Resident of Nowhere: Digital Nomads and Polish Tax Residence

Resident of Nowhere: Digital Nomads and Polish Tax Residence

2026.09.18 Author: Robert Nogacki

Digital nomads assume that leaving is the hard part. Tax authorities, from Warsaw to Canberra, have quietly agreed that it isn’t.

The young man in the coworking space in Lisbon has a Polish passport, an American limited-liability company, a British client, and a Paraguayan tax number he obtained in a week. Ask him where he pays income tax and he will tell you, with the modest pride of someone who has solved a puzzle that defeated his parents, that he pays it nowhere. He is under 183 days everywhere. He has deregistered from his mother’s address. He has filed the form. The sentence “I am not a tax resident anywhere” is, in the world he lives in, a badge of competence. In the world of the tax inspector who will eventually read his file, it is the most expensive sentence in his vocabulary.

The nomad is not a marginal figure anymore. MBO Partners, which has tracked American independent workers for years, counted about 18.5 million Americans who describe themselves as digital nomads in 2025, roughly twelve per cent of the workforce, a group that has grown by more than 150 per cent since 2019. Global estimates are scattered: the WYSE Travel Confederation spoke in early 2023 of about thirty-five million, industry tallies put the figure above forty million, and projections reach sixty million by 2030. Several dozen countries, between fifty and seventy depending on who is counting, now sell them a visa: Spain and Portugal, Croatia and Estonia, the Emirates, Thailand. Poland does not, but it exports them, and it has begun to notice.

 

The word “or”

Polish tax law defines a resident with a sentence that most nomads read only half of. Under Article 3 of the Personal Income Tax Act, a person is resident in Poland if she has here a center of personal or economic interests (the statute calls it, with a certain grandeur, the center of vital interests) or if she spends more than 183 days a year in the country. The connective is “or.” The 183 days are a threshold, not a target; a person can spend a hundred days in Poland and remain fully taxable there if her life has never actually moved. Guidance issued by the Ministry of Finance in April of 2021 spells out what “life” means. For couples and parents, it means where the spouse, partner, or minor children live. For single people, it means where they keep house and where their social life happens. The guidance adds a sentence every nomad should learn by heart: a departure with the whole family usually moves the personal center abroad, while a departure for work with the spouse and children staying in Poland usually leaves it at home. The economic center is where the work is done, where the income comes from, where the money, the property, the loans, and the bank accounts sit, and from where the person manages it all.

Two features of that definition escape the nomad. The first is comforting: the statute compares Poland with the rest of the world, not with any particular country. Nothing in it says you must acquire a new residence in order to lose the old one, and the Ministry’s own worked examples allow a rented-out flat and a Polish bank account to survive the move, and sporadic visits to one’s parents to continue. The second undoes the comfort. In practice, the comparison runs backward. In tax proceedings the authority establishes the facts of its own motion, but, as the National Tax Information office reminds applicants in the small print of its rulings, it is the taxpayer who must prove the facts from which she draws a favourable conclusion. An inspector who finds that ties to Poland persist will ask the obvious question: if not here, then where? A person who cannot answer has not conceded as a matter of law. She has conceded as a matter of evidence. Every remaining Polish thread of substance, a bedroom kept at a brother’s flat, an apartment sitting empty with the keys in a drawer, a partner who stayed, becomes the strongest point of reference in the file, not because it is heavy but because there is nothing on the other side of the scale.

Where Poland has a tax treaty with the destination country, the treaty supplies a lifeline: a cascade of tiebreakers about permanent homes, closer ties, habitual abode, and citizenship. The lifeline has a condition, which the tax authority spelled out in September 2025: the tiebreakers apply only to a person who is also a resident of the other state within the meaning of the treaty, which as a rule means residence under that state’s law. A resident of nowhere has nothing to hold on to and is judged on the Polish statute alone. Where there is no treaty, and there is none with Gibraltar, Paraguay or Panama, there is no lifeline by definition; the dispute is fought on Article 3 of the Act, and the evidence of a life elsewhere is, for the most part, in the traveller’s hands.

 

Five rulings and a lesson

Poland’s National Tax Information office issues binding private rulings, known in Polish practice as individual tax rulings, and five of them, read together, describe the border more precisely than any textbook. Arranged from the facts least bound to Poland to those most bound to it, they look like this.

In the first, decided on March 6, 2026 (ref. 0114-KDIP3-2.4011.15.2026.1.JK2), a single man announced that he was moving to Gibraltar. He was not exactly cutting ties. He kept two apartments in Poland, shares in three Polish companies, and seats on their boards, the kind of baggage that many nomads would consider disqualifying. What persuaded the authority was everything else. His main assets and his main income had long sat outside Poland, in Swiss investment accounts and in property companies in Germany and Croatia; to that he added a long-term lease in Gibraltar, an intention to spend the substantial part of the year there, a social life organized around the new address, a portfolio managed from it, and visits to Poland that would be “occasional and incidental.” On the facts he described, the authority accepted that he would cease to be a Polish resident on the day he left. The ruling added two remarks of general interest: in the absence of a treaty with Gibraltar, Polish law alone applies, and residence can change in the middle of a year.

The second ruling, of July 1, 2025 (ref. 0115-KDIT2.4011.284.2025.2.ENB), is a portrait of the man in the Lisbon coworking space, with one difference: he asked first. A Polish software consultant billing clients in Germany and Poland through a Florida limited-liability company described the year 2026, in which he intended to live nowhere: about 260 days outside the European Union, about sixty days in Poland visiting his mother, the rest elsewhere in the Union. His partner and their son would travel with him; the boy stays enrolled in a private school in Poland, is home-schooled, and returns once a year to sit his exams. In Poland he would keep one bank account with a turnover under 500 zloty a month and a passive shareholding in a Polish company with no seat on its board; brokerage and pension accounts were to be closed the year before. On visits he would sleep at his mother’s, his sister’s or his partner’s parents’. He wrote plainly that in 2026 he would be a tax resident of no other state. The authority agreed that he would not be subject to unlimited taxation in Poland: the partner and the child were leaving with him, the income came from abroad, the assets were managed from abroad, and the account and the shares did not change that picture. It is the ruling to show anyone who insists that a center of life must have an address. It need not. It must leave. The ruling settles Polish residence and nothing else; what a Florida company means for its owner, including his obligations to the IRS, is a separate chapter, and we write about it separately.

The third ruling, of March 26, 2026 (ref. 0115-KDIT2.4011.61.2026.2.ENB), shows the version without a family. A Polish worker deregistered in the Netherlands after almost four years, handed back his keys in October 2024, and flew to Thailand with a suitcase. For the rest of the year he moved between Thai and Vietnamese hostels, working nowhere and, by his own account, resident nowhere. The authority agreed that he was not a Polish resident either. What decided it was the completeness of the departure: four days in Poland that year, no property, no Polish bank account, no loan, no source of income, savings managed from abroad, no household shared with his parents, and hotels or friends’ couches rather than his mother’s spare room on his rare visits. A passport and a phone line to his mother were what connected him to Poland. The ruling does not lay down a checklist. It shows that a single traveller, with no family moving along, has the simplest road when nothing remains in Poland that an inspector could call a home.

The fourth ruling, of September 25, 2025 (ref. 0115-KDIT2.4011.457.2025.2.ENB), is the mirror image of the first myth. A retired professional soldier employed by a Polish company to work in Italy described 2026: eleven months in Italy, a flat rented for more than a year, Italian registration, Italian plates on the car. In Poland remained his partner, with whom he keeps a household, a minor son he supports, his mother, his siblings, his friends, a military pension, flats let to tenants, two mortgages, a doctor, a dentist and a hairdresser. The authority found that his center of vital interests stayed in Poland, and so did his residence, even if Italy were to claim him too: the treaty tiebreakers would have pointed to Poland, where the permanent home and the closer ties were. The applicant, for his part, wanted to remain a Polish resident, and the authority obliged. Eleven months abroad against a hairdresser in Poland; the hairdresser won, or rather everything that stood behind him.

The fifth ruling, from December 28, 2022 (ref. 0115-KDIT1.4011.686.2022.1.MR), shows what happens when a family is divided. A Polish man had lived in Britain since 2006 and run a business there since 2010, spending about 285 days a year in the country, where two of his daughters and a granddaughter also lived. In Poland remained his wife, two more daughters, and a jointly owned apartment. The authority found that he was resident in both countries and could not say where his center of vital interests lay; what saved him was the treaty, whose tiebreaker for habitual abode pointed to Britain. Strip the treaty away, apply the Polish statute alone, and the same facts end in Polish residence. He himself had argued that his center of life was in Britain; on that point the authority told him he was wrong.

Set side by side, the five cases yield a rule that nomads find counterintuitive. You may leave a great deal behind in Poland if you have a home, a calendar, and a life somewhere else. You may have a home nowhere if the center of your life, a partner and a child, travels with you and Poland keeps only a bank account, a passive shareholding and a mother to visit. What you cannot do is leave in Poland the things an inspector will call a home, a partner, a child, an apartment at your disposal, your main source of income, and trust the count of days abroad to carry you. Then that piece of Poland weighs everything, and without a treaty there is nothing to set against it. These rulings protect only the people who requested them, and they rest on facts the authority does not verify. But they show where the line is drawn.

 

The man with a key

Poland is not eccentric in this. The systems differ in architecture. In Spain the test itself turns on the absence of a proven residence elsewhere, in Britain on the absence of a home elsewhere; in Germany a dwelling at home is a self-standing condition; in Poland it is the center of life and the evidence for it. The effect is similar: proof of a life somewhere else is the currency that matters, and its absence leaves the country of origin a free field.

Spain wrote the presumption into its statute. Article 9 of the Spanish income-tax law counts “sporadic absences” toward the 183 days of presence unless the taxpayer proves tax residence in another country, in practice with a certificate. For years the tax agency treated the clause as a magnet: a Spaniard who could produce no certificate from anywhere had every day abroad counted as a day at home. In November of 2017, the Supreme Court trimmed the practice in a series of judgments: an absence of more than half a year is not sporadic whatever the traveller’s intentions, and it cannot be added to the Spanish count merely for want of a certificate. For shorter, sporadic trips the logic survived: without a certificate they count as days in Spain, and it is the taxpayer who must show that life happens elsewhere.

Germany does not even need the days. Unlimited tax liability follows from a Wohnsitz, a dwelling kept under circumstances suggesting it will be retained and used, or from a habitual abode; Sections 8 and 9 of the Fiscal Code do the work. The Federal Fiscal Court asks for neither registration nor a minimum number of days; in a judgment of July 24, 2018 (I R 58/16) it held that even irregular stays keep a Wohnsitz alive and that a German Wohnsitz brings unlimited liability even when the center of one’s life is elsewhere. It does ask for actual use as a dwelling rather than visits: a room in the parents’ house where an adult child regularly lives when in the country may be enough, a key kept in a drawer is not, and the line between the two runs through evidence, not forms. Deregistering at the municipal office changes nothing, and German advisers repeat the warning to nomads like a catechism: a key to the spare room, kept “just in case,” can cost more than a return ticket.

Britain replaced judicial intuition with arithmetic in 2013. Its statutory residence test has an automatic clause that reads like a description of the nomad’s blind spot: a person who keeps a home in the United Kingdom available for at least 91 consecutive days, at least thirty of which fall in the tax year, is present in it on at least thirty days in the year, and has no home abroad in which she spends thirty days or more, is resident even if those thirty days are all she spends in the country; only the automatic overseas tests, for people who are barely there or who work full time abroad, take priority. The absence of a home anywhere else is not an incidental fact in that test. It is a load-bearing wall.

Australia produced the most instructive case. In Harding v. Commissioner of Taxation, decided in 2019, the Full Federal Court considered an Australian who had lived for years in rented apartments in Bahrain while flying home to see his family. The Tax Office argued that a permanent place of abode meant a permanent dwelling, which Mr. Harding did not have. The court disagreed: the phrase refers to a country or town in which a person lives in a settled way, not to a building. When the Tax Office sought leave to appeal, Justices Keane and Gordon refused it, and Justice Gordon remarked that requiring a specific permanent dwelling seemed impractical given the way people now live. Mr. Harding won because Bahrain could be named. The court was explicit that the test requires a single country in which the person can be said to be living permanently. A nomad who keeps an Australian domicile and has settled nowhere fails it, and remains an Australian resident without setting foot in Australia.

The United States dispensed with the problem altogether. It taxes its citizens on worldwide income wherever they sleep, so for an American the nomadic life is a compliance cost rather than an escape, and relocating to the United States brings a green-card holder into the same system and keeps him there for as long as he keeps the card.

 

Visas, and what they are not

Across the table sit the governments that monetize the phenomenon. Croatia has since 2021 exempted holders of its digital-nomad permit from income tax on wages earned from foreign employers, and wrote the exemption into its income-tax act rather than leaving it to practice; the permit, however, is for citizens of non-EU countries, so a Pole cannot use it. Spain opens the door from its nomad visa to the so-called Beckham regime, which still has to be elected in time and on its own conditions, and which is not the forum version: for the tax year in which Spanish residence is acquired and five more, all employment income, including salaries paid from abroad, is treated as Spanish and taxed at twenty-four per cent up to 600,000 euros and forty-seven per cent above, while foreign passive income stays outside the Spanish net. Portugal closed its celebrated non-habitual-resident status to new entrants and replaced it with a narrower scheme (IFICI) for selected professions. Malta offers holders of its nomad permit ten per cent on remote-work income and a tax-free first year, but that permit is for non-EU nationals; a Pole falls back on ordinary Maltese residence with the remittance basis, under which foreign income is taxed only to the extent it is brought into the island. The Emirates levy no personal income tax, although since 2024 a freelancer whose UAE business turnover exceeds a million dirhams falls within their corporate tax. Georgia taxes registered small entrepreneurs at one per cent of turnover up to 500,000 lari, though the list of excluded professions includes consulting. Paraguay has no dedicated nomad visa but an easy residence and a territorial system, which does not protect a person working from Asunción for a client in London, because a service performed in Paraguay is Paraguayan income. (We have written separately about why a Paraguayan tax residence does not close the Polish question.)

Every honest guide to these programs repeats the same caveat, and every dishonest one omits it. A visa is an immigration status, not a tax status. Croatia’s exemption and Dubai’s zero operate inside Croatia and Dubai. Whether Poland still regards you as its resident is decided by the Polish statute and, where one exists, the treaty, and the treaty can be an illusion: the Polish treaty with the Emirates counts as a resident of the Emirates only an Emirati citizen, so a Pole without an Emirati passport never reaches the tiebreakers in Dubai and is judged on Article 3 alone. In a ruling of April 27, 2026 (ref. 0114-KDIP3-2.4011.290.2026.1.JM) that went well because the whole family moved to Dubai and what remained in Poland was a dormant bank account. Hence a paradox that the forums rarely mention: the easiest place to lose Polish residence is the place that produces paper, a lease, utility bills, insurance, a documented year of living. A country that wants to tax you produces the most of it, though Dubai, as it turns out, can manage too.

 

Arriving somewhere, or leaving completely

What did the men who won their rulings actually do? Different things, with one thing in common. The man bound for Gibraltar chose a single country, signed a long lease, moved his friendships and his portfolio management there, planned to spend most of the year at that address, and reduced Poland to a place he visited. The man with the Florida company chose no country but took his household with him and reduced Poland to a bank account, a passive shareholding and a mother to visit. The man in the hostels chose no country either and left Poland nothing at all. None of them left the center of his life behind.

The rest follows from that. A base, if there is to be one, is one country in which more of the year is spent than in Poland, with a lease, utilities, a foreign bank account opened locally, a doctor, a gym, and acquaintances who would recognize your face; a life on the road without a base has passed the test too, in the family version, with the partner and the child travelling along and a bank account and a passive shareholding left behind, and in the single version, with almost nothing left behind at all. Tax residence and returns are filed at the base, and a certificate of residence is obtained at year’s end; it does not settle a Polish dispute, and it is not a condition, the Ministry itself says that a place of residence can be shown by other documents and the man with the Florida company had none by definition, but without it a life abroad has to be proved by other means, and the Spanish experience shows how much harder that is. The apartment in Poland is let on a long lease, the keys handed over, the personal belongings removed: the Ministry’s guidance tolerates a rented-out flat, while an empty flat “at your disposal” is the textbook permanent home of the tax treaties and one of the strongest pieces of evidence against you in every system described above. Nights in Poland are matched to the situation: a family that has left together may sleep at grandmother’s, as the Florida man did and as one of the Ministry’s own examples does, whereas a single traveller who keeps a room of his own in the family home and returns to it as to his own hands the inspector an argument about a home, which is why hotels instead of a mother’s house were among the facts that carried the single nomad’s ruling. Work is performed from the base or from the road rather than from Poland, since a hundred days of laptop work in Warsaw are a hundred days of a business conducted in Poland, whatever the letterhead of the company that issues the invoices, and Polish clients on those invoices open a separate question of withholding tax. Self-certifications of residence given to banks and brokers describe the facts rather than the wish, because a false one is a separate liability, a visa or residence permit does not decide what to write in it, account data travels between states under automatic exchange, and a return filed as a non-resident by someone who is not one may amount to false tax data under the Fiscal Penal Code. A calendar is kept as it happens, with boarding passes and card receipts, since in a dispute over days every week must be proved and the days of arrival and departure both count as days in Poland. And, for those who want more than hope, a request for a private ruling describing the coming year as a future event: the man from Gibraltar did it, and so did the man with the Florida company, who filed in May 2025 for the year 2026 and accepted that the year of departure would still be a Polish one. Protection lasts for as long as the facts match the description, the law stands still and the ruling itself is not changed or revoked.

Sequence matters. The year in which the base is built, or the Polish ties are dissolved, is a transitional year, and it usually ends either in Polish residence or in a residence that switches on a specific date. Both are lawful; which of them applies is decided by the facts and the calendar, not by a declaration. In planning terms, the first clean year is the one that begins with the center of life already outside Poland.

The young man in Lisbon has, in truth, done the easy part. Leaving Poland takes an afternoon and a form. Tax authorities on four continents have arrived, by different routes, at a similar conclusion about what happens next: the state you left does not have to look far for evidence. What you left behind is enough, unless you can show what outweighs it. The hard part, the only part that counts, is taking the center of your life with you and being able to prove it. A man very much like him, with a Florida company and a suitcase, did exactly that. He asked first.

Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec advises on changes of tax residence, prepares written memoranda and requests for private rulings, and puts affairs in Poland in order in a safe sequence.