Health and Safety in Greece: 6 Duties for Athens Offices
Greece is not usually the first jurisdiction a group examines. Athens offices tend to be modest in headcount, established for a shipping, funds, technology services or professional purpose, and managed as a small satellite.
Two features of Greek law make that a risky assumption. One obligation attaches to every employer regardless of size, with no threshold at all. And the arrangement is notified to the state electronically, which means the absence of it is visible without anyone visiting your premises.
Six duties.
1. Every employer needs a safety technician
The foundational obligation, and the one that surprises foreign parents most.
Under the codified Greek framework, every employer is required to use the services of a safety technician. This is not a threshold requirement. It applies to an office of three people as much as to a larger undertaking, and the Greek public administration states the position plainly: every employer is required to use safety technician services.
Where the undertaking employs fifty or more workers, the employer must engage both a safety technician and an occupational physician. Below that level, arrangements differ according to the size and classification of the undertaking, and in certain categories an adequately trained employer may perform the safety technician duties personally.
The national registry of administrative services sets out the procedure and the position.
2. The threshold for self-performance moved in 2025
Worth knowing if you last looked at this a while ago.
Reforms introduced during 2025 reduced from fifty to twenty the employee threshold below which an employer may perform the duties of a safety technician themselves. The same package strengthened other elements: mandatory written instructions from the occupational physician and the safety technician, maintenance of the instruction log in electronic form, strengthened roles for health and safety committees and internal protection and prevention services, an updated classification of undertakings into risk categories, and a new information system for documenting and monitoring health and safety matters.
For an entity between twenty and fifty employees, that is a direct change. Confirm the current position and the commencement details through local advice, since the package was substantial and implementation has been staged.
3. The appointment is notified electronically
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The feature that distinguishes Greek practice from most of Europe.
The appointment of a safety technician, and where applicable an occupational physician, is notified electronically through the Labour Inspectorate's digital portal, separately for the undertaking and for each branch. Where the service is provided through an external protection and prevention service, the notification arrangements differ accordingly.
This matters for a foreign-owned entity because it changes the nature of the risk. In jurisdictions where the arrangement is internal, an omission is discovered during an inspection. In Greece the appointment is a filing, so its absence is discoverable administratively at any time.
4. The written risk assessment is authored by those appointees
A structural difference worth understanding rather than working around.
Greek law requires a written occupational risk assessment, and the employer is responsible for its preparation by the safety technician and the occupational physician, who are expected to cooperate in jointly authoring and revising it.
That is not how a British or American group typically operates. The assessment is not a document your group health and safety function writes and has translated. It is produced by the appointed local professionals, which means the appointment in point one is a precondition for the assessment rather than a parallel obligation.
Groups that have produced a group-standard assessment for their Athens office and never appointed anybody have, in Greek terms, neither.
5. Committees are elected, and scale with headcount
Committees for health and safety at work operate at enterprise level, with membership ranging by size, and in smaller undertakings a single elected person fulfils the role.
The pattern is by now familiar across Europe: the employee side is elected rather than appointed by management, and consultation is expected before decisions rather than after them. A group that determines an arrangement centrally and communicates it locally has not consulted, and the small size of a Greek entity does not remove the obligation.
6. Accident records, evidence preservation and consequences
Three obligations that arise around an incident.
Employers must maintain a record of occupational accidents causing incapacity for work beyond a defined short period. Where a serious injury occurs, evidence must be kept unchanged for the investigation. And after an accident, the employer is expected to inform workers of the circumstances and warn of potential risks in order to prevent recurrence.
Enforcement sits with the Labour Inspectorate, and where an accident at work is established the case can be forwarded for criminal proceedings against the employer. Penalties under the framework extend to imprisonment as well as financial sanction, so this is not a purely administrative regime.
What an Athens entity needs
| Duty | Trigger | Common position in a foreign-owned office | |---|---|---| | Safety technician | Every employer, no threshold | Not engaged, assumed size-dependent | | Occupational physician | 50 or more workers | Not engaged | | Self-performance option | Below 20 employees since 2025, with training | Position not reviewed since the reform | | Electronic notification | On appointment, per undertaking and branch | Not filed | | Written risk assessment | All undertakings, authored by the appointees | Group document, no local authors | | Committee | Enterprise level, elected, scaling by size | Not established | | Accident records and evidence | On a reportable event | Route unassigned |
Row one is the one to settle first, because rows four and five both depend on it. An entity with no appointed safety technician cannot file the notification and cannot produce the assessment in the form Greek law contemplates.
Greece in a European group
The Greek arrangement illustrates the pattern this batch keeps returning to.
The underlying duty is common across the European Union and derives from the same EU Framework Directive 89/391/EEC. The machinery is entirely national, and it is the machinery you have to comply with. Cyprus requires external advisers to be approved by the state. Belgium requires an internal prevention service from the first employee. Austria quantifies prevention support in hours per employee per year. Greece requires an appointed technician for every employer and files the appointment with the state.
No group standard satisfies all of that. EU-OSHA's overview of the Greek national system is a reasonable orientation for a parent company, and holding one group view while each entity meets its own national test is where health and safety consultants and software are worth more together than either alone. Periodic health and safety audits confirm the smallest entities were not skipped.
Where Arinite fits
Arinite works with locally qualified practitioners in Greece, which is not merely sensible but structurally necessary given that the assessment must be authored by the appointed professionals, while your group keeps one point of contact across every country. We support 1,500+ businesses across 50+ countries and protect 100,000+ employees, with 95%+ client retention over 15+ years. Our health and safety consultants work extensively with finance and banking, legal and IT and software organisations.
Our global health and safety consultants handle the jurisdictions that usually accompany a Greek entity, and our international health and safety consultants can establish what is outstanding locally. If nobody can tell you who your safety technician is, a free gap analysis is the right place to start.
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Arinite Health & Safety Consultants
Health & Safety Expert at Arinite
