If your client is a business established outside Poland, the general rule for services is that the VAT belongs where the customer is, not where you are — so you invoice without Polish VAT and say on the invoice why. That single rule answers most of the panic in this question.
What it does not answer is the registration you need before the first such invoice, and that is where people actually get caught: selling services to a business in another EU country requires you to be registered for EU transactions first, and the domestic revenue threshold most guides quote has nothing to do with it. Register, then invoice. Not the other way round.
Checked on 7 September 2026. This is the shape of the question, not tax advice; the answers are your księgowa’s.
Where the VAT lands
For business-to-business services, the general place-of-supply rule puts the supply where the customer is established. Two cases, and they behave differently:
A business client in another EU country. Outside the scope of Polish VAT. You issue the invoice without Polish VAT, and the client accounts for it themselves under the reverse charge — odwrotne obciążenie. The invoice has to say so, and it has to carry both parties’ EU VAT numbers.
A business client outside the EU — a US company, say. Also outside the scope of Polish VAT, for the same reason, but it is not an intra-EU transaction, so the EU reporting obligations below do not attach to it.
A consumer rather than a business is a different rule entirely, with different consequences, and if that is your situation this post is not about you.
The status of the client is not a formality. “Business” means a taxable person, and the way you establish that for an EU client is their VAT number — which you check, in the EU’s VIES system, and keep the evidence of. A number that does not validate is not a client you can reverse-charge to.
What you register for, and when
VAT-UE registration comes before the first intra-EU service, not after a threshold. This is the sentence worth taking away.
The domestic VAT exemption threshold — the one every Polish tax guide leads with — governs whether you charge Polish VAT on domestic sales. It does not exempt you from registering for intra-EU transactions. A sole trader comfortably under the domestic threshold, invoicing one German client, still needs to be on the EU register before that invoice goes out.
Mechanically:
- File VAT-R, the VAT registration form, completing the part that covers intra-EU transactions.
- You are entered on the EU register and your NIP becomes usable with the PL prefix as an EU VAT number. That is the number the reverse-charge invoice carries.
- You then file recapitulative statements — informacje podsumowujące — listing the intra-EU services you supplied in the period. These are separate from any VAT return and they are due whether or not you are otherwise a VAT payer.
Whether you are also obliged to register for domestic VAT, and on what threshold, is a separate question that depends on what you sell and to whom. Ask it explicitly rather than assuming the two answers are the same one — the most common error here is a reader concluding from “I am under the threshold” that no registration applies at all.
The exchange rate is not the one your bank gave you
You invoice in euros. Your tax is in złoty. The conversion for tax purposes is not the rate your bank applied when the money landed.
Revenue in a foreign currency is converted at the National Bank of Poland (NBP) average rate for the last business day preceding the day the revenue arose. Your bank’s rate, your Wise rate, and the rate on the day you happened to transfer are all irrelevant to the tax computation — they affect what you end up holding, not what you declare.
Two practical consequences:
- Keep the invoice date straight, because it is what selects the NBP rate. This matters disproportionately for an invoice near a year boundary, where it also decides which year’s revenue band you land in — and on the ryczałt the revenue bands are cliffs, not gradients.
- The difference between the NBP rate and the rate you actually got is a real thing, and how it is treated is a question for your księgowa rather than something to work out from a forum.
Getting paid, and where the money sits
A foreign-currency account is worth having, from a Polish bank or otherwise. Receiving euros into a złoty account converts them at whatever rate applies at that moment, which hands a decision about timing to your bank.
Beyond that, the money route in and out of Poland is its own subject and it has its own post later in this plan. The one thing to settle early is that the account you nominated on your CEIDG registration is the one the tax office and ZUS expect to see, so if you open something new, update the registration rather than assuming it follows.
KSeF, and why I am not giving you a date
Poland’s KSeF — the Krajowy System e-Faktur, the national e-invoicing system — is the structural change coming for everyone who issues an invoice here. Its mandatory phase-in has been rescheduled more than once, and the current dates and which taxpayers they bite for first are exactly the sort of thing this site refuses to state without a dated government source.
So: it exists, it will apply to you, and the current timetable is a question for your księgowa this quarter rather than a figure to take from any guide, including this one. A page that gives you a confident KSeF date without naming a government publication and the date it was checked is a page that has copied an older page.
The two questions this raises that are not about invoicing
Are you Polish tax resident? Invoicing a foreign client from Warsaw does not make you taxable somewhere else, and living in Warsaw generally does make you taxable here. The 183-day rule is the headline but not the whole test, and it has its own post in the Money section of this plan. If you still file at home as well, the two systems interact through a treaty, and that is a conversation between a księgowa and a preparer in your home country — not one either of them can have alone.
Does your residence title allow any of this? Everything above assumes you may run a JDG in Poland at all, which depends on your permit class and is the gate in front of the whole thing. It is worth saying twice because the invoicing question feels urgent and the eligibility question feels theoretical, and the order of importance is the other way round.
The unglamorous part
The contract that pays for all of this is held together by whatever you send your client every week. Working from Warsaw for a company that is not here means nobody sees you work, and the written update stops being a chore and starts being the entire visible surface of the engagement — which is why a written status update ends up replacing the standup when the team is not in one room.
That is not a tax point, and it is the thing most likely to decide whether you are still invoicing this client next year.
Where this post is uncertain
The place-of-supply rule and the reverse charge are stable EU-wide law and are stated here in general terms only; VAT-R, the EU register and the recapitulative statement are the Polish mechanics as they stand. I have deliberately not given a domestic VAT threshold figure, a KSeF commencement date, or the treatment of exchange differences, because I do not have dated sources for the 2026 versions and each is the kind of number that is wrong in one direction only. Your księgowa has all three, and this is one of the posts on this site where the honest answer is that the reader needs a professional rather than a better article.