The number of applications for a pension was 123,000 during the first months of the year, leaving officials worried that it could challenge the highs recorded in 2021, with 212,151 applications, and 2022, with 211,133.
In any case, pension applications are expected to easily exceed the levels recorded in 2023 (190,368) and 2024 (197,228). Authorities do not want applications under review to keep piling up; it took years and a considerable effort to award the majority of pensions, main and auxiliary, within 90 days. At the end of July, there were 15,000 main pensions and between 31,000 and 32,000 auxiliaries pending for over 90 days. This number is expected to slightly rise, as the majority of employees at social security agency EFKA take their holidays in August.
Deputy Labor Minister Anna Efthymiou recently said that the average time to approve a pension application is 50 days and that some more complicated cases, such as a person having worked partly abroad or in a succession of jobs, are to blame for the delays.
Another hurdle is the lack of a fully digitized social security database; at this point, only 51% of the database, some 27 million pages, has been digitized. Authorities claim that the rest will be ready by early 2026.