POLAND Law and Practice Contributed by: Piotr Augustyniak, Nash Concept Ltd
on planning behaviour: clients discount announced reliefs until enacted, seek individual rulings more sys - tematically, and prefer instruments whose treatment rests on settled statutory text. The years 2025 and 2026 have added a distinctive institutional dimension: fiscal pressure on the state budget has produced revenue-oriented drafts, several of which have been halted at the presidential stage. The amendment that would have tightened the taxa - tion of family foundations – a 36-month holding peri - od, restrictions on the rental exemption and the exten - sion of controlled-foreign-company and exit tax rules – was vetoed on 27 November 2025 on grounds of legal certainty. The statutory review of the family foun - dation legislation, due after 22 May 2026, will frame the next round of discussion. Planners should assume that measures of a similar orientation will return and should therefore structure their affairs so that they are defensible under both current and foreseeable law; in the meantime, the implementation of the global mini - mum tax from 2025 and the phasing-in of mandatory e-invoicing during 2026 continue to raise the compli - ance baseline. 1.7 Transparency and Increased Global Reporting Poland participates fully in the international transpar - ency architecture. Financial institutions report under the Common Reporting Standard and under a Model 1 intergovernmental agreement implementing FATCA. The mandatory disclosure rules implementing DAC 6 are among the broadest in the EU, extending to purely domestic arrangements and supported by an aggres - sive hallmark catalogue, so that a significant propor - tion of private client work is reportable. The Central Register of Beneficial Owners covers companies, partnerships and family foundations, as well as trustees of foreign trusts with a Polish nexus, and remains, in principle, publicly accessible. Manda - tory structured e-invoicing (KSeF) is being phased in during 2026, beginning with the largest taxpayers, and extends the administration’s near-real-time visibility of transactions. The balance between privacy and trans - parency is struck largely in favour of transparency; for private clients, the practical consequence is that confidentiality can no longer be an objective of struc -
turing, and that the contemporaneous documentation of non-fiscal purposes has become the principal pro - tective discipline. 2. Succession 2.1 Cultural Considerations in Succession Planning Poland is living through its first great generational transfer of private wealth since the restoration of the market economy in 1989. The founders of the largest family enterprises, now in their 60s and 70s, built their businesses personally and often retain both opera - tional control and an understandable reluctance to relinquish it; succession conversations therefore tend to begin late and to be structured around instruments that preserve the founder’s influence, such as retained usufruct, privileged voting rights and, increasingly, the family foundation with the founder on the board. Two further factors shape practice. First, the wide Pol - ish diaspora – in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Ger - many, Switzerland and North America – means that a typical succession has a cross-border element, even where the estate is domestic. Secondly, the tradition of lifetime giving within the family, encouraged by the unlimited immediate-family exemption, results in sub - stantial transfers being made well before death, with the estate proper often reduced to a residual function. 2.2 International Planning Poland is bound by the EU Succession Regulation, so that the law of the deceased’s last habitual resi - dence governs the estate by default, and a testator may instead choose the law of their nationality. The choice of Polish law by expatriate Polish citizens – or of a foreign national law by foreign residents of Poland – is the standard first step of cross-border planning, since it fixes the applicable forced heirship regime and the machinery of administration in advance. The tax dimension is less accommodating. Poland maintains only a small number of historic conven - tions on succession taxes, and the domestic statute provides no unilateral credit for foreign inheritance tax; relief is generally confined to the deduction of the foreign tax as a burden on the acquired assets, a
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