The health contribution on ryczałt: three brackets, three numbers

Three numbers for 2026, set by your annual revenue: 498.35 zł a month under 60,000 zł, 830.58 zł between 60,000 and 300,000 zł, and 1,495.04 zł above 300,000 zł. Fifty per cent of what you pay is deductible from revenue. The figures are published by gofin and Symfonia.

The useful thing is not the three numbers, which are wrong from next January. It is that each one is 9% of a fixed multiple of a single GUS wage figure, so you can compute next year’s the day the figure is published instead of waiting for someone to write about it. And it is that the thresholds are cliffs, not brackets in the ordinary sense — crossing one reprices the whole year.

Checked on 7 September 2026.

Where the three numbers come from

The base is the average wage in the enterprise sector, including payouts from profit, for the fourth quarter of the previous year, announced by Statistics Poland (GUS). For 2026 that figure is 9,228.64 zł.

The contribution is 9% of a set percentage of that base — 60%, 100% or 180%, by revenue band:

under 60,000 zł        9%  ×  60%  × 9,228.64  =    498.35 zł / month
60,000 – 300,000 zł    9%  × 100%  × 9,228.64  =    830.58 zł / month
over 300,000 zł        9%  × 180%  × 9,228.64  =  1,495.04 zł / month

That is the whole derivation, and every one of the three published figures falls out of it exactly. Write down 9% and 60/100/180, not the złoty amounts. In February 2027, when GUS publishes the Q4 2026 wage, you will have your own numbers in thirty seconds. This is the same trick that makes the Blue Card salary threshold usable a year ahead — the multiple survives, the absolute does not.

Annually, on the 2026 figures: 5,980.20 zł, 9,966.96 zł or 17,940.48 zł.

The 50% deduction, and what it is worth

Half of the health contribution paid is deductible from revenue on the ryczałt. It reduces the base the ryczałt rate applies to, not the tax itself, so its value is your rate times half the contribution.

At the 12% rate, that is 6% of the contribution back:

Modest, and worth knowing precisely, because a comparison against another regime that counts the deduction on one side and not the other is off by exactly this much.

The thresholds are cliffs

This is the part that matters and the part almost nothing in English says.

The band is set by your cumulative revenue for the year, and it is reconciled annually. So it is not a marginal system: revenue that crosses a threshold does not put the excess into a higher band, it puts the whole year into the higher band.

Crossing 60,000 zł moves you from 498.35 to 830.58 zł a month. That is 332.23 zł more per month, 3,986.76 zł more per year — about 3,747 zł after the 50% deduction at the 12% rate.

Read that as a marginal rate and it is absurd, which is the point: the złoty of revenue that takes you from 59,999 zł to 60,001 zł costs you roughly four thousand złoty. The same shape repeats at 300,000 zł, where the step is 664.46 zł a month — 7,973.52 zł a year.

Two honest consequences:

• If you are going to land within a few thousand złoty of a threshold, the timing of your last invoice of the year is a real question, not an accounting fiddle. Whether an invoice belongs to December or January is determined by rules about when revenue arises, not by preference — so this is a conversation with your księgowa in November, not a decision you make on 30 December.
• If you are going to clear a threshold comfortably, stop thinking about it. The cliff only matters at the edge.

I am describing the shape of the reconciliation, not its mechanics. The annual settlement of the health contribution has its own rules and its own form, and the person who files it should be the person who explains it to you.

A year that does not arrive evenly

Revenue for most people on a JDG is lumpy, and the banding is annual, which produces a shape worth understanding before it happens to you.

Take someone billing steadily and landing at 240,000 zł for the year. They sit in the middle band throughout: 9,966.96 zł for the year on the 2026 figures. Nothing surprising.

Now take someone with the same annual total who invoices almost nothing until March and then bills heavily. The annual outcome is the same, because the band is set by the year’s cumulative revenue, not by any single month — but the monthly payments along the way were not, and the reconciliation at the end is what squares them. Whether that lands as a top-up or a refund depends on where the running total sat when each monthly contribution fell due.

Two things follow, and they are the practical version of everything above:

• Do not read your monthly contribution in March as a forecast of your year. It is a payment on account against a band that is not settled yet.
• Budget for the reconciliation. A good year that crosses a threshold late produces a bill you did not feel arriving month by month, and it arrives after you have already spent the revenue that caused it.

None of that is unusual or unfair; it is just annual arithmetic collected monthly. It only bites people who assumed the monthly figure was the whole story.

What it is not

It is not NFZ cover you are buying, exactly. The contribution is what registers you and your dependants with the public system; the cover itself is the same public cover everybody else has, with the same waiting lists. What the contribution buys is entitlement, not access. The contract decision covers where that entitlement comes from on each contract type, and the Health section later in this plan covers what the public system actually delivers against the private subscription market.

It is not waived by ulga na start. The relief in the first six months of a JDG removes social contributions and leaves the health contribution standing — which is why the declaration you file is ZZA and not ZUA. A reading of the relief as “no ZUS at all” is wrong in the direction that costs you cover.

It is not the same under the other regimes. On podatek liniowy and on the scale the health contribution is computed proportionally to income under different rules, which is one of the reasons the comparison between regimes is not a comparison of headline rates — the crossover has its own post.

Three things to do

1. Write down 9% × 60/100/180 of the GUS Q4 enterprise-sector wage. Not the złoty figures.
2. Watch for the announcement each February and recompute. Every number on this page changes on that day.
3. Forecast your revenue against the two thresholds in November, while an invoice date is still a live question rather than a historical fact.

Where this post is uncertain

The three 2026 figures are published by gofin and Symfonia and the derivation above reproduces all three exactly from the GUS Q4 2025 enterprise-sector wage of 9,228.64 zł, which is why I am confident presenting it as the rule rather than as a coincidence. The annual reconciliation is described in shape; its mechanics, its form and its deadlines belong to your księgowa. Nothing here is tax advice, and the revenue thresholds are defined by rules about when revenue arises that this post does not attempt to state.