For decades, Greece has been one of Europe's strongest homeownership markets, with owning a home deeply embedded in the country's social and economic fabric. But a worsening housing affordability crisis is steadily reshaping that tradition, as rising property prices, surging rents and higher borrowing costs push more households into the rental market.
Across the European Union, homeownership remains the dominant form of housing, although its share has gradually declined in recent years. According to Eurostat, the homeownership rate in the EU-27 stood at 70.1% in 2016 and remained broadly stable through 2021. The trend reversed in 2022, falling to 69.1% in both 2022 and 2023, before declining to 68.4% in 2024 and edging up slightly to 68.5% in 2025. The figures point to a gradual but persistent shift toward renting as housing becomes less affordable across the bloc.
The change has been considerably sharper in Greece. The country's homeownership rate stood at 73.9% in 2016, slipped to 73.3% in 2017 and briefly climbed to 75.4% in 2019 before entering a sustained decline. It fell from 73.9% in 2020 to 73.3% in 2021, 72.8% in 2022 and 69.6% in 2023. After a marginal recovery to 69.7% in 2024, the rate eased again to 69.4% in 2025.
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The decline means that nearly one in three households in Greece now rents its home, with renters accounting for 30.3% of all households. Over the past decade, the country has lost roughly 4.5 percentage points in its homeownership rate, compared with a decline of about 1.5 percentage points across the European Union.
The most pronounced deterioration has come since 2022, when a combination of rapidly rising home prices, accelerating rents and sharply higher financing costs made purchasing a first home increasingly difficult, particularly for younger households. While demand for housing has remained resilient, affordability has deteriorated as wage growth has failed to keep pace with housing costs and mortgage rates have risen following the European Central Bank's tightening cycle.
Despite the decline, Greece still records a homeownership rate slightly above the EU average—69.7% in 2024 versus 68.4% across the bloc. The gap, however, has narrowed substantially in recent years, underscoring how quickly the country's traditionally owner-occupied housing market is converging toward broader European patterns as the housing crisis reshapes where and how Greeks live.
