A Spanish clinic and a Greek clinic can both advertise a 60 or 70 per cent success rate for donor-egg treatment. The prices they quote are within a few thousand dollars of each other, and both undercut a London list by half or more. What separates them is not the offer. It is whether there is anything to check the offer against.
Spain runs a mandatory national activity registry. Greece does not publish detailed national outcome tables on the same model. That single difference changes what a quoted success rate means in each country, and it is the reason the Health Tourism News guides to IVF in Spain and IVF in Greece answer the success question in two different ways.
What Spain publishes about itself
The Spanish registry’s 2022 tables put own-egg live birth per fresh transfer at 34.0 per cent under 35, 24.7 per cent at 35 to 39 and 12.2 per cent at 40 and over. Counted per cycle started, which is the honest denominator for a patient deciding whether to fly, the same registry shows 9.3 per cent overall.
Those figures do something a brochure cannot: they place Spain against Britain. The UK regulator reports 25 per cent births per embryo transferred; Spain’s registry shows 25.0 per cent per transfer. Two national registries, within a rounding error of each other. Spain does not win on own-egg success, whatever a marketing page implies, and a clinic quoting 60 or 70 per cent for own-egg treatment is describing selected good-prognosis patients or cumulative attempts across several transfers.
Donor eggs are where the numbers genuinely change shape, and the registry shows that too. Live birth per fresh donor transfer holds at 47.0 per cent under 35, 46.5 per cent at 35 to 39 and 40.7 per cent at 40 and over, because embryo aneuploidy follows the donor’s age rather than the recipient’s. Cumulative clinical pregnancy per donation cycle reaches 64.2 per cent against 31.9 per cent with a patient’s own eggs. For a British patient in her mid-forties, that near-flat curve, not the price list, is the argument for treatment in Spain.
What Greece asks you to take on trust
Greece asks for more trust because it publishes less. In the absence of national outcome tables on the Spanish model, the honest figures for Greek donor treatment are the pan-European ones: donor-egg clinical pregnancy running around 45 to 50 per cent per transfer across recipient ages, with live birth somewhat lower. Greek donors are young and screened, and there is no reason to think Greek laboratories underperform. There is simply no national denominator to hold a Greek clinic’s own claim against.
That is not an argument against Greece. It is an argument about what a number from a Greek clinic can and cannot prove, and it changes which questions are worth asking in the consulting room.
The measure that flatters everyone
Both countries share a reporting habit that does more damage than the registry gap. Clinics commonly advertise clinical-pregnancy rates, and clinical pregnancy is an earlier and higher measure than a baby. It counts a heartbeat on a scan. The two diverge by the miscarriage rate, and in donor treatment the Spanish registry puts pregnancy loss near 20 per cent at every recipient age, against own-egg miscarriage that climbs past 40 per cent after 40.
The denominator moves the number as much as the clinic does. Per transfer is higher than per cycle started, because it drops every cycle that never reached a transfer. Cumulative across several attempts is higher again. A patient comparing 65 per cent at one clinic with 45 per cent at another may be comparing three different measures rather than two clinics, and neither figure is wrong on its own terms.
Two questions settle it. Live birth, not clinical pregnancy. Per cycle started, not per transfer.
The prices, which are checkable
| Treatment | Greece, published | Spain, published | UK reference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Own-egg IVF cycle | $3,400 - $5,100 ICSI usually included | $5,600 - $6,650 ICSI included | $5,100 - $10,200 ICSI often extra |
| Patient medication | + $1,140 - $1,710 | + $1,150 - $1,700 | + comparable |
| Egg-donation cycle | $5,700 - $10,250 | $7,650 - $10,850 | $16,500 - $20,500 named London list |
Published clinic prices from the two Health Tourism News country guides, each with its own methodology note and dated exchange rate.
Greece is the cheaper of the two on the headline cycle, and both are roughly half a London donor price. Neither country folds the patient’s gonadotrophin medication into the quoted figure, which is a market convention rather than a trick, and it is worth adding before the two are compared with anything at home.
Two laws, one shared consequence
Spain’s 2006 statute makes donation anonymous by law: the clinic matches by phenotype and immunological profile, and the child will never be able to trace the donor. Greece is predominantly anonymous in practice, with a 2022 reform making open, identifiable donation optional at the donor’s choice, a route reportedly little used. Britain went the other way in 2005, and a donor-conceived Briton can request identifying details at 18, with the first cohort eligible from October 2023.
Each country has a feature the other lacks. Greece’s legal treatment age runs to 54, raised from 50 by the same 2022 reform, with the national authority assessing cases between 50 and 54. Spain sets no numeric ceiling in statute at all; the figure of 50 that circulates is professional guidance and clinic practice. Greece’s altruistic, court-authorised surrogacy route, long one of the few open to foreign patients, was effectively closed to non-residents by a 2025 reform requiring permanent residence in Greece for both the intended parents and the surrogate.
The consequence they share arrives years later and appears in no quote. Embryos made with an anonymous donor generally cannot be imported to a British clinic, because the donor fails Britain’s identifiability requirement. The feature that brought the patient abroad is the feature that strands the surplus embryos there, with storage fees running on and every future transfer meaning another flight. Where all transfers will happen is a decision for before the first cycle, in writing, with both clinics.
What this means for patients
The price comparison is the easy half and it is the half most patients spend their time on. The harder half is that a success rate is only as good as the system that publishes it. In Spain a patient can hold a clinic’s claim against a national table. In Greece the honest anchor is the European band, and any figure above it should be read as a selected-patient number until the clinic explains its denominator.
Ask for live birth per cycle started. Ask what the number excludes. Then compare the prices.
Health Tourism News is a trade publication and sells no treatment. Prices are the figures clinics publish, held on file, with the limits of each panel stated in the guide it comes from.