Akis Skertsos, Greece's Minister of State, used a social media post on August 9, 2026 to challenge the claim that seven in ten Greeks have bank deposits under 1,000 euros, arguing the figure confuses individual people with bank accounts.
Skertsos said there is a major difference between saying seven in ten depositors have deposits under 1,000 euros and saying seven in ten bank accounts have a balance under 1,000 euros. He said the first statement refers to people, while the second refers to accounts, and argued that news coverage and opposition commentary often blur the two, presenting the first as fact when the data does not support it.
How the deposit data is counted
According to Skertsos, figures from the Hellenic Deposit and Investment Guarantee Fund (TEKE) record depositors per bank rather than unique individuals. The same person can hold accounts at three different banks and be counted three times, and each joint account holder is also recorded separately.
He said that, based on official figures, 31.7 million eligible depositors were recorded at the end of 2025, roughly three times Greece's population of about 10.5 million.
Skertsos illustrated the point with an example of a person holding three accounts: 500 euros in the first, 800 euros in the second, and 50,000 euros in the third. Two of the three accounts hold less than 1,000 euros, he said, but that does not mean two out of three Greeks have less than 1,000 euros, since this person actually holds total deposits of 51,300 euros. He called this the statistical trap of converting per-account or per-bank data into data about unique individuals, noting that TEKE and the Bank of Greece do not, for supervisory and technical reasons, allow the total deposits of each person to be calculated.
Deposits up 39.8% since 2018
Skertsos said the picture of household bank deposits in Greece has improved significantly in recent years. Between December 2018 and December 2025, deposits held by individuals rose from 106.4 billion euros to 148.7 billion euros, an increase of 42.4 billion euros, or 39.8 percent.
He said the increase is not confined to very large deposits. A large share came from the 5,000 to 100,000 euro brackets, where much of the wealth of households and the middle class is held: deposits of 5,000 to 50,000 euros rose by 16.0 billion euros, while deposits of 50,000 to 100,000 euros rose by 7.9 billion euros, for a combined increase of nearly 24 billion euros between 2018 and 2025.
Skertsos's conclusion
Skertsos said the claim that seven in ten Greeks have bank deposits under 1,000 euros does not follow from the TEKE data, since the figures concern eligible depositors per bank rather than unique individuals, and the same person can appear more than once without it being possible to know their total deposits.
He said conservative estimates drawn from TEKE and Bank of Greece data show that at least about 4 million individuals hold an account with a balance between 5,000 and 50,000 euros, while at least about half a million individuals hold an account with a balance above 100,000 euros. Balances in the 5,000 to 100,000 euro brackets, he said, rose cumulatively by nearly 24 billion euros.
Skertsos said Greece in 2026 is not a country of 1,000 euro bank deposits, but one where individual deposits rose by nearly 40 percent in seven years, with almost 24 billion euros of that increase coming from the 5,000 to 100,000 euro brackets tied more broadly to the middle class. He said public debate about Greeks' financial situation must rest on responsible, documented readings of the data, since bank accounts and people are not the same thing, and warned that otherwise the public risks being misled into conclusions that serve neither truth nor knowledge.
