Cost of Living in Athens: What Our Family Spent in 2 Months

Our actual budget for two months in Athens, Greece — including accommodation, groceries, eating out, childcare, and the everyday expenses of living here as a family. We lived in Athens for approximately eight weeks between May and July 2026. All prices in this article reflect what we actually paid during that stay.

We’d expected Athens to be pretty affordable.

And, for the most part, it was.

Coffee was excellent and cheap. Eating out could be surprisingly good value. We barely spent anything on transport, and there were plenty of ways to entertain our daughter without opening our wallets.

But there was one rather significant exception.

Our apartment cost us €625 a week.

Roughly twice what we would ideally budget for accommodation.

There was a reason.

We’d come to Athens for a very specific reason. Kelli was due to give birth to our second daughter, and rather than keep traveling, we decided to settle somewhere for a couple of months.

Four weeks before the birth. Four weeks after.

So this wasn’t our typical budget. Nor was it an attempt to live as cheaply as possible.

We wanted somewhere comfortable to work, cook, spend time with Nora, and eventually bring our newborn home.

And that shaped almost every decision we made.

Our Athens cost of living: the numbers

Here’s what we spent on an average week living in Athens.

Our babysitter cost €120 a week during the first four weeks, rather than €60 every week. I’ve averaged it across the stay to make the overall comparison easier.

That puts our listed spending at approximately €8,000 for eight weeks, or around €4,300 per average month.

These are our spending figures, not a recommended minimum budget. The table also doesn’t capture every incidental purchase.

And importantly, it doesn’t include the costs of having our baby, medical appointments, health insurance, annual subscriptions or other expenses that weren’t specific to living in Athens.

Those are separate from the everyday living costs we’re looking at here.

Accommodation: where our budget went slightly off the rails

We’d thought our euros would stretch a bit further in Athens.

But we were looking for a short-term rental, in a neighborhood we wanted to live in, with quite a particular list of requirements.

And we weren’t especially willing to compromise.

Our daughter Nore was born in Zagreb two years ago, we’d been living in a tiny apartment. It was cramped, hot, and the air conditioning didn’t work particularly well.

We didn’t want to repeat that experience.

This time, we wanted enough room for everyone, a proper kitchen, somewhere to work, reliable internet, good air conditioning and a lift.

We eventually found a spacious, two-level apartment in Pangrati through Airbnb.

It had two bedrooms, two bathrooms, two patios, sweeping views across Athens, and enough room for us to live comfortably even if we wouldnt be leaving the apartment much.

At €625 a week, it was expensive by our standards.

But looking back, I think it was good value.

It gave us exactly what we needed during a time when comfort mattered more than usual.

That’s probably the biggest lesson from our accommodation search: Athens might be affordable, but don’t assume a comfortable, well-equipped short-term rental will be cheap.

Especially if you’re travelling with a family, working remotely, or have particular requirements.

Someone staying longer, signing a conventional lease, or someone staying a shorter time that can make do with a smaller apartment may have a very different bottom line.

But for our circumstances, spending more on the apartment was a decision we were happy with.

Groceries: €175 a week, and definitely not our usual diet

Normally, we’re reasonably frugal when it comes to groceries.

A lot of our weeknight meals are pretty simple. Vegetable curries, salads, lentils, stir-fries, rice-paper wraps. We eat plenty of vegetables and don’t tend to spend a fortune on elaborate dinners.

Athens was a little different.

For one thing, we weren’t spending our weekends sailing somewhere new, moving campsites or heading off on another adventure.

We were nesting.

And with Kelli preparing to give birth, we also wanted to include more meat in our diet.

So we deliberately increased our grocery budget and started cooking meals that were a bit more involved than our usual weeknight offerings.

Bolognese, chicken cacciatore, lamb rogan josh, alongside the usual bean burritos and vegetable-based meals.

We also spent time preparing food ahead of the baby’s arrival, stocking the freezer with meals to make life easier during the second half of our stay.

One of the pleasures of being in a proper city again was having specialist shops on our doorstep.

We had a butcher, a spice shop, bakeries and local produce shops within walking distance.

And naturally, once you start visiting specialist shops and buying nicer ingredients, the grocery bill tends to follow.

Even in Athens.

We also made good use of AB supermarket delivery, particularly on days when getting out to do the shopping felt like more trouble than it was worth.

That made life considerably easier, without noticeably increasing what we spent.

Our grocery bill averaged around €175 a week for our growing family.

Could we have spent less?

Absolutely.

But this was one of those periods when we were happy to spend a little more on food, particularly when so much of our time was being spent at home.

Eating out: €100 a week

Athens has a fantastic food scene.

And after spending so much of our recent lives on boats or in vans, having an entire city of restaurants within reach was something we were keen to take advantage of.

We weren’t spending weekends at anchor or exploring another campsite.

Instead, we were exploring Athens through its food.

Our eating-out budget averaged around €100 a week, although that was very much a choice rather than a necessity.

At the cheaper end, we found gyros, pizza and other casual meals for around €5–10 per person.

Traditional Greek tavernas were often around €15–20 per person, depending on what we ordered.

And occasionally we’d head somewhere a little more elevated and spend more like €30–40 per person.

The great thing about Athens was having all those options.

You could eat cheaply without feeling like you were missing out, or spend a bit more and enjoy some really excellent food.

That said, we didn’t find that every restaurant automatically offered great value.

As with anywhere, it paid to be discerning.

We could certainly have reduced our eating-out budget by cooking more at home or sticking to inexpensive local places.

But trying different restaurants was one of the things we enjoyed most about living here.

And with relatively little money going towards transport or paid entertainment, it felt like a reasonable place to spend some of our budget.

Drinks were reasonable too. A beer was usually around €4, or €6–7 for half a litre of house wine. So even with a drink or two, eating out could still be excellent value.

Coffee: €15 a week

Coffee deserves its own little mention because it became such a big part of our everyday life.

Pangrati seemed to have an almost unreasonable number of lovely independent cafés.

And most served excellent coffee for just a couple of euros.

We spent around €15 a week on coffee, which felt like exceptionally good value.

But what we came to appreciate most wasn’t really the price.

It was the culture around it.

Cafés weren’t just somewhere to grab a quick caffeine hit. They were neighbourhood gathering places. Old blokes chatting, students working, families catching up.

At first, the relaxed service took some getting used to.

Eventually, we realised nobody was in much of a hurry.

Except us.

And as we slowed down, we found our favourite places. The staff learnt our order, chatted to Nora, and those little coffee stops became part of our routine.

It’s one of the things we miss most about our time in Athens.

Getting around: almost nothing

Transport barely featured in our budget.

But there’s an important reason for that.

We hardly ever left our neighbourhood.

With Kelli heavily pregnant for the first half of our stay, and a toddler and newborn to consider afterwards, travelling across Athens often didn’t feel worth the effort.

We considered heading across town for a particular restaurant one evening, and visiting a food festival another time.

But once we thought about the traffic, the cost of a taxi or Uber, and the general effort involved, we usually decided to stay closer to home.

Fortunately, we’d chosen a neighbourhood where that was easy.

From our apartment in Pangrati, we could walk to cafés, restaurants, shops, a gym, a dentist, two excellent parks and the Hellenic Children’s Museum.

Almost everything we needed was nearby.

That saved us money, but more importantly, it made daily life easier.

Of course, there was a trade-off.

Athens isn’t always the easiest city to navigate with a stroller. Pavements disappear, cars park wherever they can, and crossing roads can be an adventure in itself.

Public transport didn’t always suit the journeys we wanted to make, and taxis could be frustrating.

So while our transport costs were extremely low, I wouldn’t suggest everyone should expect to spend as little as we did.

We’d deliberately organised our lives around a fairly small area.

And for those two months, that suited us.

Childcare: €10 an hour

During the first four weeks, we had a babysitter come three mornings a week, for four hours at a time, giving Kelli and me a chance to get some work done.

We found her by posting in a local Facebook group. It took a bit of legwork to find and vet potential candidates, but we ended up with someone fantastic, and for much cheaper than going through an agency.

She was a childcare specialist in her regular job, and Nora absolutely thrived with her. They’d head to the local park or play togeth

Keeping a toddler entertained without spending much

One of the nicest surprises about living in Pangrati was how little we needed to spend entertaining Nora.

Our nearest park had an informal group of mums, a couple of dads, and toddlers who seemed to turn up most days.

We started bringing Nora along, and she quickly made friends.

It became one of the highlights of our routine.

We also visited the Hellenic Children’s Museum twice.

Admission was free, although we needed to book tickets well in advance.

For afternoons at home, we stocked up on inexpensive arts-and-crafts supplies from Jumbo.

We even bought a little inflatable pool for the balcony to help Nora cool down during the summer heat.

Athens also had plenty of free cultural activities taking place while we were there.

The This is Athens City Festival was running across the city, bringing the city to life with live music, street parties, open-air cinema, theatre, guided walks, food experiences, neighbourhood events, and plenty of family-friendly activities, including workshops and storytelling.

The challenge wasn’t necessarily finding things that were affordable.

It was finding things that were nearby, suitable for a toddler, and practical to get to in the middle of an Athenian summer.

Two good places to look for local events and activities are This is Athens and more.com.

To book tours and tourist activities check out Get Your Guide.

Internet, mobile data and other expenses

Working remotely was another reason we needed a comfortable apartment.

We made sure our Airbnb had reliable Wi-Fi and a dedicated workspace, so we could work from home without relying on cafés every day.

For our phones, we used local mobile data plans.

Two SIM cards from the local carrier Cosmote cost us around €10 a week in total, which was excellent value. We had to buy and set up the sims in a local Cosmote store – which was an exercise in itself.

I also paid around €12 a week for a gym membership at the local Alterlife Gym.

Neither was a major expense, but they’re useful examples of how affordable some of the everyday necessities were.

We haven’t included our existing insurance, annual subscriptions, medical costs or other expenses that weren’t directly related to living in Athens in this breakdown.

And because we were in a short-term Airbnb, we weren’t paying separate household utility bills in the way someone with a conventional rental might.

That’s another reason not to treat our numbers as a universal monthly budget for Athens.

So, is Athens actually affordable?

For us, yes.

But not quite in the way we’d expected.

We spent far more on accommodation than we usually would, and we deliberately increased our spending on groceries and eating out.

We weren’t trying to live cheaply.

We were trying to make life comfortable and enjoyable during a fairly unusual couple of months.

And in most other areas, Athens made that surprisingly easy.

Excellent coffee for a couple of euros.

Plenty of good, affordable places to eat.

Cheap mobile data.

Free parks and activities.

And an everyday routine that didn’t require us to spend much money getting around.

If we’d chosen a smaller apartment, cooked simpler meals, and eaten out less, we could have spent considerably less.

But I’m not sure we would have enjoyed those two months quite as much.

Looking back, the apartment, the food, the neighbourhood and the little routines were what made Athens work for us.

We’d arrived expecting to spend two months waiting for our daughter.

Instead, we found ourselves building a little life.

And for the money we spent, I think we got pretty good value.

Frequently Asked Questions About the Cost of Living in Athens

How much does it cost to live in Athens for a month?

Our family spent approximately €4,300 per month, including our Airbnb, groceries, eating out, coffee, mobile data, gym, and occasional childcare.

We weren’t trying to live on a tight budget, and accommodation accounted for a significant proportion of our spending.

Is Athens expensive to live in?

We found everyday life surprisingly affordable, particularly groceries, coffee, casual restaurants and mobile data.

Short-term accommodation was the big exception. Our Airbnb cost €625 a week, although we deliberately chose somewhere spacious and comfortable.

How much did we spend in Athens excluding rent?

Our regular expenses averaged approximately €300–400 per week, including groceries, restaurants, coffee, mobile data and gym membership.

We also spent €480 on childcare during the first four weeks, which was additional to that estimate.

Can you live in Athens more cheaply than we did?

Absolutely. We paid a premium for a comfortable short-term apartment, cooked more elaborate meals than usual and deliberately spent money exploring Athens’ restaurants.

Someone renting a smaller apartment, cooking simpler meals and eating out less could spend considerably less.

Is Athens affordable for families with young children?

In our experience, yes, although it depends on your accommodation and childcare needs.

We found excellent free playgrounds, a free children’s museum and inexpensive activities. We also found a fantastic babysitter for €10 an hour.

Getting around with a stroller was considerably more challenging, so choosing a walkable neighbourhood made a big difference.

What expenses aren’t included in our Athens budget?

Our figures exclude pregnancy and childbirth-related healthcare, medical appointments, insurance, annual subscriptions and other ongoing expenses not specific to living in Athens.

They also shouldn’t be confused with the costs of relocating permanently, which might involve utility bills, deposits, residency costs and other expenses we didn’t encounter during our short stay.

Planning a longer stay? Our companion guide to living in Pangrati covers why we chose the neighborhood, what to look for in an apartment, and the practicalities of everyday life.