Getting a mortgage as a non-resident: Spain, Portugal, Greece and Cyprus

It means tax residence, not nationality and not where you were born. A Dutch citizen who has crossed the 183-day line in Spain is a resident to a Spanish bank and gets resident pricing. A Spanish citizen who has lived in Frankfurt for a decade is a non-resident and gets the lower ceiling. Passports come into it only at the edges: several Greek and Cypriot banks treat non-EU applicants more cautiously again, and Cyprus has a separate purchase permit for non-EU buyers that runs alongside the loan.

The reason banks price the two differently has almost nothing to do with your creditworthiness. A domestic borrower arrives with a credit file the bank can query, a salary paid into an account it can see, an employer it can verify, and assets inside a legal system it can enforce against without hiring foreign counsel. A non-resident arrives with translated documents from a system the credit committee does not know. The bank prices that uncertainty three ways at once: it lends a smaller share of the value, it charges a wider margin, and it takes longer over the file.

Inside the EU this is still a regulated consumer loan. The Mortgage Credit Directive (2014/17/EU) applies wherever the lender sits, which means you receive a standardised information sheet setting out the total cost, and a reflection period of at least seven days before you can be held to the offer. Spain went further in Ley 5/2019 and requires the documentation to reach you at least ten calendar days before signing. What none of that does is oblige any bank to lend to you. There is no right to a mortgage, and a rejection needs no reason beyond internal policy.

The practical consequence is timing. A cash purchase in Spain or Portugal can complete in four to six weeks. A non-resident mortgage typically adds enough to push completion into the six to twelve week range that our country records use, and in Cyprus conveyancing regularly runs three to six months. If you sign a preliminary contract with a deposit at risk before the loan is approved, that gap is your problem rather than the bank's.

Spain has the deepest market of the four, and it is the reason most of the search traffic for non-resident mortgages points there. Sabadell, Bankinter, CaixaBank, BBVA and UCI all run desks aimed at foreign buyers, which means genuine competition on the spread. The ceiling is 70 percent, calculated on the lower of the price and the bank's own valuation, and 60 percent is a more common starting point until the file is strong. Terms are usually capped at 20 to 25 years and to an age between 70 and 75 at the final payment, which quietly shortens the loan for buyers in their fifties. Resident pricing averaged 2.98 percent in May 2026; non-resident quotes reported over the same year ran roughly 3.2 to 4.5 percent. Some lenders have also pulled full-term fixed rates for non-resident loans above about EUR 500,000, which is broker reporting rather than a published policy, so treat it as a thing to ask about rather than a fact to plan around.

Portugal sits at the same 70 percent ceiling, occasionally 80 for EU and EEA residents with euro income, and every large retail bank runs a non-resident programme. The structural difference is the product mix. Mixed rates, fixed for an opening period and then linked to Euribor, passed 85 percent of new housing contracts in April 2026, so the fixed rate you are quoted is frequently a fixed opening period rather than a fixed loan. Banco de Portugal put the average on new housing credit at 2.93 percent in June 2026; non-resident deals reported in mid-2026 sat around 3.4 to 4.5 percent variable and 4.0 to 5.2 percent fixed. Portugal also charges the borrower more at the outset than Spain does, for reasons set out in the next section.

Greece is the country where the honest answer is that the product may not exist for you. Our country record rates non-resident lending as limited rather than open, and that is not a nuance. A small number of banks, with Eurobank and Alpha Bank the names that recur, run non-resident programmes; several others require Greek tax residence before they will open a file at all. Where lending happens the ceiling is 65 percent and 50 to 65 percent is realistic for non-EU buyers, terms are shorter than elsewhere, and 15 years is a common maximum. The Bank of Greece put the average floating-rate housing loan at 3.56 percent in June 2026, while quotes reported to foreign buyers cluster in the 4 to 5.5 percent band. Buyers in Greece who assume finance and then cannot get it lose a deposit, so the sequence in which you commit matters more here than in Spain.

Cyprus lends to non-residents, and it is the most expensive of the four. The Central Bank of Cyprus caps LTV at 80 percent for a primary permanent residence and 70 percent for everything else, which is where a holiday home lands by definition, and banks frequently stop well below the cap for non-residents. The Central Bank put the average mortgage rate at 4.06 percent in May 2026, and lenders commonly add a non-residency loading of half a point to a point on top of that. Cyprus also carries the title-deed problem we set out on the country page: a bank will not take security on a property whose title is not clean, so the mortgage application doubles as a rough filter on the property itself.

Put side by side, the pattern is that the two countries with the most competition, Spain and Portugal, offer both the highest ceilings and the lowest rates, and the two smaller markets offer less of each. That is not a coincidence. It is what a thin lending market looks like from the borrower's side.

Our property buying costs calculator leaves mortgage costs out on purpose. It prices transfer tax, notary, registration and legal fees, because those apply to every buyer in a country and can be expressed as a country range. Mortgage costs cannot: they depend on which lender you use, what you negotiate, and how large the loan is. Folding a made-up average into a country figure would make the calculator look more precise and be less true. So the numbers below sit here instead.

Spain is the cheapest of the four on mortgage-specific costs, and that is a legal artefact rather than a market one. Real Decreto-ley 17/2018 made the lender the taxable person for stamp duty on the mortgage deed from 10 November 2018, and Ley 5/2019 then pushed the notary, registry and administrative costs of the mortgage onto the lender as well. What is left for you is the valuation, roughly EUR 250 to 600, and an arrangement fee where the bank charges one, which is often in the region of half a point to a point of the loan and is one of the few genuinely negotiable numbers in the transaction.

Portugal is the opposite case. Stamp duty on the loan itself falls on the borrower at 0.6 percent for terms of five years or more, under verba 17.1 of the general stamp duty table, which is EUR 1,200 on a EUR 200,000 loan and is payable whatever else you negotiate. On top of that come the valuation, an arrangement fee, and registration of the charge. A Portuguese mortgage therefore adds something in the order of one to two percent of the loan to a purchase that our calculator already prices at 3 to 11 percent of the price.

Greece and Cyprus we can describe less precisely, and we would rather say so than invent a range. Both charge an arrangement fee in the region of half a point to a point, both require a bank-appointed valuation, and Cyprus adds registration of the mortgage at the Land Registry. We have not found a regulator-published fee schedule for either country, so those figures come from lender documentation and should be treated as weaker than the Spanish and Portuguese numbers on this page.

One cost applies everywhere and is easy to miss when comparing headline rates: life cover and buildings insurance are effectively mandatory conditions of the loan in all four countries, usually sold by the bank. In Spain the same mechanism runs in reverse as bonificaciones, where the bank shaves the rate in exchange for a salary account, a card, a pension product or its own insurance. A rate quoted with every bonificacion applied is not the rate you pay if you drop one of the products two years in.

Nothing starts without a local tax number. Spain issues an NIE, Portugal a NIF, Greece an AFM, and Cyprus a tax identification number. You cannot open a bank account without one, and you cannot get a mortgage without an account, so this is the first item on the list rather than a formality near the end. Our separate guide covers how the Spanish NIE is obtained and how long it currently takes.

After that, every lender in the four countries asks for broadly the same file: passport, two or three years of tax returns from your country of residence, three to six months of bank statements, payslips or full company accounts if you are self-employed, a credit report from your home country, proof of address, and a complete list of existing debts including your mortgage at home. Almost all of it needs official translation, and depending on the bank and the country an apostille as well. Translation and legalisation are a real line item and a real delay, not an afterthought.

Every bank then runs the file against a debt service ratio: your total monthly debt payments as a share of documented net income, typically somewhere between a third and a half depending on the lender and the country. Your existing mortgage counts against it in full, which is the single most common reason a non-resident application that looked comfortable comes back smaller than expected. In most of these markets the exact ratio is bank policy rather than a published rule, so it is not a number you can look up in advance.

The valuation is done by a valuer the bank appoints, not one you choose, and the loan is a percentage of the lower of that valuation and the agreed price. If the valuation comes in under the price, the shortfall is yours in cash. That is worth knowing before signing a preliminary contract, because a valuation gap and a deposit at risk make an uncomfortable combination.

The realistic sequence, then, runs: tax number, bank account, an agreement in principle with a stated LTV and rate, only then a signed preliminary contract, then the formal valuation, the binding offer, the reflection period, and the deed. Six to twelve weeks is normal for the whole thing in Spain and Portugal, and longer in Greece and Cyprus.

If your income is in sterling, dollars or krona and the loan is in euro, the exchange rate becomes part of the mortgage whether or not anyone mentions it. Under the Mortgage Credit Directive this counts as a foreign currency loan: the definition turns on the currency in which you receive the income used to repay the credit, not on where the bank is. That triggers specific protections in the national law implementing the directive, including a conversion right or an equivalent arrangement to limit the risk, and a warning when the amount you owe or the instalment moves by more than 20 percent against the rate at signing.

Those protections are real, but they are protections against surprise, not against loss. A 10 percent move against you on a EUR 800 monthly payment is EUR 80 a month, every month, for the remaining term. Over twenty years that is not a rounding error, and it runs in both directions.

The risk also shows up before you borrow anything, in what the bank will lend. Lenders commonly discount foreign currency income before running the affordability sum, in the region of 10 to 30 percent depending on the currency and the bank. This is lender practice rather than a published rule, so we cannot source it as firmly as the LTV caps on this page, but it is the reason a UK or US applicant sometimes finds the offer smaller than the LTV ceiling would suggest even with income well above the threshold.

We have no view on where any currency goes next, and we do not publish forecasts. The only honest framing is arithmetic: the payment is fixed in euro and your income is not, so work out what the payment is worth to you at a rate meaningfully worse than today's before the exposure is twenty years long.

This is a description of where the arithmetic tends to go against a local loan, not a recommendation about what to do with your money. We are a research site, we are not authorised to advise, and we do not know your file.

The first case is size. Valuation fees, arrangement fees and Portuguese stamp duty do not scale down with the loan. On EUR 60,000 borrowed, a EUR 500 valuation, a one percent arrangement fee and 0.6 percent stamp duty come to nearly three percent of the loan before the first interest payment. On EUR 300,000 the same costs are a footnote. Small non-resident loans are expensive in percentage terms, and some banks set a minimum loan size that rules them out anyway.

The second is the comparison people frequently do not run: what borrowing at home would cost against your existing house. Readers regularly find that a remortgage or an equity release in their home country prices below a 4 percent non-resident loan in Cyprus or a 4.5 percent one in Greece. The trade-offs are that the security then sits on the home you actually live in, and that the currency mismatch flips direction, leaving you with a euro asset and a debt in your own currency. Whether that is better depends on facts we do not have.

The third is Greece specifically, where the non-resident product is thin enough that treating finance as available is a planning error. Sellers there are not always willing to accept a financing condition in the preliminary contract, which means a mortgage that falls through can cost the deposit rather than just the purchase.

The fourth is worth flagging for anyone buying with a residency permit in mind. The Greek and Cypriot investment routes are defined by a minimum investment value in the property, and borrowing against that property does not reduce the threshold you have to meet. Some programmes are also specific about the funds arriving from abroad. Whether a mortgage is compatible with a given permit application is a question for the programme rules and a lawyer, not for a comparison table.