Personal Taxes in Poland: Inheritance and Gifts, Private Rental, Real Estate Sales

 

In Polish personal taxation, outcomes are rarely determined by interpretive subtlety; they are determined by time and by form. The same inheritance may be wholly exempt or taxed under a progressive scale, and the difference turns on a notification filed within a statutory period. The same gift, executed by bank transfer, enjoys an exemption that a handover of cash may forfeit.

This page states the law as it stands (lex lata, 29 July 2026) in the four areas that generate most private client inquiries:

The Inheritance and Gift Tax

Groups, Tax-Free Amounts, and the Scale

The Act of 28 July 1983 on Inheritance and Gift Tax (ustawa o podatku od spadków i darowizn) assigns acquirers to three tax groups by proximity of kinship.

• Group I comprises, inter alia, the spouse, descendants, ascendants, siblings, a stepchild, a stepfather and stepmother, and also parents-in-law, a son-in-law and a daughter-in-law
• Group II covers more distant relatives
• Group III, all remaining acquirers

The tax-free amounts, in force since 1 July 2023 and unchanged in 2026, are PLN 36,120 for Group I, PLN 27,090 for Group II and PLN 5,733 for Group III.

The excess over the tax-free amount is taxed under a progressive scale with brackets of PLN 11,833 and PLN 23,665, common to all groups: the rates run from 3% to 7% in Group I, from 7% to 12% in Group II, and from 12% to 20% in Group III. The 20% rate is therefore the ceiling of Group III alone; an inheritance from one’s parents, even where the exemption has been lost, is assessed under the considerably milder scale of Group I.

Two structural rules decide more cases than the rates do.

First, the taxable base is the net value of the property acquired, after deduction of debts and encumbrances, which alters the arithmetic fundamentally where the estate is indebted or the property mortgaged.

Second, acquisitions from the same person are aggregated over the five years preceding the year of the latest acquisition; staggering gifts over time is effective only insofar as it respects that mechanism.

 

The Close Family Exemption and the SD-Z2 Notification

Within Group I, the statute carves out a narrower circle, colloquially the zero group, entitled to a complete exemption under Article 4a: the spouse, descendants, ascendants, a stepchild, siblings, a stepfather and a stepmother. Parents-in-law, sons-in-law and daughters-in-law remain outside that circle although they belong to Group I, a distinction which is a recurrent source of costly error in transfers between the families of spouses.

The exemption is conditional upon notifying the acquisition on form SD-Z2 within six months, which in succession cases run from the date on which the court order confirming acquisition of the estate becomes final, or from the registration of the notarial deed of certification of succession. The deadline retains its substantive, not procedural, character, yet its rigor has been softened along two routes. The older one protects an acquirer who learned of the acquisition later and can substantiate that fact, by opening a fresh six-month period from the moment of knowledge. The second has applied since 7 January 2026: a new Article 4c, added by the amending Act of 21 November 2025, permits restoration of the deadline on the taxpayer’s application upon substantiating that the failure occurred without his or her fault; the application must be filed within seven days of the cessation of the cause, together with the SD-Z2 itself, the relevant provisions of the Tax Ordinance (Ordynacja podatkowa) applying accordingly, and a refusal is subject to review extending, after a successful complaint to the administrative court, to the setting aside of any assessment decision already issued. The transitional rule matters: the new mechanism does not revive deadlines that had already expired before its entry into force, while it does extend to the parallel notification for an enterprise acquired by succession under Article 4b. No notification is required where the acquisition follows from an agreement executed as a notarial deed, since the notary reports it. Nor does the notification exhaust the conditions of the exemption: the circle of persons, the title of acquisition and, for monetary gifts, the documentation of the transfer all matter independently.

 

 

Cash Gifts: The Route of the Transfer Decides

The prudential rule nonetheless remains a plain transfer from the donor, properly described, made before the notification is filed.

 

The Territorial Reach of the Tax: Foreign Heirs, Foreign Assets

For an international readership the threshold question is jurisdictional. Immovable property situated in Poland falls within the charge irrespective of the residence or citizenship of either party. Assets situated abroad fall within it where the acquirer is a Polish citizen or has his or her permanent residence in Poland at the time of acquisition. A narrow statutory exclusion covers movables situated in Poland where neither the acquirer nor the deceased or donor was a Polish citizen or permanent resident. Of particular importance to foreign heirs, the exemptions, including the close family exemption of Article 4a, are available where the acquirer was, at the time of acquisition, a citizen of Poland or of another EU or EEA member state, or resided in Poland or an EEA state; a German or Spanish child inheriting from a Polish parent may therefore qualify prima facie, provided the SD-Z2 discipline is observed. Finally, Poland’s network of double taxation treaties concerns income taxes and, as a rule, does not extend to inheritance and gift taxation, save for a handful of conventions dating from the interwar period; overlapping exposure in two states is managed by planning and by the mechanics of each statute, not by treaty relief.

 

Transfers Beyond the Zero Group and the Annuity Contract

Outside the zero group, the tax-free amounts and the scale described above apply, and an acquisition exceeding the tax-free amount must be declared on form SD-3 within one month. Structuring at this level is computational rather than intuitive: staggered gifts must be tested against the five-year aggregation, and a gift coupled with an instruction (polecenie) reduces the base once the instruction is executed. A category of its own is the annuity contract (umowa dożywocia), under which real property is transferred in exchange for lifetime maintenance. It is an onerous contract, not a gratuity: the acquirer pays the tax on civil law transactions, while on the transferor’s side, under the resolution of a seven-judge panel of the Supreme Administrative Court of 17 November 2014, case no. II FPS 4/14, no revenue capable of assessment arises for personal income tax purposes, with the practical consequence that no income tax is due even where the transfer occurs within five years of acquisition.

The choice among gift, annuity and testamentary disposition is accordingly a calculation, familial as much as fiscal, and rarely an obvious one.

 

Private Rental

Lump-Sum Taxation and DAC7 Reporting

Since 2023, revenues from private rental have been taxed exclusively under the registered lump sum (ryczałt od przychodów ewidencjonowanych): 8.5% up to PLN 100,000 of annual revenue and 12.5% on the excess. Spouses within the community of property who file the statutory statement that the whole revenue will be taxed by one of them benefit from an elevated threshold of PLN 200,000. The lump sum admits no deductible costs, which should not be confused with the statutory deductions from revenue that remain available; the annual return is filed on form PIT-28 by 30 April. The boundary with business activity was drawn by the resolution of the Supreme Administrative Court of 24 May 2021, case no. II FPS 1/21: what decides is the allocation of the asset to business property, not the scale or organization of the letting as such, although with fully serviced short-term rentals the authorities continue, mutatis mutandis, to test that boundary.

What has changed is the information environment. Since 1 July 2024, the Polish provisions implementing Council Directive DAC7 have required digital platform operators, booking services included, to report landlords’ identities and revenues to the National Revenue Administration (Krajowa Administracja Skarbowa), and the first reports, covering 2023 and 2024 retrospectively, were delivered by 31 January 2025. Unreported rental income has thus ceased to be a question of probability and become a question of time. A non-resident letting Polish real property is taxed in Poland on a situs basis under the same regime. Where past years require correction, a voluntary disclosure filed before the authority acts remains the difference between an arithmetical exercise and a penal fiscal one.

 

We help you sort out past tax returns, where justified by making use of the ‘voluntary disclosure’ scheme, before the tax authorities do so on their own terms.

 

The Sale of Real Property Within Five Years of Acquisition

The sale of real property before the lapse of five years, counted from the end of the calendar year of acquisition, is taxed at 19% of the income. For inherited property the period is computed with the benefit of the deceased’s own holding period, and a partition of the estate within the limits of one’s inherited share does not constitute a new acquisition. On the cost side, an heir may deduct documented outlays and, for gratuitous acquisitions, inter alia the estate debts settled and forced-share claims satisfied, which not infrequently reduces the income to zero before any relief is even reached. A non-resident seller of Polish real property is taxed in Poland on the same basis; the wider transactional framework is described under real estate law in Poland.

 

The Housing Relief: A Proportional, Not an Automatic, Exemption

The income is exempt in the proportion which the expenditure on the taxpayer’s own housing purposes bears to the proceeds of sale, provided the expenditure is made within three years from the end of the tax year of the disposal. Spending part of the proceeds exempts part of the income; the belief that any housing expenditure within the window exempts the whole is among the most frequent errors we correct. The second is the developer trap: since 2019 the statute has required that ownership, or the specified right, actually be acquired within the three-year period, so that installments paid toward a unit not conveyed by notarial deed in time do not satisfy the condition. The catalog of qualifying purposes, the line between renovation and initial finishing, and the repayment of mortgage credit are the recurring subject of our tax opinions and applications for individual tax rulings, which at this level of controversy provide protection worth having.

A change is on the horizon. A draft amendment to the PIT Act of 16 March 2026 would introduce a new provision restricting repeated use of the relief and narrowing it to the satisfaction of the taxpayer’s own housing needs. As at the date of publication this remains a bill in the legislative process, and current disposals are governed by the existing rules; it appears prudent, however, to structure transactions that straddle the two legal states with the transitional provisions in mind before they harden into law.

 

 

Where These Cases Are Decided

The common denominator of all four areas is the documentation of flows. A gift without the trace of a transfer, rent collected outside any account, or unexplained credits return years later as an authority’s question about the source of funds, with the attendant risk of proceedings concerning income from undisclosed sources, taxed at a punitive 75% rate. The authorities’ toolkit now includes inspection of bank accounts and platform-reported data, and the dispute migrates from the return itself to the stages of a tax audit, tax proceedings and, where necessary, appeals to the administrative courts. The horizon of exposure is set by the statute of limitations for tax obligations, which as a rule runs for years after the event. Cheaper than any of those stages is securing the position ex ante: by an individual tax ruling where the law is unclear and the stakes are high, and by documentary order where the law is clear and only family practice departs from it.

 

Scope of Engagement

We advise private clients in four forms:

Recurring compliance and annual filings are described under personal income tax. Larger estates are handled jointly with our succession practice, including structures built on the Polish family foundation. For clients moving their center of vital interests across borders, including those relocating to the United States, we resolve the residence question before two states attempt to resolve it for them.

 

Legal status as at 29 July 2026.