Self-employed insurance premiums are rising – How they’re shaping up by category

By Chrysostomos Tsoufis

Increased contributions by 9.6% will be paid this year by 1.3 million freelancers, self-employed people and farmers, as by law they must increase in line with inflation.

The insured will have until February 12 to choose which of the 6 insurance categories they will join after the few-day extension decided by the administration of EFKA as normally the selection deadline ended today.

Whoever does not submit an application, the system will automatically leave him in the insurance class he belonged to last year, as the regulation provides that in the cases of not submitting an application for a change of insurance class, the classification class of the previous year remains active.

-The increase of 9.6% means that the lowest insurance category, which is chosen by more than 80% of the insured, will increase from €210 to €230.

-The second category increases from €252 to €277

-The third from €302 to €332

-The fourth from €363 to €399

-The fifth from €435 to €478.5

-The sixth from €566 to €622.5.

€10 should be added to these amounts, which is the unemployment contribution. The Ministry of Labor tried to abolish this levy in order to mitigate the impact of the increases, but it seems that the ears of Mr. Staikouras, the Minister of Finance, were not exactly listening.

Even so, however, the Ministry of Labor considers that, at least for the lower level, the increase is manageable, especially if compared to the amounts that the self-employed had to pay according to the provisions of Law Katrougalos.

For example, according to the announcement of the Ministry of Labor, an insured person with an annual income of €20,000 used to pay €449, while now even after the increase he will pay €230.

An insured person with an annual income of €30,000 paid €674.

If we assume that an insured person of €55,000 per year chooses the 6th tier because he wants to receive a larger pension, with the Katrougalou prefecture he paid €1235/month while now he will pay about half of that, €620/month.

The Ministry of Labor proceeded with the increases despite the fact that the associations of freelancers, self-employed and farmers had requested a freeze at least for this year due to the specific conditions (energy crisis, inflation) in the meetings they had with its leadership.

The strongest argument of the ministry is that after the 2 increases of the minimum wage, the contributions of the workers paid with it (€225) were higher than those of the first tier of the self-employed. Therefore, it was possible for an employer to pay less money for his own contributions than the contributions corresponding to his employee who is paid the minimum wage.

Furthermore, according to the Ministry of Labour, the nature of the country’s insurance system imposes the increase, which is redistributive, which means that the pensions of current retirees are covered to a significant extent by the contributions of active insured persons. Any adjustment of pensions (such as the one made after 12 years) should also be covered by corresponding contributions to the insurance funds.

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