Tell the office, in writing, as soon as the change is real — and understand that you are in the harder of the two versions of this problem, not the easier one.
The rule everyone will quote at you is the 15 working days in Article 121 of the Act on Foreigners. That rule is about someone who already holds a temporary residence and work permit and then loses the job it names. If your decision has not come yet, you hold no permit, so Article 121 is not the provision that governs you. What governs you is simpler and less comfortable: your pending application was built on an employer, the decision the office is preparing will name that employer, and the office decides on the file as it stands when it decides.
Checked on 2 September 2026. This is a description of the process and of where the published rules stop. It is not advice about your case, and this is the post where I would most strongly suggest asking the office in writing rather than acting on a reading of the internet, mine included.
The two situations people confuse
After the decision. You hold a zezwolenie na pobyt czasowy i pracę — the single permit — and the employment it names ends.
Article 121 of the Act on Foreigners is explicit here, and Zielona Linia, the public employment service’s information portal, quotes it: “Cudzoziemiec przebywający na terytorium Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej na podstawie zezwolenia na pobyt czasowy i pracę zawiadamia pisemnie wojewodę, który udzielił tego zezwolenia, w terminie 15 dni roboczych, o utracie pracy” — you notify the voivode who granted the permit, in writing, within 15 working days of losing work with any of the entities named in it.
From there, per that guidance, two routes:
- Apply to change the permit. If you file the change application within the period, the notification obligation is treated as satisfied by the filing itself. Voivodeship offices publish a fee of 220 zł for the change application — check the current figure in MOS before paying, since fees move. A change does not extend the permit’s own validity.
- Apply for a new single permit. Here you notify the voivode of the job ending within 15 working days first, then apply.
Miss the notification and the consequences are concrete: the voivode refuses the change, and because the purpose of stay you declared has ceased, a procedure to withdraw the permit can begin.
Before the decision — you, if you are reading this site. There is no permit to change and no permit to withdraw. Article 121’s fifteen days do not attach. But your file is now wrong, and a file that is wrong on the day the office reads it is the problem.
What the pending case actually needs
Here is where I have to be careful, because the published guidance is thin. Zielona Linia’s page on changing employers addresses the post-decision situation and does not deal with a case still pending. The voivodeship offices publish procedures for granting and for changing a permit; the “my circumstances changed while you were deciding” path is not written up cleanly anywhere I could find on 2 September 2026.
What follows is therefore the shape of the question, not an answer to it.
The application you filed rested on a specific employer, specific work conditions, and the documents that came with them — in the ordinary single-permit case an employer annex setting out the position, the pay and the hours, and where required a informacja starosty, the labour market test issued by the local employment office. Change the employer and every one of those attachments describes something that no longer exists.
The office can only decide on the file it has. So the practical question is which of these your case needs:
- Supplementing the pending file with the new employer’s documents, so the decision is made on the current facts; or
- Withdrawing and filing again, which restarts a queue you have already spent months in; or
- Letting it run and dealing with it afterwards through the change procedure, if the decision would still be granted on the old basis.
Which of those is available depends on how far the case has gone, what the office has already verified, and what your new work actually is. That is a question for the Mazowiecki office and, if the answer matters to your status, for a lawyer. It is not a question to answer from a forum, and I am not going to pretend it has a general answer.
What to do this week
The order is real.
- Write to the office now, in writing, through MOS. State the case reference, that the employment on which the application was based has ended or is changing, the date, and the new employer and position if you have them. Ask what the office requires. A dated written notice costs nothing and is the thing you will want to be able to point to later.
- Keep the paper on both jobs. The termination or its date, the new contract or offer, and the dates in between. Gaps matter and are easier to explain in the same month than a year on.
- Ask your new employer to prepare the annex and, if applicable, to start the informacja starosty. The labour market test takes time on its own and is not something to begin after the office asks.
- Ask the office explicitly whether it wants a supplement or a fresh application — and take the answer in writing rather than at a counter. This is the question the whole thing turns on.
- Do not stop working on a basis you were lawfully working on because you read something ambiguous. And do not start work on a new basis assuming the pending application covers it. Whether your right to work survives the change is its own question and it belongs to your employer’s HR and a lawyer, not to you and a search engine. What the certificate that replaced the passport stamp does and does not evidence is in the post on that document.
Why this is worse than it should be
Because the wait makes it likely. At nine to fourteen months in Warsaw, a mid-case job change is not an edge case — it is the ordinary length of a first contract running into the ordinary length of the queue. A process designed around sixty days does not have a well-worn path for “the facts changed twice while you were deciding”, and the gap between the design and the duration is exactly where readers of this site live.
The office is not hostile about it. It is simply not built for it, and the burden of keeping the file true to the facts sits with you.
When to pay a lawyer
Here, more readily than anywhere else on this site. Specifically:
- The gap between jobs is more than a few weeks.
- The new role is materially different — a different profession, materially different pay, or a move from an employment contract to umowa zlecenie or to B2B, each of which does something different to a permit built on employment.
- You did not report a change and time has passed.
- You are within touching distance of a decision and do not know whether to disturb it.
A few hundred złoty for an hour with someone who does this weekly is cheap against restarting a year-long queue.
Where this is uncertain
Stated plainly: the post-decision rule is well documented and quoted above from a government information portal. The pending-case path is not, and I have not found an official published procedure for it. I have described what the file consists of and what the office must decide on, and I have stopped there deliberately rather than inventing a sequence that reads authoritative.
If you find that the Mazowiecki office gives you a clear written answer on this, that answer is better than anything on this page.