They are separate, they are set by different people, and only one of them is actually a choice you make at the screen.
Three costs wearing one coat
The machine's own fee, charged by whoever operates it for the use of their hardware.
Your own bank's fee, charged from several thousand miles away — often a foreign-ATM charge, a foreign-transaction charge, or both. This one is invisible at the machine and is frequently the largest.
The conversion, which is where euros become dollars. It can be done after the fact by your card network, or on the spot by the machine.
That last one is the question.
Euros or dollars
The screen will offer to bill you in dollars. It will often make this sound helpful — a locked-in rate, no surprises, your own currency.
It is a service being sold to you, not a step in the withdrawal. European rules require the machine to show you both currencies, the exchange rate, and the markup over the reference rate as a percentage, and to tell you that you may instead pay in the local currency and let your own bank convert. You are allowed to decline, and declining does not cancel anything.
So the thing to recognise is not a button that says decline. Wording varies and some machines are designed to make the helpful option look like the default. What is always true is the pairing: euros is the local currency, dollars is your home currency. Choose euros unless you have deliberately looked at the two numbers and decided otherwise.
A bank logo tells you who, not how much
Preferring a machine run by an actual bank over a free-standing one in a tourist street is a reasonable habit. It tells you who operates it and gives you somewhere to complain.
It does not tell you what the withdrawal costs. A bank's own machine can still offer to convert your euros into dollars, and that offer is how a good many of them make money from visitors.
You may also read that Greece removed or capped a set of ATM charges in 2025. That is real, and it applies within the Greek payment system. It has never been established to cover a card issued in the United States, and it says nothing at all about your own bank's fees or about the conversion. Do not arrive expecting free.
What to settle before you go
None of this is Greek. It is your own bank, and it is answerable from your kitchen table.
- Know the PIN for the card you plan to use, and know your daily withdrawal limit. - Ask your bank, in these words, what it charges for a foreign ATM withdrawal and what it charges as a foreign-transaction fee. They are two different things. - Carry a second physical card, kept somewhere other than the first. - Do not rely on the phone alone. A card reader wants a chip more often than you would like.
Taking out more at once means paying the fixed fees fewer times, and carrying more cash. Where you want to sit between those is yours.
Where the euros come from on this trip
Not a warning. A sequence.
Get your island cash in Athens or at Piraeus, before you board. You reach Serifos first, and Serifos is the one island on this route where the operator records show a single machine: an Alpha Bank ATM at the branch in Livadi, listed for twenty-four-hour access. It is a real machine and there is no reason to expect trouble from it. There is simply nothing else on the island to fall back on if the day goes sideways.
Sifnos and Milos are easier. Operator records place a machine in Apollonia and a banking point at Kamares, where the ferry comes in; on Milos there is one at Adamas and an Alpha branch inland at Triovasalos, which is not at the port. The Adamas machine sits at a travel agency, and nobody has checked whether you can reach it when the agency is shut.
Machine locations from bank operator records, retrieved 31 August 2026. A listing establishes that a machine exists and what access its operator states — not that it is working, stocked, or reachable on the day you want it.