ul. Dywizjonu AK "Jeleń" 7B/U4, WarszawaMaximum length
3 years
there is no extension – you apply again
How you apply
Online only
through MOS, since 27 April 2026
Minimum pay
PLN 4,806
the full monthly minimum, whatever your hours
Labour market test
Abolished
no starosta’s information since 1 June 2025
Stamp duty
PLN 440
plus PLN 100 for the residence card
How long it takes
Months, not days
the statutory 60 days is suspended in practice
On this page
What the residence permit for work is
The residence permit for work – formally the temporary residence and work permit, zezwolenie na pobyt czasowy i pracę, and usually called the single permit – is one decision that does two jobs at once. It allows you to live in Poland and it allows you to work for the employer, in the position and on the terms written into the decision. It is granted for the period needed for the purpose of your stay, and for no longer than three years.
Three features of it decide most of what follows, and each of them surprises somebody every week.
You apply, not your employer
The foreigner is the applicant and the only party to the proceedings. The employer completes and electronically signs one attachment about the terms of employment, and has notification duties of its own, but it is not a party, cannot appeal, and since April 2026 cannot file for you either.
It is tied to a job, not to Poland
The decision names the employer, the position, the minimum salary, the working time and the type of contract. Leave that job and the permit does not simply follow you – you have 15 working days to act, and missing them is expensive in a way described below.
There is no renewal
Nothing is “extended”. When three years run out you file a fresh application, from the beginning, with a fresh fee and fresh biometrics. Plan it around the waiting times below, not around the expiry date on the card.
Two systems, two portals, two different things. English-language pages constantly confuse them. A work permit (zezwolenie na pracę) or a registered oświadczenie is a work title, obtained by the employer, filed exclusively through praca.gov.pl since 1 June 2025. The single permit is a residence title, obtained by you, filed exclusively through MOS since 27 April 2026. You will usually need both at different stages, and neither portal knows anything about the other.
If you hold an EU Blue Card, a permit for highly qualified employment, this page is not yours – see our separate guide to the EU Blue Card in Poland. If you have already been here five years, look at the long-term EU resident permit, which is indefinite and no longer ties you to an employer at all.
Who cannot apply for a residence permit for work
Before the conditions, the gatekeeping. For nine categories of applicant the voivode does not refuse the permit – he refuses to initiate the proceedings at all. The difference is not academic. There is no examination on the merits, no certificate of legal stay arising from the filing, and nothing to appeal about on substance. It is the worst way to lose, and it is entirely avoidable if it is spotted before filing.
| If on the filing date you… | What it means |
|---|---|
| run a business in Poland | A registered sole trader’s activity on the day you file blocks the case from opening. The business has to be closed before filing, not during the proceedings. Whether a formally suspended business counts is not settled – treat it as a live risk rather than a safe harbour. |
| are here on a tourist or family-visit visa | Since 1 June 2025 these visa purposes are excluded outright. The old practice of entering as a tourist and “converting” to a work permit inside Poland no longer exists. |
| are a posted or delegated worker | Employees sent to Poland by a foreign employer to provide a service are outside this permit. So are people admitted under international agreements facilitating the entry of traders and investors. |
| hold a seasonal work title | Seasonal work under the 2025 employment act is its own regime and does not lead into the single permit. |
| hold another state’s document | Another Schengen state’s short-stay visa or residence document, a third country’s long-term visa, or an entry permit granted in special circumstances – each blocks the case, with narrow exceptions for Schengen mobility. |
The business-activity bar is the one that catches professionals. A consultant who kept a dormant Polish sole tradership open “just in case”, a developer who invoices a second client through a registered activity, a founder who has a company and an employment contract at the same time – all three file, all three lose the fee, and all three discover that the filing never protected their stay. If you have any registered activity in Poland, the sequencing has to be worked out before anything is submitted.
There is also a power for the government to set an annual cap on the number of these permits, with exhaustion of the cap as a ground of refusal. The power exists; we have found no cap actually set for 2026. Similarly, a starosta may publish a list of occupations for which permits in that district will be refused. We have found no such list published anywhere to date. Both are worth checking at the moment of filing rather than assumed away.
Conditions for a residence permit for work
What you must satisfy to get a residence permit for work
The purpose of your stay must be work, and the statutory conditions must be met cumulatively. After the repeals of 2022 and the reform of 2025 the list is much shorter than it used to be, and shorter than almost every page describing it.
| Condition | What it means in practice |
|---|---|
| Health insurance | Cover under the public health insurance system, or confirmation that an insurer covers your treatment costs in Poland. Where the insurance arises from the very job you are applying on, the condition counts as met – you do not have to be insured before you file. |
| Comparable remuneration | Your pay must not be lower than that of workers doing comparable work, or holding a comparable position, for the same working time. This is a fairness test against the employer’s own workforce and the local market, not a fixed figure. |
| The minimum wage | Monthly remuneration not lower than the statutory minimum wage – PLN 4,806 gross in 2026 – regardless of working time and regardless of the type of contract. This has its own section below, because it is where the money is lost. |
| Occupation not excluded | The work must not be in an occupation on a list which the local starosta is empowered to publish for labour-market reasons. This replaced the old labour market test on 1 June 2025. So far as we can establish, no such list has been published anywhere. |
| A genuine employer | The entity employing you must actually conduct business justifying your employment, must have the means to meet the obligations of employing you, and must be clear of social-insurance and tax arrears. More on this in the employer section. |
A valid work permit is not a condition of being granted the single permit – the single permit contains its own authorisation to work. But a work permit or an equivalent title is what keeps you working lawfully while the case is pending, which is a different question and is dealt with further down this page.
Documents the office will expect
The application form and its attachments, all submitted electronically: your travel document; the employer’s attachment on the terms of employment, completed and electronically signed by the employer through a link the system sends it; certificates from the Social Insurance Institution and from the tax office confirming the employer has no arrears; evidence of health insurance; proof of the stamp duty; and, where a representative is appointed, the power of attorney with its own duty paid.
Offices differ at the margins and may call for more. What they may not do is make the permit conditional on documents the Act no longer requires – see the next section but one.
The pay condition, and the part-time trap
There are two separate pay conditions and they are frequently collapsed into one. The first is comparability: you may not be paid less than colleagues doing the same kind of work. The second is the floor: your monthly remuneration may not be lower than the statutory minimum wage.
The floor is not pro-rated. A half-time contract must still pay the full monthly minimum – PLN 4,806 gross in 2026 – not half of it. The same is true of a quarter-time contract, and the same is true whether you are employed on a contract of employment or on a civil-law contract. Working time and contract type make no difference to the floor whatsoever.
This single rule refuses more part-time applications than anything else in the Act. Every page that tells you a pro-rated salary is enough is describing a rule that does not exist.
Where you work for more than one entrusting entity, the remuneration from those jobs may be added together to reach the floor. That is a real planning tool for people whose work is genuinely split – two half-time roles that each pay PLN 2,600 will clear the threshold together where neither clears it alone – but each employer still has to be named in the application, each has to produce its own attachment and its own arrears certificates, and each has to satisfy the comparability test.
| Year | Minimum monthly wage | Minimum hourly rate |
|---|---|---|
| From 1 January 2026 | PLN 4,806 gross | PLN 31.40 |
| 2025 | PLN 4,666 gross | PLN 30.50 |
The figure changes on 1 January each year. The permit itself records a minimum salary, and if the statutory minimum overtakes what your decision records, the contract has to keep up – that is a matter for employment law, but it also matters here, because paying below the floor undermines the basis on which the permit was granted.
What you do not have to prove
Accommodation, income and the labour market test
Three conditions that dominate the English-language internet, and a good deal of Polish-language advice too, were removed from the residence permit for work years ago or abolished last year. Knowing this is worth money and weeks.
No accommodation to prove
The requirement of secured accommodation was repealed with effect from 29 January 2022. No rental contract, no landlord’s statement, no proof of a place to live is a condition of this permit. Your address is still a field on the form, and voivodeship document lists no longer ask for a housing document. An office that demands one is asking for something the statute does not require, and that is worth saying to it in writing.
No stable and regular income test
The old condition of a stable and regular source of income went at the same time, replaced by the minimum-wage floor. You are not asked to show a savings history or an income record over past years. That test survives on other permits – notably the long-term EU resident permit – but not on this one.
No labour market test
The informacja starosty – the certificate that local recruitment had failed – was abolished outright on 1 June 2025. It used to add four to six weeks before anything else could start. It is gone, and what replaced it is the negative occupation list described above, which so far appears to be empty.
One caveat worth stating plainly: even Poland’s own official business guidance portal still lists the starosta’s information among the documents for this permit, and still says the decision should arrive within a month. Neither statement has been true for some time. If an office or an employer produces a checklist built on either, it is a checklist worth challenging.
Filing since 27 April 2026 – online, and in person
This is the largest change to Polish residence procedure in a decade, and it governs every residence permit for work application filed today. It took effect on 27 April 2026. The amending act of 21 November 2025 did not fix the date itself; it required the Minister of the Interior to announce it with at least fourteen days’ notice, and the announcement came on 10 April 2026.
An application filed anywhere other than the MOS portal is left without consideration. Not refused – not read. The ordinary rule of administrative procedure by which posting a letter counts as filing it has been expressly disapplied for these applications. Paper posted before 27 April 2026 but arriving afterwards was not processed either: only actual receipt counted.
The practical consequence for anyone whose legal stay is running out: the date of posting protects nothing. Only a completed electronic submission does.
There is no paper route for this permit at all. A narrow paper residue survives for intra-corporate transfer permits and for family members applying from abroad. Neither covers the single permit.
Four things about MOS that nobody tells clients in advance
You press submit – we build what goes into it
MOS is built so that the application is sent from the applicant’s own account, under the applicant’s own signature. That single step stays with you and takes a few minutes. Everything that decides the outcome sits on either side of it: the file we assemble, every entry checked before it goes, the employer’s attachment obtained and signed, and the whole of the procedure afterwards. We prepare the submission; you send it.
You need a trusted profile first
An account requires a Polish Profil Zaufany, and the application must be signed with a trusted signature, a qualified electronic signature or a personal signature. In practice a PESEL number comes first, which for a newly arrived worker is itself a step with a queue. Start this before you need it, not in the week your stay expires.
The portal does not chase you
MOS does not notify you that something needs completing. Requests and deadlines have to be diarised and watched. A missed request to cure a formal defect does not merely delay the case – it postpones the point at which the decision clock is treated as having started.
Appeals go outside the portal
If the decision is negative, the appeal is not filed through MOS. It goes the traditional way, through the voivode who issued the decision, within fourteen days. People who assume the portal handles the whole life of the case lose the appeal deadline this way.
Filing online has not made the procedure paperless at the human end. You still have to attend in person. After submission the voivode summons you to give fingerprints and a specimen signature and to present your original travel document. There is no statutory deadline for when that summons must issue, and in several voivodeships it is now the practical bottleneck of the whole procedure.
What replaced the passport stamp
The stamp in the passport confirming that an application had been filed was abolished on the same date. In its place the voivode issues an electronic certificate of submission, delivered through the portal, which you download and print. The Border Guard is notified electronically that the application has been filed.
The legal effect is unchanged: your stay is treated as lawful from the day of filing until the decision becomes final. What that certificate does not do is dealt with two sections below, and it is the most costly misunderstanding on this page.
The residence permit for work procedure, step by step
Clear the gatekeeping
Check that nothing on the exclusion list applies on the day you intend to file – registered business activity above all, and the visa you are currently on. This is done first because it cannot be repaired afterwards.
Assemble the file, including the employer’s part
Employment terms checked against both pay conditions; arrears certificates from the Social Insurance Institution and the tax office obtained by the employer; health insurance evidence; stamp duty paid. Employers are often slower than clients expect – the certificates alone can take a fortnight.
File through MOS, personally
Before the last day of your legal stay. The system e-mails the employer a link to complete and electronically sign its attachment. The certificate of submission follows, and your stay is protected from that day.
Attend for biometrics
On the voivode’s summons: fingerprints, a signature specimen and the original passport. Since April 2026 this appointment no longer starts the decision clock, but you cannot be granted the permit without it.
Answer what the office asks
Requests to complete the file, to explain the employment, or to produce further evidence about the employer. Each one is on a deadline, and each unanswered request pushes the start of the decision period further away.
Decision
The decision names the employer, the position, the minimum salary, the working time and the type of contract. Read it carefully – those five entries define what you may lawfully do, and departing from them is what triggers the modification procedure.
Residence card
Issued after a positive decision for PLN 100. It is the document that evidences your status; the permit is the decision behind it.
How long it really takes
Three answers, and only the third one is useful to you.
The statutory deadline and the real waiting time
The statute says 60 days
Sixty days before the voivode at first instance, and ninety days before the Head of the Office for Foreigners on appeal. Since 27 April 2026 the sixty days run from a complete, defect-free electronic submission – the old trigger, which waited for your personal appearance at the office, has gone. On paper that is a genuine improvement.
But the clock is suspended
The running of the deadlines for deciding residence cases before voivodes does not begin, and where begun is suspended – currently until early March 2027, under a provision of the 2022 Ukraine assistance act, repeatedly extended. It covers temporary residence, permanent residence, long-term EU residence and modifications. Cases are still processed; what is removed is the office’s exposure to a complaint about delay.
And the real figure is months
On Office for Foreigners data as at the beginning of 2026, the national average was around eleven months, with a median a little lower. The spread between voivodeships was enormous – roughly six months in the fastest to well over eighteen in the slowest. What effect the April 2026 switch to electronic filing has had is not yet measurable.
There is an argument about that suspension, and it is worth knowing. The provision sits in an act adopted to assist citizens of Ukraine. The Voivodeship Administrative Court in Poznań has held, in more than one case, that being an exceptional Ukraine-specific measure it applies only to Ukrainian citizens and persons under temporary protection – not to every foreigner. Offices nevertheless apply it to everybody.
We have not found a Supreme Administrative Court ruling settling the point either way, so this is a genuinely contested position rather than a settled answer. It is, however, a real argument where a case has been sitting for a year with nothing happening, and it is one we are willing to run.
The planning consequence is blunt: apply for the residence permit for work early. Legal stay is protected from the day of filing, so the cost of filing three months before your current title expires is nothing, while the cost of filing three days before it expires is a year of living on a certificate with a job you may not be able to keep.
Legal stay is not the right to work
If you read one section of this page, read this one. It is the misunderstanding that costs our clients the most, and it is repeated on almost every English-language page on the subject.
The certificate of submission legalises your stay. It does not authorise you to work. To keep working while the single permit is pending you must separately hold a valid work title – a work permit, a registered declaration of entrustment, or a statutory exemption – and you must have been entitled to work immediately before you filed.
A worker whose work permit expires in month seven of a twelve-month procedure stops being allowed to work, even though the stay remains perfectly lawful. The employer who keeps paying them is exposed to a fine of up to PLN 50,000 per worker, and the worker to a fine of their own.
So the diary has two dates in it, not one: when your residence title expires, and when your work title expires. They are issued by different authorities, through different portals, on different cycles. Keeping the work permit alive across the whole of the pending procedure is ordinary, unglamorous case management, and it is where most of the value of being represented actually sits.
Once the single permit is granted for the same employer and the same position, the underlying work permit expires by operation of law. Until then it is doing the work.
Two further limits of the certificate
It is not a travel document. This was firmly true of the passport stamp it replaced, and we have seen nothing to suggest the electronic version changed it. If you leave Poland while the case is pending you need a valid visa or another entry title to come back, and you should not assume the certificate will get you across a Schengen border.
It protects the stay only while the proceedings run. Where the proceedings are suspended at your own request, the protection does not apply. And if the application is left without consideration – because it was filed on paper, or because the case could not be opened at all – no protection ever arose in the first place.
Coming from abroad: the work visa route
If you are not yet in Poland, the single permit is not your first step. The sequence is a national visa first, then the residence permit once you are here.
The employer obtains the work title
Either a work permit – granted for up to three years, or one year where the employer has traded for less than a year or the work is half-time or less – or, for citizens of Armenia, Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine, a registered declaration of entrustment for up to 24 months. Both are filed exclusively through praca.gov.pl. Georgia was removed from the declaration scheme on 1 December 2025.
You apply at a Polish consulate
The national visa, type D, is issued by the consul and only by the consul. There is no procedure for obtaining one inside Poland. Its purpose code follows the work title behind it, and its validity cannot exceed one year. Extension inside Poland is possible only in narrow statutory situations and should never be planned for.
You enter and start work
On the visa plus the work title. The employer must give you a written contract, in Polish and in a language you understand, before you start.
Before the last day of legal stay, you apply for the single permit
Online, personally, through MOS. Given that the visa runs for a year at most and the permit procedure now averages close to a year, this application should be prepared from about the sixth month, not the eleventh.
A tourist or family-visit visa is now a dead end. Since 1 June 2025 those visa purposes do not permit work, and holders of them cannot even open single-permit proceedings. Anyone advising you to “come on a tourist visa and sort the papers out here” is describing a route that was closed more than a year ago.
What your employer has to do
The employment reform that took effect on 1 June 2025 made the employer’s position considerably heavier. It matters to you because the great majority of refusals of a residence permit for work are about the employer, not about the foreigner.
In your application
- Complete and electronically sign the attachment on the terms of employment, through the link the portal e-mails it
- Produce certificates of no arrears from the Social Insurance Institution and the tax office
- Be able to show it genuinely conducts business justifying your employment
- Be able to show it has the means to meet the obligations of employing you
Around the employment itself
- A written contract in Polish and in a language you understand, transmitted through the system before work starts
- Verification of your residence title before work starts
- Notification within 7 days if you take the job up, 14 days if you do not, and of early termination
- Retention of the documents for two years after the employment ends
And the penalties, which went up sharply
Illegal entrusting of work now carries a fine of PLN 3,000 to 50,000 per foreign worker, and fraudulently inducing a foreigner to come and work, PLN 6,000 to 50,000 per worker. The foreigner working illegally faces PLN 1,000 to 5,000. Labour inspectors may impose administrative fines of up to PLN 10,000 without going to court. Refusal grounds for work titles were widened to catch obstruction of an inspection, outsourcing without temporary-work-agency status, and violations within the preceding 24 months.
A separate refusal ground exists for employers set up or operating mainly to facilitate foreigners’ entry into Poland, and for arrangements in which you would nominally be employed by one entity while actually working for another without a proper temporary-work-agency structure. If you have been offered a job by an intermediary rather than by the company you would actually work for, that is worth examining before you file, not after you are refused. We act for employers as well as for foreigners, and on this permit the two sides of the file are the same file.
Changing employer, position or salary
This is the best-drafted part of the current law and, handled properly, a genuine advantage of the single permit. There are three tiers, and knowing which one you are in is worth several months.
| What happens | What you have to do |
|---|---|
| Your employer changes its name, legal form or seat or the workplace is transferred to another employer | Nothing, from you. The permit stands. The employer must notify the voivode in writing within 15 working days. |
| You get more hours and a proportional pay rise or your job title changes without your duties changing or a civil-law contract becomes an employment contract | Nothing, from you – these were liberalised by the 2025 reform. Again, an employer notification within 15 working days. Before that reform each of these could put the permit in question. |
| You move to a different employer or to a different user-undertaking, or your position, salary, working time or contract type change | A modification of the permit – not a new permit. Applied for at any time during the permit’s validity, PLN 220, no fingerprints, no personal appearance. You are the only party; the employer is not. |
Fifteen working days, and they are not negotiable. If you lose your job with an employer named in the permit, you must notify the voivode in writing within 15 working days. That duty is treated as satisfied if, within the same 15 working days, you instead apply to modify the permit for a new employer.
Miss it and the consequence is not a fine. The voivode is required to refuse the modification where the notification was not given – which closes the cheap, fast, biometric-free route and forces a whole new application, with the full fee, fresh fingerprints and the full queue. Your employer has a parallel 15-day duty of its own, and its notification does not discharge yours.
Two further points clients routinely get wrong. First, a modification does not extend the permit: the modified permit expires on the original date, however late in its life you change jobs. Second, a modification will be refused if the proposed employment is shorter than the permit’s remaining validity, as well as on any of the ordinary conditions – insurance, comparable pay, the minimum wage – or where the new employer is not genuinely trading, is suspended, struck off or in liquidation, or lacks the means to employ you.
One honest uncertainty: whether the modification application must itself go through MOS since April 2026 is not settled – the electronic-filing rule is expressed in terms of applications for the granting of permits, and official guidance on modifications has not caught up. We confirm the position with the particular voivodeship office before filing rather than guessing at it.
Refusal of a residence permit for work, withdrawal and appeal
The most common grounds of refusal
Refusals of a residence permit for work fall into three groups, and they call for completely different responses.
Grounds about you
Not meeting the conditions for the declared purpose of stay; entry in the register of foreigners whose stay is undesirable, or an alert in the Schengen Information System; defence, security or public order; untrue data, false information, forged or altered documents, untrue testimony or concealment of the truth; tax arrears; unpaid deportation costs; an application filed during unlawful stay. Lacking the qualifications required for a regulated profession sits here too.
Grounds about the employer
Convictions for trafficking, offences against employees’ rights, social-insurance and health-and-safety offences, or document offences; arrears in social-insurance contributions or taxes; not conducting genuine activity justifying your employment, including suspension, removal from the register or liquidation; no financial means; an entity set up mainly to facilitate foreigners’ entry; disguised temporary-agency work. In our experience this is the largest single group.
Not a refusal at all
Refusal to initiate the proceedings, for the reasons set out near the top of this page, and leaving the application without consideration where it was filed outside MOS or left incomplete. Neither is a decision on the merits, and the response to each is procedural rather than evidential.
A granted permit can also be withdrawn – where the purpose of stay ceases, where the employer stops genuinely trading, where position or salary changed without a modification, or where the original application rested on false information. Withdrawal proceedings are adversarial and are defensible; they are not a formality.
The appeal route
An appeal lies to the Head of the Office for Foreigners, lodged through the voivode who issued the decision, within 14 days of service. The appeal body has ninety days – subject to the same suspension described above. From there, a complaint to the Voivodeship Administrative Court in Warsaw within 30 days of service of the final decision, and then a cassation appeal to the Supreme Administrative Court.
The appeal is not filed through MOS. It is sent outside the portal. We have seen more than one appeal deadline lost to the assumption that the system would handle it.
Filing an appeal keeps your stay lawful while it is considered, because the decision has not become final. That is a reason to appeal properly and in time even where the prospects are moderate – and a reason never to let the deadline pass while deciding what to do.
Fees for a residence permit for work
How much a residence permit for work costs
These are the official charges, not our fees. The stamp duty and the residence card fee go to different accounts – a surprisingly common cause of a file being treated as incomplete.
| What | Amount |
|---|---|
| Stamp duty – residence and work permit | PLN 440 |
| Stamp duty – modification of the permit | PLN 220 |
| Residence card – issue or exchange | PLN 100 |
| Residence card – minors under 16 and students | PLN 50 |
| Residence card – replacement after loss or damage (first / repeat) | PLN 200 / 300 |
| Power of attorney | PLN 17 (exempt for a spouse, sibling, parent or child) |
| Employer’s work permit, types A and B – up to / over 3 months | PLN 200 / 400 |
| Employer’s work permit, types C, D and E | PLN 800 |
| Declaration of entrustment of work | PLN 400 |
The work-permit and declaration fees in the last three rows changed on 1 December 2025. Any page still quoting PLN 100 for either is out of date, and the difference is now material to an employer hiring in numbers.
What other pages still get wrong
The law on this permit changed substantially on three separate occasions – January 2022, June 2025 and April 2026 – and most published guidance has stopped at one of them. Here is what is still circulating, and what is actually true.
| Still commonly said | The position now |
|---|---|
| “Submit the application in person or by post.” | Electronic filing only, since 27 April 2026. Paper is left without consideration, and the date of posting counts for nothing. |
| “You get a stamp in your passport.” | Abolished on the same date. An electronic certificate of submission, downloaded from the portal, does the same job. |
| “Come on a tourist visa and sort the papers out here.” | Closed since 1 June 2025. Those visa purposes do not permit work, and proceedings cannot even be opened on them. |
| “It is all online now.” | Overstated the other way. Fingerprints still require attending in person, and appeals go outside the portal. |
| “Your employer needs the starosta’s labour market information.” | Abolished on 1 June 2025. Replaced by a list of excluded occupations which appears not to exist anywhere yet. |
| “You must prove accommodation and a stable income.” | Both conditions were repealed with effect from 29 January 2022. |
| “Part-time is fine if the pro-rated salary meets the minimum.” | Wrong and expensive. The full monthly minimum is required whatever your hours. |
| “The voivode must decide within 60 days.” | True on paper; the running of that deadline is suspended until early March 2027, and the real average at the start of 2026 was about eleven months. |
| “The certificate lets you work, and lets you travel.” | Neither. It legalises your stay in Poland and nothing more. |
| “Changing employer means a new permit.” | Usually a modification at PLN 220 – but only if you notify within 15 working days, and it does not extend the permit. |
| “A pay rise or a new job title needs a new permit.” | Since the 2025 reform, several such changes need nothing beyond an employer notification. |
| “Running a business just gets you refused.” | Worse – the case is not opened at all, so no protection of stay ever arises. |
| “The permit can be extended.” | It cannot. A fresh application, from the beginning. |
| “The employer applies for it.” | The foreigner applies and is the only party. The employer signs an attachment. |
Where this page is uncertain, it says so. Three points above are genuinely unresolved rather than merely complicated: whether a suspended business activity blocks the case, whether the suspension of decision deadlines validly reaches non-Ukrainian applicants, and whether modification applications now go through the portal. Those are matters on which we give an assessment and a reason, not a false certainty.
How our lawyers help with a residence permit for work
KRASUSKI Legal is a boutique firm built around immigration law. We have handled several thousand immigration matters for clients from all over the world, and we act both for foreigners and for the companies that employ them. Where a role is highly qualified, the EU Blue Card may be the better permit, and we will say so. On a residence permit for work the job is mostly sequencing and vigilance: getting the order of steps right before anything is filed, and keeping two separate titles – residence and work – alive across a procedure that now takes the better part of a year.
Before you file
- Checking that nothing bars the case from being opened at all
- Testing the employment terms against both pay conditions
- Working with the employer on its attachment and arrears certificates
- Timing the filing against your current visa or permit
Through the procedure
- Preparing the whole file for you to submit through MOS
- Answering the voivode’s requests within time
- Keeping the work title valid while the residence case runs
- Pressing the office where a case has stopped moving
When it goes wrong
- Appeals to the Head of the Office for Foreigners
- Proceedings before the administrative courts
- Refusals to initiate, and applications left without consideration
- Defending the permit against withdrawal
Afterwards, and for employers
- Job changes, modifications and the 15-working-day duty
- Work permits and declarations, and the employer’s notification duties
- Family members’ applications, kept in step with yours
- The route onward to permanent residence, long-term EU residence and Polish citizenship
Filing soon, or already waiting?
Tell us what you hold today – visa or permit, work title, employer – and we will tell you whether the case can be opened, what it will need, and when to file. If you have already filed and nothing is happening, that is a different conversation and also worth having.
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How does working with a lawyer fit with filing online?+
Since 27 April 2026 the application is sent from the applicant’s own MOS account, under their own signature – that step belongs to you and takes minutes. Everything around it is ours: we prepare the entire file, check every entry before it goes, obtain and manage the employer’s electronically signed attachment, answer the office’s requests within time, keep your work title valid while the case runs, and handle the appeal if it comes to that. In practice clients find the portal the easy part – it is the preparation and what follows that decide the result.
I work half-time. Is half the minimum wage enough?+
No. The monthly minimum – PLN 4,806 gross in 2026 – applies in full regardless of working time and regardless of the type of contract. This is the most expensive misunderstanding on the pay condition. If you genuinely work part-time for two employers, the salaries may be added together to reach the threshold, but each employer then has to be named and documented in the application.
I have a sole tradership registered in Poland. Does that matter?+
Very much. If you are conducting business activity in Poland on the day you file, the voivode refuses to initiate the proceedings at all – the case never opens, the fee is gone and your stay is never protected by the filing. The activity has to be dealt with before filing. Whether a formally suspended business is treated the same way is not settled by any authority we have found, so it should be treated as a risk rather than a workaround.
Can I keep working while I wait for the decision?+
Only if you separately hold a valid work title – a work permit, a registered declaration or a statutory exemption – and were entitled to work immediately before filing. The certificate of submission legalises your stay, not your work. If your work permit expires during the procedure, your right to work ends with it even though your stay remains lawful, and both you and your employer are exposed to fines.
Do I still need a rental contract?+
No. The accommodation condition was repealed with effect from 29 January 2022 and current voivodeship document lists for this permit do not ask for a housing document. Your address is a field on the form. If an office nevertheless demands a tenancy agreement, it is asking for something the Act does not require, and that can be said to it in writing.
I am changing jobs. New permit or modification?+
A modification – PLN 220, no fingerprints, no personal appearance – provided you act within 15 working days of losing the previous job. Applying to modify within that period also discharges your duty to notify the voivode. Miss the fifteen days and the modification must be refused, which forces a complete new application. The modified permit expires on the original date; it is not extended.
My employer gave me a raise. Do I have to do anything?+
If the rise came with an increase in working time and is proportional to it, nothing is required of you – the employer notifies the voivode within 15 working days. The same is true of a change of job title without a change of duties, and of moving from a civil-law contract to an employment contract. A change to the salary alone, outside that pattern, is a modification. It is worth checking which side of the line a particular change falls on before assuming.
Can I travel home while the case is pending?+
You can leave, but the certificate of submission is not a travel document and should not be relied on to get you back. You need a valid visa or another entry title for the return. This was firmly the position with the passport stamp the certificate replaced, and we have seen nothing indicating it changed. If a trip is unavoidable, plan the re-entry before you book it.
The office has had my case for a year. Can I do anything?+
Sometimes, and it depends on the file. The statutory deadlines are formally suspended until early March 2027, which is what offices rely on. But there is administrative court authority holding that the suspension, being part of a Ukraine-specific act, reaches only Ukrainian citizens and persons under temporary protection. The point is unsettled rather than hopeless. Separately, a case can often be moved by dealing with whatever the office is actually waiting for, which is not always what the file suggests.
What happens when the three years run out?+
You apply for a new residence permit for work, from the beginning – there is no renewal. Given the current waiting times, that application should be prepared months before the permit expires. If by then you have five years of lawful residence behind you, it is worth looking instead at the long-term EU resident permit, which is granted for an indefinite period and is not tied to any employer.
Your attorney
Marcin Walasiak – Attorney at law
Marcin leads our employment-based residence practice: single permits and their modifications, work permits and declarations on the employer side, applications through MOS, refusals at both stages, withdrawal proceedings and cases before the administrative courts. If you want to know whether your case can even be opened, and when to file, that is the question he answers first.
m.walasiak@krasuski.legal
Warsaw: +48 502 115 589 Wrocław: +48 71 719 59 08
Legal status as of September 2026. This article is general information and does not constitute legal advice in an individual case. Whether your employment, your current title and your employer satisfy the conditions for a residence permit for work depends on your documents and can only be assessed on them.
Warsaw Office
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