How to open a bank account in Cyprus: documents, fees and appointments

The two routes ask for different documents. Eurobank's new-customer page says the app route needs a Cypriot biometric ID card plus proof of address, and that dual citizens must visit a branch to open an account. The same page says the branch route accepts a European identity card or passport, or an Alien Registration Certificate. So the answer to "is a passport enough?" is yes at a counter and no in an app.

Bank of Cyprus works the same way. Its QuickAccount runs through 1bank for subscribers aged 18 and over. And its app-onboarding page attaches a condition: "your physical presence at the Bank will be required in order to complete the process of activating your account and debit card".

The floor under all of this is an EU right: anyone legally resident in the European Union can claim access to a payment account with basic features, whatever a bank's own onboarding policy says. I unpack that right, and its limits, further down.

Rule one thing out, because a well-ranked competitor guide implies otherwise. You don't need a €300,000 property purchase or any residency-by-investment route to open a personal account. That's a different product for a different reader. UNHCR's Cyprus banking page confirms the low end of the same principle for the group with the thinnest paperwork of anyone: identification documents issued by the Republic to refugees and asylum-seekers "can suffice for opening at least a basic payment account".

Haven't started your paperwork yet? My moving to Cyprus checklist puts the bank account in the order it actually happens.

1. 1
   An address. A rental agreement in your name is the usual first document.
2. 2
   Proof of legal residence. EU citizens register for the Yellow Slip (MEU1). Third-country nationals go through the Pink Slip route and receive an Alien Registration Certificate, or ARC: the Republic's residence-registration document for non-EU nationals, and the branch-route substitute for a Cypriot biometric ID.
3. 3
   A Tax Identification Number, which banks ask about for tax reporting. In practice you register for it once you have an address, which is why it sits here in the order rather than first.
4. 4
   The account.

Now the circular bit, said out loud. You need an address to open the account. You need a bill to prove the address. And you need one to six months of living here before a bill turns up in your own name. Week two in Cyprus is exactly when that trap closes.

The way out is the substitute list. Proof of address has to be in your name and dated within the last six months. Per Eurobank and UNHCR, these stand in for a utility bill:

• a rental agreement
• a municipality bill
• a home insurance policy
• a tax payment certificate
• an official government document
• a statement from another bank

People in the protection system can use an affidavit or a Social Welfare Services certificate instead.

Prepare the source-of-funds evidence just as carefully. Payslips, tax returns or a sale contract all work, and non-resident files draw more of this scrutiny than resident ones. Ancoria's own guide describes the process as five steps, and warns that notarised copies may be accepted first with the originals shown in person later.

The banks don't agree with each other on age. Eurobank's app rule and Bank of Cyprus's 1bank rule both say 18 and over, while Ancoria's guide says 17 or older. Ask your own branch, because I wouldn't plan a teenager's account around an unresolved discrepancy.

Some of this paperwork comes from the same office that handles your permit, so read the district immigration offices page before you book anything. If you're employed, GeSY and social insurance registration produces the certificate on the bank's list anyway.

Under Directive 2014/92/EU, a breach of anti-money-laundering rules is the one ground on which a bank must refuse you. So everything else on the document list exists to let the bank satisfy those checks.

This is the section I wanted to read and couldn't find anywhere. Every Cyprus banking guide I checked describes the process and then goes quiet about the price. The numbers that do circulate come from forum threads where three people quote three different figures for the same bank.

So here are four banks' own published schedules, annualised, each with its document date.

Three things fall out of that table, and I won't stretch it further than it goes.

The resident spread is €8 to €36 a year. Same everyday product, 4.5 times the price, and the cheapest cell is a channel choice rather than a loyalty scheme. Opening in an app is what makes it €8.

Ancoria is the only bank here that prices residency out loud, at €100 a year for a non-resident against a resident's €12. That's 8.3 times, or 12.5 times the app-opened rate. It answers “should I open before or after I move?” better than any process guide does.

Dormancy is charged three different ways, and Alpha's €30 is levied in addition to maintenance rather than instead of it. So an idle Alpha account can cost more than an active account at any other bank on this list.

What makes the missing comparison odd is that the inputs are compulsory. Under Articles 4 and 5 of Directive 2014/92/EU, every payment-account provider has to hand you a standardised fee information document in common terminology before you sign, then a statement of all fees incurred at least once a year, free of charge. The raw material is mandatory, standardised and public. And nobody had built the table.

One thing the tariffs do not answer: none of these four documents publishes a minimum opening deposit or a minimum balance for a personal current account. Figures between €50 and €21,000 circulate on forums, and I won't repeat any of them as a rule, because a bank can set a risk-based requirement on your individual file. Ask the branch what it wants before you go in.

Read the table narrowly. These are headline maintenance charges only. Transfers, cards, cash handling and statements are priced separately in each bank's own document. The figures still circulating in older guides, including a €2 AstroBank fee and an €8 EU transfer charge, are either superseded or attached to a bank that no longer exists. Treat those as proof that stale numbers travel well, not as prices. There's no “typical” Cyprus bank fee, and no source supports inventing one.

The maintenance fee is small but recurring, so it belongs in the fixed-costs line of what living in Cyprus costs.

It's also the step guides skip. They tell you to make an appointment and stop there. But the booking form has a trap in it, so here is the whole sequence.

At Eurobank, which most people still look for under its former Hellenic name, the sequence runs like this:

1. 1
   Open the branch booking page. Eurobank's is at eurobank.cy/en/personal/bookameeting.
2. 2
   Choose Branch Meeting, not an online meeting. This is the step that costs people a week.
3. 3
   Pick your city. Nicosia and Limassol have their own booking pages.
4. 4
   Pick the date and time from what the branch has free.
5. 5
   Wait for the email confirmation, and bring the documents from the section above.

The trap is step two, in the bank's own words: an online or virtual meeting is for consultation only, and an in-person branch meeting is required to complete the request. Book the wrong type and you lose a week.

At Bank of Cyprus the digital path runs through 1bank and the BOC Mobile app, as a new customer application. But the bank states that "your physical presence at the Bank will be required in order to complete the process of activating your account and debit card". Bring the originals of everything you uploaded.

Bank of Cyprus posts its branch hours as 08:00 to 14:30 Monday to Thursday, and 08:00 to 14:00 on Friday. So this is a working-hours errand rather than something you slot around a job. And if you searched “Hellenic Bank appointment” and landed on a Eurobank page, that's correct, not a redirect error. The section on which banks actually exist explains why.

The cap comes from Decrees K.D.P. 488/2020, 489/2020 and 490/2020, quoted in Bank of Cyprus's own Fee Information Document: "A maximum total amount of €36 is set in a calendar year … excluding credit transfers exceeding €5,000 per transaction." Inside that ceiling, and up to 100 such transactions a year, sit:

• opening, operating and closing the account
• deposits
• EU cash withdrawals at branches and the bank's own machines
• EU direct debits, card payments, credit transfers and standing orders

After that the normal tariff resumes. Recipients of the Guaranteed Minimum Income pay nothing for the core services, per the same document.

The 10-day deadline is Article 16 of Directive 2014/92/EU, transposed into Cyprus law by Law N.64(I)/2017, with the Central Bank of Cyprus as the competent authority. The Central Bank's own leaflet settles the residency question the rest of this page keeps circling. The right applies irrespective of where you live, as long as you're a consumer legally resident in the European Union.

Be clear about the limits, though.

• A bank must refuse where opening the account would breach anti-money-laundering rules.
• It may refuse if you already hold an equivalent account with another Cyprus institution.

And a refusal isn't the end of it. Law N.64(I)/2017 was amended by N.124(I)/2020 and N.76(I)/2021, and the second of those added a consumer alternative dispute resolution right. So you can escalate. The Central Bank of Cyprus is who you complain to.

Know what you're signing up for. The basic account is a genuinely reduced product: Bank of Cyprus's version carries no cheque book, no overdraft and no credit card. Alpha's charges catalogue prices its equivalent at €2 a month.

The guides that pretend otherwise contradict themselves. One popular guide gives four incompatible figures in a single article: about two weeks, up to four days, around ten days, and several weeks. Ask Google the same question four different ways and it summarises four different answers back, from one to three weeks up to several months. Not one of them is traceable to a bank, a regulator or a government body. That's the state of the published information, and worth knowing before you plan around a date. I'd rather tell you that than invent a range.

One bank does publish a partial figure, and it is worth having. Eurobank says that once your application is approved, opening the account "can take as little as one hour, to a maximum of five business days ... depending on the information/documentation submitted". Read that narrowly: it is the approval-to-open leg, not the apply-to-usable-IBAN window, and it is the only bank-published number I could find.

What actually moves the rest of it:

• Whether your file was complete. The 10-day clock doesn't start until it is.
• Whether an in-person step applies to you at all. The two big banks differ: Bank of Cyprus requires physical presence to activate the account and the card even on its digital route, while Eurobank says that if you apply through its Mobile App "you do not have to visit a bank branch. The process is completed online."
• How long the anti-money-laundering and source-of-funds review takes. Non-resident files draw the heaviest version of this.

So, in practice: if you already hold a Cypriot biometric ID, an app-opened account is a same-week job. A branch-opened account for a newcomer is gated by appointment availability, then the originals check, then activation. Ancoria describes the sequence plainly: the IBAN, the online banking credentials and the debit card all arrive at approval and activation, not when you apply.

Read on 3 September 2026, it showed 15 authorised credit institutions, only 4 of them locally authorised: Ancoria Bank, Bank of Cyprus, Cyprus Development Bank and the Housing Finance Corporation. Three are subsidiaries of EU banks: Alpha Bank Cyprus, Eurobank Limited and National Bank of Greece (Cyprus). One is a non-EU subsidiary. Three are EU branches operating under the European passport, and four are non-EU branches. The register also carries one representative office, listed separately from those 15, which isn't a bank at all.

Then the two corrections no page in the search results carries.

Hellenic Bank is now Eurobank Limited. The register lists it exactly that way, as "Eurobank Limited (previous name: Hellenic Bank Public Company Limited)". The bank's own site announces the merger between Hellenic Bank and Eurobank Cyprus and tells existing customers that at this stage no action is needed on their part. Hellenic's charges page now redirects to the Eurobank domain.

AstroBank is no longer on the register. Alpha Bank completed the acquisition of substantially all of AstroBank's assets and liabilities with effect from 31 October 2025, under a €205 million deal signed on 24 June 2025. That created Cyprus's third-largest lender, with more than €6.6 billion in assets. Systems integration continues through 2026, and Alpha runs a dedicated page for former AstroBank customers.

Most newcomers arrive with the app already on their phone, so the real question isn't what it is. It's whether it can replace a Cypriot account.

Deposits at a Cyprus-authorised credit institution are covered to €100,000 per depositor per institution, including accrued interest, and paid within 7 working days of deposits becoming unavailable. That window is not a Cyprus invention: Directive 2014/49/EU sets the cover at €100,000 and the repayment deadline at seven working days across the whole EU, which is why Lithuania's numbers match. Revolut Bank UAB holds a Lithuanian licence, authorisation code LB002119, company number 304580906. Its deposit insurance is therefore the Lithuanian scheme: also €100,000, but a different fund in a different country. It isn't on the Cyprus register because it has no Cyprus establishment, which is why your IBAN is Lithuanian. Wise says of itself that it isn't a bank account, but offers many similar features. E-money is safeguarded rather than deposit-guaranteed.

Now the question underneath the question. Under Article 9 of Regulation (EU) No 260/2012, a payer or payee in the EU "shall not specify the Member State in which that payment account is to be located", provided the account is reachable within SEPA. So a Cyprus employer or landlord can't lawfully insist on a CY-prefixed IBAN for a euro transfer or direct debit.

So here is where an LT IBAN stands, use case by use case. The first four rows are what the regulation says; the last two are the honest gaps.

Residency is priced. At Ancoria the same current account costs €12 a year for a resident, €8 if you open it in the app, and €100 a year for a non-resident. So opening before you land can cost roughly eight times more a year for an identical product.

Then there's the charge nobody warns about. Fund an account, leave it alone until you arrive, and it can pick up a dormancy fee. Bank of Cyprus charges €6 a quarter once an account has been inactive for 400 days. Eurobank charges €15 every six months after 12 months with no transactions. And Alpha's €30 a year sits on top of the maintenance fee.

So for most people moving on a definite date, the cheaper sequence is to arrive, sort the address paperwork and the residence documentation, then open as a resident. Keep a SEPA-reachable account to move money across in the meantime. Eurobank's branch route accepts a passport, so you lose nothing by waiting.

A status point for British readers. Since Brexit you're a third-country national here, so the Pink Slip file is the relevant one and not the MEU1 route. If you're moving on a pension, retiring in Cyprus covers where that income lands.

• If you already hold a Cypriot biometric ID, the app route is open, and it's the cheapest door at €8 a year with Ancoria.
• If you don't hold one, your shortlist is whoever can give you a branch appointment soonest.
• If you'll be paid a Cypriot salary and pay Cypriot utilities, branch density and direct-debit coverage matter more than a few euro of maintenance. That favours Bank of Cyprus and Eurobank's merged network.
• If you keep only a small everyday balance, the fee is the whole story: €8 against €36 a year for the same product.
• If money will sit idle, weigh the dormancy rules, and Alpha's €30 on top of maintenance in particular.
• If you're still non-resident, read the section above before you choose anything.

A last structural point. This market has consolidated twice since 2024. So any recommendation, mine included, should be checked against the Central Bank register and the bank's current tariff on the day you act. A guide is a starting point, not a substitute for the document.