The Double-Insurance Pension Bonus That Hundreds of Thousands of Greek Workers Are Simply Not Claiming

On a Tuesday morning, you can see them if you walk into any local KEP office in Athens. Women holding folders full of photocopies, older men in tattered jackets, and the occasional retiree with a son or niece to help them understand the bureaucracy. They are waiting for clarity, which is what the majority of Greeks have been waiting for since 2010. Statistically speaking, there are also people in that group who might be receiving a second pension stream but are unaware of it.

The double-insurance bonus isn’t exactly a secret. It is concealed within the lengthy framework of Law 4387, the 2016 reform that combined the nation’s disparate insurance funds into a single entity known as EFKA. The idea is fairly simple. In many situations, a worker’s contributions to two different schemes during their career—for example, IKA for a salaried job in the 1990s and OAEE later as a self-employed shopkeeper—can be combined and counted toward an improved calculation. Sometimes this leads to a monthly payment that is noticeably higher. It can occasionally be several hundred euros annually. Sometimes it’s much more.

Nevertheless, it is not being claimed by hundreds of thousands of eligible Greeks. The causes are a combination of the profoundly human and the dull.

Exhaustion is a part of the issue. After fifteen years of pension reform fatigue, many Greeks simply lost faith that interacting with the system would benefit them following the 2012 cuts that eliminated the thirteenth and fourteenth months of payments, the 2016 recalculations, and the 2022 carve-out that discreetly redirected contributions toward individual savings accounts. Pensioners seem to believe that any new “bonus” is either a ruse or a paperwork trap when they pass the older cafes in Exarcheia or Kypseli.

The paperwork itself comes next. Applicants usually need employment records from companies that are no longer in business, contributions stamps from decades ago, and verifications from funds that were absorbed into EFKA years ago in order to claim combined-insurance recognition. After 2017, the state digitized a large portion of this, but the process was not uniform. When I spoke with a retired electrician in Patras last spring, he told me that after his third visit, he had given up because the official kept requesting a document from a fund that, in theory, had ceased to exist in 2008.

The cultural memory of austerity might also be important in this situation. It seems almost suspicious to claim anything called a “bonus” after the highest pensions saw cumulative reductions of up to 44% between 2010 and 2015. Many elderly Greeks continue to hold out hope that it will be reversed by the next reform.

But the money is real, which is frustrating. Combined-insurance provisions were one of the more progressive aspects of the post-crisis architecture, according to the IMF’s 2021 working paper on the Greek system. They were specifically created to reward employees whose careers transcended the old fund boundaries. These employees, the so-called “mixed” contributors, used to be the biggest losers in the system. They are now supposed to be among the modest winners, at least on paper.

Whether or not anyone tells them will determine whether or not they ever truly win. The Greek government hasn’t exactly launched a public campaign about the 2022 reform because it is understandably preoccupied with managing its long fiscal shadow. Thus, the bonus remains unclaimed, legitimate, and technically sound, waiting for a generation that has every reason to be skeptical of positive news.