At a glance

What does third-party car insurance cover in Greece?

Third-party car insurance, the only car cover required by law in Greece, pays for the damage you do to others: injury or death, and damage to their vehicle or property, with legal minimums of €1.3 million per injured person and per accident. It covers your passengers but not you as the driver, and never your own car.

  • Third-party liability is the only car insurance the law requires in Greece. The owner or holder must keep it from the day the car gets its plates, whether the car moves or not, unless it has been formally laid up1.
  • Its minimum amounts are set by law: €1.3 million per injured person for bodily injury and €1.3 million per accident for damage to property1.
  • It covers any damage you do to someone else with your car: injury or death of a person, and damage to another vehicle, a garden wall, a shopfront or a lamp post2.
  • It covers your passengers, but not you as the driver3. That needs the separate driver’s personal accident cover.
  • It never covers your own car: not if you are at fault, not if it is stolen or burns, and not the windscreen.
  • Glass breakage and roadside assistance are cheap extras with published prices and frequent use, and legal protection is worth a look too.

Third-party liability is the only car insurance the law requires in Greece. Every car with plates must have it, and its legal minimums are the same for every company.

What it covers

Any damage you do to someone else with your car: injury or death of a person, including compensation for pain and moral damage, and material damage to somebody else’s property, whether another vehicle, a garden wall, a shopfront or a lamp post2. The minimum amounts are set by law and they are high: €1.3 million per injured person and €1.3 million per accident1. No company may sell less.

It also covers your passengers, with one exception: the driver. European law requires cover for all passengers other than the driver3, and the Greek decree does not count the driver who caused the damage as a third party2.

What it does not cover

  • Your own car. Not at all. Not if you are at fault, not if it is stolen, not if it burns, not if a tree falls on it.
  • You as the driver. If you are injured in an accident you caused, third-party liability pays nothing for you. That is the “driver’s personal accident” cover and it is separate.
  • The windscreen. Not even one stone on the motorway.

The most common way to find this out: you park, come back and find the side scratched with no note. Third-party liability has nothing to do with it; it covers the other person, not you.

When it is the right choice

When the car is not worth enough for insuring it to make sense. Our own rule of thumb, not a measurement: if the car’s market value is below about six to eight times the annual premium of a comprehensive policy, comprehensive rarely pays off. Suppose a fifteen-year-old car worth €2,500 and a comprehensive premium of €400 a year: in about six years you have paid what the car is worth.

For scale, the public figures for 2024 put the average net price of own-damage cover for private cars at about €131 a year, an average over all cars and not the price of yours45.

What is often worth adding on top of third-party liability are the cheap, high-frequency covers. Glass breakage had 3.39 claims per 100 private cars in 2024, at an average of €329 a claim, and an average net price of about €20 a year4. Roadside assistance has published prices: €2.50 a month at Hellas Direct, in an annual policy paid in twelve debit-card instalments6, and €35 or €41 for six months at Interamerican, for Greece or for Europe7. Legal protection helps you claim from the other side, and it is worth asking what it costs on your own policy.

See the companies and the prices they print for your car

Sources

  1. ↑Law 5113/2024 (Government Gazette A 96/21.06.2024), articles 4 and 5: the duty to insure and the minimum amounts in Presidential Decree 237/1986, 2024
  2. ↑Presidential Decree 237/1986, articles 6 and 7: what the compulsory cover includes and who is not a third party, 1986
  3. ↑Directive 2009/103/EC on motor insurance, article 12: passengers, other than the driver, 16 September 2009
  4. ↑Hellenic Association of Insurance Companies (ΕΑΕΕ), Motor Insurance Statistical Yearbook 2024: tables 3A, 3B and 7A, November 2025
  5. ↑How the comparison works: where every number comes from, October 2026
  6. ↑Hellas Direct, car roadside assistance (in Greek), 12 October 2026
  7. ↑Interamerican, roadside assistance insurance (in Greek), 12 October 2026