysis of the PDF file itself. Database snapshot: 22 September 2026. Population 84,494 companies, one record per company with a financial year that closes within 2024 and with both revenue and result reported. Removed: branches of foreign companies, which publish the consolidated accounts of their parent, ESEF consolidated statements, which count the subsidiaries again, records not in euros, and revenue below €5,000.

The €5,000 threshold removes only the practically inactive companies, where the ratio becomes noise. I chose it myself, so I measured what changes without it:

At every threshold, 66 comes first and 96 last. In the middle of the ranking a sector can move several places, so the article talks about groups of sectors and not about the difference between twelfth and fifteenth place.

The sector is the two-digit KAD of the main activity. During 2026, GEMI moved to a new code list, and the registry permanently holds two generations of codes. At two digits nothing changes. The subsectors in the article were joined by hand with the codes of both generations.

The number is not a return on capital: a hotel with 10% on a €20 million property and a consulting firm with 20% and no fixed assets do not compare as investments. It does not correct for intra-group transactions, so a subsidiary that invoices its parent at cost shows a zero margin. And the denominator is not "all Greek businesses": the roughly 670 thousand sole proprietorships do not publish financial statements and are missing completely. Every percentage here reads "among the companies that publish financial statements".