Heating a house in Crete, and the Εξοικονομώ grants: what is open, who qualifies, and what a mild winter costs

People who buy in Crete tend to budget for air conditioning and forget about heating. That is half right: the island’s winters are genuinely mild, among the gentlest in Greece and well under half as cold as the EU average. But a stone village house with single glazing and a tiled floor can be colder inside in January than the weather outside suggests, and the Greek grants that pay for insulation, windows and heat pumps are, almost without exception, for main residences. If Crete is your second home, assume you will pay for any energy upgrade yourself. Climate data, prices and programme rules as they stood in October 2026, checked against Eurostat, the Ministries of Environment and Finance, the Housing Policy portal and Greek energy reporting.

I am not an engineer or an energy adviser and this is not technical or financial advice. The right heating for a particular house depends on how it is built, and an engineer’s energy certificate is the place to start.

How mild the winter is

Heating degree days measure how much heating a climate needs. Eurostat’s figures for 2025 put Crete at 824, against 951 for Attica, 1,446 for Greece as a whole and 2,828 for the EU. In other words, Crete needs less than a third of the heating of an average EU region. It is often described as the mildest part of Greece; it is not quite — the South Aegean islands recorded 505 — but it is close. All four Cretan regional units fall in the warmest zone of the Greek building-energy code.

What the averages hide is the house. Many old Cretan houses were built to stay cool: thick stone walls, small windows, stone or tiled floors, and often no insulation in the roof. They hold the cold of a damp January as well as they hold off the heat of August. The energy performance certificate will tell you what you are buying; a class G house will cost far more to keep comfortable than the climate suggests.

What heating costs

The obvious choice for most houses is a heat pump — in practice, the same air-to-air units that cool them in summer — because the winter is short and mild enough for them to work efficiently. Household variable electricity tariffs for September 2026 ranged from about €0.148 to €0.297 per kWh, averaging €0.207; those figures are the supply charge only, and regulated network charges come on top, so the real cost per kWh is higher. Heating oil opened the 2025/26 season at about €1.10 a litre, and reports in September 2026 expected around €1.75 for 2026/27; the Ministry of Development’s fuel price observatory put home heating oil at €1.616 in Heraklion and €1.582 in Chania on 15 October 2026, so plan on roughly €1.55–1.65 and check again, because the price moves week to week. Wood stoves and fireplaces are common in the villages; no official statistics on how Cretan homes are heated could be found.

Solar panels, and how they offset a winter electricity bill, are covered in solar panels and net metering; the whole annual bill in running costs.

The grants: Εξοικονομώ and its successors

Εξοικονομώ 2025, the main Greek home energy-upgrade programme, closed to applications on 13 April 2025. Its rules show the pattern: the home had to be a main residence (owners, or tenants with at least seven years left on a lease), have an energy certificate of class C or lower, and improve by at least three classes with a primary-energy saving of more than 30%. The subsidy was 95% for individuals earning up to €5,000 or households up to €10,000, and otherwise 50% — 65% for families with three or more children, 80% for households with a disabled member. Certain categories of enrolled homes have until 30 November 2026 to complete their works.

The next round sits inside Greece’s Social Climate Fund plan, worth €5.3 billion and approved by the EU in August 2026, which includes Εξοικονομώ upgrades for 62,000 homes and 280,000 heat pumps and solar water heaters, aimed at vulnerable households, between 2026 and 2032. The main renovation phase is reported to start in 2027. No call dates or income limits have been published, and the planned version is reported to exclude short-term rentals.

Ανακαίνιση Κατοικίας is the other live programme: €500 million for homes with a building permit dating from before the end of 1990, up to 120 m² (150 m² for families with three or more children), with an energy class of C or lower. It covers occupied main residences and closed homes that will become a main residence or a long-term let, within income limits of roughly €18,000–25,000 for a single person and €25,000–35,000 for a couple, and it pays 70–80% up to €36,000, plus €2,500 for studies. Its eligibility-certificate stage for closed homes ended on 30 September 2026, so a buyer arriving now is too late for this round unless it reopens; sources also disagree on whether the rental commitment is three or five years. Renovating an old house sets out the building side.

The heat-pump and solar water heater voucher — which, unusually, accepted secondary homes — closed to applications in March 2025. A new €200 million round, paying 50% (55% for vulnerable households), was announced in September 2026 with calls expected before the end of the year; whether second homes will qualify again has not been published.

The heating allowance

The Greek heating allowance is paid only to tax residents who filed a Greek return, for their main residence, within income and property-value limits. For 2025/26 it ranged from €100 to €800, up to €1,200 in areas of high need, and was claimed through the tax authority’s platform. An owner who is not a Greek tax resident is outside it.

The honest downside

The data flatter Crete a little: a mild climate does not make a cold house warm, and old stone houses can be both. The grants are generous but narrowly aimed — at main residences, at modest incomes, at vulnerable households — and the next Εξοικονομώ has no dates. For a buyer from abroad with a holiday home, the realistic assumption is that insulation, windows and heat pumps are paid for privately, and that the price of the house should reflect what they will cost.