Self-employed in Greece: how many, and in which sectors

In 2024 Greece had 1,368,400 self-employed people, out of 5,183,500 people in employment in total. One in four worked for themselves, a share that ranges from 0.9% to 79.6% by sector. GEMI, the General Commercial Registry, holds 605,513 active sole proprietorships today.

The two numbers measure different things. Eurostat counts people who work. GEMI counts registrations. The gap between them shows where the commercial registry ends and the liberal professions begin.

Who counts as self-employed

In the national accounts, a self-employed person is anyone who works without a wage from an employer. This includes the liberal professions, farmers, owners of businesses with staff, partners in partnerships and contributing family members. The main job is what counts: someone with a salaried job and a side activity is recorded as an employee.

The total splits into 3,815,100 employees and 1,368,400 self-employed, which is 26.4%. This is the highest share in the EU-27, and no member state is missing from the 2024 measurement: Bulgaria is second with 24.1%, Italy third with 23.0%, Sweden last with 5.2%. The EU average is 14.3%, so Greece works at almost double.

The share by sector

The form of the work explains the two ends. In agriculture the production unit is the household itself: 380,000 self-employed out of 477,200 people in employment. In water transport and in employment services people work under a contract on a ship or in an office, and the share falls below 3%.

Education at 7.8% is the most counterintuitive number in the table, because its private side is visible. But public schools carry 375,000 people in employment in total, and the employees swamp the owners of private tutoring schools.

How many of them GEMI sees

The sole proprietorship is the only form in the registry that matches one person: one natural person, one VAT number (Greek tax ID), one registration. But the ratio sole proprietorships / self-employed is not a clean coverage rate, because two factors push it in opposite directions.

A partner in a general partnership (OE) is self-employed for Eurostat and a legal entity in the registry, so the ratio underestimates. That is why the table has a second column, where each OE and each limited partnership (EE) counts with two partners, the minimum the law allows.

In the opposite direction, the numerator counts registrations. The 605,513 include sole proprietorships held by someone whose main job is salaried, and registrations that were never closed. So both columns are upper bounds, each with a different assumption, and the share of people who actually appear in the registry is lower than even the first one.

Agriculture is the largest sector of self-employment in Greece, and almost all of it is outside the registry. Farmers have no obligation to register in GEMI, so 391,700 people leave 11,019 registrations. Of the eighteen sectors, it has the largest gap in absolute persons, 380,681, almost four times the next one. On its own, it explains why the ratio for the total stays at 44.2%.

In health the 14.4% has a different cause. A doctor with a private practice works in a liberal profession as a natural person and registers with the tax registry, not the commercial one. The same holds for lawyers and engineers. This is why, in the comparison of GEMI financial statements with Eurostat, health and professional activities show the lowest ratio of registrations.

Trade and food service sit at the opposite end. There the activity needs a shop, a licence and suppliers, that is, merchant status, and registration is mandatory.

The four sectors where registrations exceed people

A ratio above 100% means that the registry has more sole proprietorships than there are people who report this work as their main job. There are three causes.

The first is the second activity. The insurance agent is the clearest example: the sector has 47.4% self-employed, but thousands of portfolios are held by people with another main job. Employment statistics count them as employees. GEMI shows them as sole proprietorships.

The second is registrations that were never closed. Deregistration takes effort and money. Dormancy takes nothing.

The third is classification. The activity code (KAD, the Greek extension of NACE) in the registry is declared by the business itself, while the sector in the national accounts comes from the job. A technician who invoices through a sole proprietorship with an administrative services KAD is classified where he works.

Three definitions for the same thing

In September 2026 ELSTAT, the Hellenic Statistical Authority, announced that it is preparing its own data on the self-employed. Its definition is a third one: sole proprietorships without employees, from the Statistical Business Register. It is a registry count with an employment filter, while Eurostat counts people.

The announcement gives one number that can be checked: the self-employed are 61.2% of the economically active legal units in Greece for 2023. In GEMI, sole proprietorships are 605,513 out of 983,692 active Greek registrations with a declared activity, which is 61.6%.

The match does not prove that the two registries see the same people. The years are three years apart, the statistical register drops sole proprietorships with staff, and GEMI keeps active registrations that produce no revenue. But it does show that the composition of the business population comes out the same by two independent routes.

ELSTAT announces a wider publication within 2026, with age and education level by activity and geographic area.

Methodology

Employment: Eurostat nama_10_a64_e, national accounts, Greece, year 2024, unit thousand persons (THS_PER), series EMP_DC for the total, SAL_DC for employees and SELF_DC for the self-employed. Pulled from the dissemination API on 02/09/2026. 2024 is the latest available year.

Registrations: snapshot of the bizlist.gr production database on 02/09/2026, active only, matched to the main KAD. The denominator of the 61.6% is the 983,692 registrations of this perimeter, that is 605,513 sole proprietorships plus 378,179 legal entities. Sole proprietorships are the legal form ΑΤΟΜΙΚΗ. Partnerships are OE and EE.

The sector comes from the first two digits of the KAD. After the 2026 renumbering the database holds a permanent mix of old and new codes. At sector level the shift is small, but at two-digit level it would be serious. That is why the two-digit codes in the first chart come only from the Eurostat side.

What was not measured. Section O is excluded, that is public administration, defence and compulsory social security: it is not business activity and the registry does not cover it. Households as employers and extraterritorial organisations are also excluded. So are branches of foreign companies and the 5,566 sole proprietorships without a declared activity.

What the ratio does not say. It is a visibility ratio, not a compliance rate. The 2.8% for agriculture does not mean that 380,000 farmers break the law. It means the law does not require them to register. Also, employment is for 2024 and registrations are current, so the ratio comes out slightly overestimated for this reason too.

The calculation does not cut at any arbitrary threshold, so it needs no sensitivity check. The only parameters are the 2 for partners, which is the legal minimum and not an estimate, and the exclusion of the public sector. All 95 publishable numbers are recalculated from the raw data before every release.