Short-term rental in Greece 2026: a sector study of the companies in the market

Short-term rental in Greece has 203,122 properties in the registry of AADE, the Greek tax authority, and 2,454 companies with a short-term rental main activity code (KAD, the Greek extension of NACE). The 2026 sector study looks at these companies: how many there are, when they were set up, where they have their seat, what revenue they report and who controls them.

I took from GEMI, the General Commercial Registry, every company with a KAD for short-stay accommodation or property management, 55,303 by main KAD. I cross-checked them with their financial statements, the state aid registries and data from Eurostat, ELSTAT (the Hellenic Statistical Authority) and AADE. Here are the main points. The full study, 33 pages with tables by municipality, regional unit and KAD, is free as a PDF: Short-term rental in Greece 2026.

Three sectors that overlap

Short-term rental has had its own KAD codes since 2024. It is part of a larger accommodation sector, and many companies in this market report property management as their main activity. That is why I measured all three.

The 8,762 companies with short-term rental as a secondary KAD are 3.6 times as many as those with it as their main KAD. Their main KAD is mostly leasing of real estate (1,513), buying and selling of real estate (580) and construction of buildings (271). All of them, with main or secondary KAD, come up in one search by KAD.

Formations after 2024

2024 needs care: the dedicated KAD codes were created that year, and part of the 765 are existing companies that changed code. 2025 closed with 532 formations, three times as many as in 2022. In the first 9 months of 2026 there are 405, against 451 in the first 9 months of 2025. GEMI fills in the most recent months with a delay, so the gap can get smaller.

The legal form is changing too. In accommodation formations, the sole proprietorship was 79.5% in 2015 and is 28.1% in 2026. In short-term rental, private companies (IKE) and limited partnerships (EE) together are 56% of the companies.

Where they have their seat

The municipality of Athens alone has 459 short-term rental companies, almost as many as the next six municipalities together (470). Attica as a whole has 1,011, 41% of the sector. In accommodation the picture changes: the top regional units are Corfu (2,512), Chalkidiki (2,373) and Chania (2,109).

If the accommodation companies of each area are divided by the nights spent via platforms (Eurostat, 2024), Thessaloniki has 451 companies per million nights and Attica 511. Lefkada, and Magnesia with the Sporades, have more than 1,200. That is a market split among many small companies.

Revenue and profitability

The financial statements cover only the companies that must publish them, mainly IKEs and SAs. Branches of foreign companies stay out, because they report the revenue of the parent company.

The median accommodation company had €49,417 in revenue, so it is a business with one or two properties. The 311 companies with revenue above €1 million are 5.3% of the sample and make 70% of the revenue. For accommodation revenue per night spent there is a separate analysis.

The change for property management first came out at −7.1%. One company alone caused the drop. In our database it had the revenue of its group for 2023, about €400 million, and its own revenue for 2024, below €0.5 million. I corrected it from the GEMI PDFs. So that a whole sector does not hang on one line, the comparison leaves out the companies whose revenue changed more than 10 times. With a limit of 5 or 20 times, accommodation and management stay between +11% and +14%. The short-term rental companies with financial statements in both years are only 212, and their change moves from +3% to +6% depending on the limit. That is why the table gives a range.

Who controls them

In the accommodation companies, 57,337 people appear as shareholders or board members. Of these, 53,131 have only one company in the sector. 124 have five or more, and the largest portfolio reaches 31. In property management the people with five or more companies are 324, because there each property or portfolio often gets its own legal entity.

State aid

11% of the accommodation companies, 4,307, have received at least one state aid. 1,794 are beneficiaries of NSRF (ESPA) projects, the EU structural funds in Greece, with €244 million in public expenditure. The other aid is mainly de minimis and pandemic measures. In short-term rental only 16 companies are NSRF beneficiaries.

Methodology

The source is GEMI, retrieved on 2 October 2026, with companies founded up to 30 September 2026. Each sector is defined by the main KAD, with both the old and the new 2026 codes: of the 2,454 short-term rental companies, 70 are still on an old code. Accommodation does not include hotels, camping and long-term leases. Property management is KAD 68.20, 68.32 and 68.30.

The financials leave out 180 branches of foreign companies in accommodation and 463 in management, consolidated group statements and amounts in other currencies. The state aid comes from two registries, the de minimis Accumulation Registry and the NSRF list of operations. They often record the same aid, so their amounts are not added together.

Sole proprietorships, general partnerships (OE) and limited partnerships (EE) do not publish financial statements. They are the smallest companies in each sector, so the real median revenue is lower than the one in the table. The geography counts the company seat: companies based in Athens often manage properties on the islands.