670,000 Pensioners Gain 2.7% Raise as Government Scraps Pre-2016 Pension Gap

Q: With the personal difference vanishing in 2027, will older retirees ever truly recover the thousands lost during the 2023-2025 freeze?

No. The abolition of the personal difference in 2027 will raise monthly payments for more than 670,000 older retirees, but it will not repay the money they missed during the 2023-2025 freeze. What changes on January 1, 2027 is forward-looking. Pensioners who retired before May 13, 2016 will finally receive the full annual uprating again, and they are also expected to benefit from the projected 2.7% pension increase in 2027. That should produce a noticeable jump in monthly income, especially after only a partial easing of the personal difference in 2026. But the missed increases from 2023 to 2025 were cumulative. Because those rises were not added when they happened, affected pensioners lost not just three years of higher payments, but also the compounding effect those increases would have had on later pensions. Removing the personal difference stops the gap from widening further; it does not reconstruct the full path their pensions would have followed. In practical terms, older retirees will be better off from 2027 onward and the long-running inequity with newer retirees will narrow sharply. Yet they are unlikely ever to be fully made whole unless the government introduces separate retrospective compensation or back payments, and nothing in the current reform indicates that will happen. So the reform fixes future uprating, not past losses. It improves incomes going forward, but the thousands forgone during the freeze are, on current policy, largely gone for good.

1 articles · Updated · Kathimerini English Edition · Aug 8

From Jan. 1, more than 670,000 pensioners who retired before May 13, 2016 will get another increase after the government abolishes the remaining “personal difference” cutting their payments.
The change follows a partial removal at the start of 2026, which delivered this group’s first raises in years after they were excluded from pension increases granted to newer retirees in 2023-25.
The “personal difference” was the gap between what these pensioners would normally receive and what they were actually paid under the 2016 pension reform.
Pensions are estimated to rise 2.7% in 2027, though affected retirees still will not fully recover losses built up over the years.