Both numbers matter, and almost everything you will read gives you only one. The statute says the wojewoda — the voivode, the regional government office that decides your case — has 60 days. The Mazowiecki office in Warsaw was reported in mid-2026 to be taking nine to fourteen months. The gap is not a rumour and it is not incompetence you can appeal against. Since April 2022 a separate act has suspended the running of that 60-day term outright, which means that for most of the wait you are not “past the deadline” in any sense the law recognises.
That is the single most useful thing to understand about your case, and it is the thing the first page of results will not tell you, because the first page of results is written by people selling you a faster answer.
Everything below was checked on 2 September 2026. Sources are named in each section. This is a description of a process, not advice about your case — offices exercise discretion, files differ, and the point where you need a lawyer is marked below.
What the statute actually gives you
Article 112a of the Act on Foreigners (ustawa o cudzoziemcach) sets the term for a temporary residence decision at 60 days. The number everyone quotes is real. What almost nobody quotes is when it starts.
Under Article 112a the 60 days run from the last of these to happen:
- You filed the application in person, or appeared in person at the voivodeship office after filing — unless personal appearance is not required in your case.
- You filed an application free of formal defects, or corrected the defects you were asked to correct.
- You supplied the documents the office required.
The order is real and it is the order the office works in. Read it once more and notice what it means: the clock does not start when you press submit. It starts on the day the office agrees your file is complete. If it summons you in month four for a missing document, month four is where day one lives. The appeal stage — the Head of the Office for Foreigners (Szef Urzędu do Spraw Cudzoziemców) reviewing a refusal — carries its own term of 90 days.
These terms were put into the Act by an amendment in force from 29 January 2022, as Zielona Linia, the public employment service’s information portal, sets out.
Why the 60-day clock is not running right now
This is the part almost nothing on the open web explains, and it is load-bearing for everything else you might try.
Article 100da of the Act of 12 March 2022 on assistance to Ukrainian citizens — a statute that has nothing to do with your nationality, despite its name — suspends the running of the deadlines for handling cases before the voivode concerning:
- granting and withdrawing a temporary residence permit,
- granting and withdrawing a permanent residence permit (pobyt stały),
- granting and withdrawing EU long-term resident status,
- changing a temporary residence and work permit.
The suspension has been in place since 15 April 2022. The Office for Foreigners (UDSC) published on 6 October 2025 that the Act of 12 September 2025 (Dz.U. 2025 poz. 1301) had extended it to 4 March 2026. It was then extended again by the Act of 23 January 2026 on winding down the Ukraine-assistance measures (Dz.U. 2026 poz. 203), which entered into force on 5 March 2026.
Three consequences, and they are the reason this site exists:
- During the suspension, the voivode has no obligation to notify you that your case has not been decided within the term.
- The voivode does not forward a ponaglenie — the formal reminder under Article 37 of the Code of Administrative Procedure — to the Head of the Office for Foreigners. Filed ponaglenia are, in the phrasing law firms use, left without examination.
- The suspension does not stop your case being processed. UDSC is explicit about this: proceedings continue, new applications are accepted, and everything the office does during the period is effective. What is suspended is the deadline, not the work.
One caution, stated rather than smoothed over. The end date of the current extension is reported inconsistently. Legal publisher prawo.pl, reporting a June 2026 administrative-court judgment, refers to a suspension period running to 4 March 2027, and the Polskie Forum Migracyjne foundation gives the same date; the Stowarzyszenie Interwencji Prawnej gives 3 March 2027. UDSC’s own explanatory page still carried the superseded 4 March 2026 date when checked on 2 September 2026. One day either way changes nothing about your case, but if the exact date matters to you — because you are timing a court filing — read the consolidated text of Article 100da in the Dziennik Ustaw rather than any summary, this one included.
What Mazowieckie actually takes
Warsaw is not an average. It is the extreme.
The legal-services publisher LegalSol reported in 2026 that the Mazowieckie office was running at nine to fourteen months for a karta pobytu, against six to fifteen months nationally depending on the city, and attributed the difference to volume against staffing.
The volume is documented far more solidly, in correspondence between the Commissioner for Human Rights (Rzecznik Praw Obywatelskich, the Polish ombudsman) and the Ministry of the Interior and Administration:
- The Mazowieckie voivode received over 147,000 applications in 2023 — roughly a quarter of all applications in Poland — and around 106,000 in the first half of 2024 alone.
- The office received no additional staffing for that share, and reallocated internally.
- The Supreme Audit Office (NIK) found that around 60% of the cases it examined breached procedural rules, principally through inaction and delay.
- Caseload per official ranged from 189 to 1,325 files depending on the voivodeship.
- The longest single case documented ran to 2,700 days.
That last figure is not a typical outcome and should not be read as one. It is in this post because it is the honest ceiling, and because a reader eleven months in deserves to know that the distribution has a very long tail rather than a hard stop.
The RPO has now written to the ministry repeatedly on this — 27 September 2024, 10 July 2025 and again on 1 June 2026 — with ministry replies in November 2024 and August 2025. Nothing in that correspondence gives you a faster case. It gives you something almost as useful: documentary proof that your wait is a known, measured, official problem rather than something you caused.
Is your case normal, or is it broken?
The distinction that matters most while you are inside this, and the one nobody will make for you. On the evidence above, in Warsaw:
Consistent with a normal case. Silence for nine months or more. No status change in the portal. No response to an email. A summons arriving many months after filing. All of that is what a 250,000-file backlog looks like from the applicant’s side, and none of it means your file has been lost.
Worth investigating. No confirmation that your application was accepted as free of formal defects — because until the office records that, Article 112a’s clock has not conceptually started and, more practically, you may not hold the document that evidences your legal stay. A summons you answered and heard nothing about for many months. A file that the office cannot locate by case number at the counter. A decision that names an employer you no longer work for.
The first list is a wait. The second is a case that needs a specific, documented intervention, and that is where the next few posts go — the *ponaglenie* and what it can and cannot do right now, and the administrative-court complaint that follows it.
What MOS 2.0 changed on 27 April 2026
The mechanics moved this spring, and most of the ranking web still describes the old ones.
Since 27 April 2026, applications for temporary residence, permanent residence and EU long-term resident status are filed only through MOS (Moduł Obsługi Spraw), the Office for Foreigners’ portal at mos.cudzoziemcy.gov.pl. Voivodeship offices state the point bluntly — there is no paper route. An application sent outside the portal is left without consideration. A narrow set of cases still runs on paper, principally employer-filed intra-corporate transfer and mobility applications and family cases where the applicant is outside Poland.
Two changes matter to anyone already waiting:
The passport stamp is gone. The voivode stopped placing the red odcisk stempla in travel documents on 27 April 2026. What you get instead is a zaświadczenie — a certificate confirming that the application was filed, downloadable from your MOS account. It is issued only after an official verifies that the application was filed in time and is free of formal defects, which in practice can mean after your in-person appointment rather than on the day you submit. What that document does and does not do has its own post, because the answer surprises people.
The in-person visit did not go away. The office still summons you to present the original travel document, give fingerprints and provide a signature specimen. Digital filing changed the channel, not the contact.
MOS 2.0 did not change Article 112a and it did not change the suspension. You will find sites presenting a 90-day figure as the new processing time. Treat any such number with care: the site mos20.pl, which reads like an official portal and ranks like one, states on its own pages that it is operated by a private company and is not affiliated with the Polish government or UDSC. A processing-time promise from a commercial service is a marketing claim, not a term.
What to do this week
In this order, because the order is the point.
- Confirm the office has recorded your application as complete. Log into MOS and check whether the zaświadczenie has been issued. If it has not, and you filed months ago, that is the one thing worth chasing now — everything else downstream depends on it.
- Download and keep the certificate. Save a copy outside the portal, and carry one. It is the document that evidences your legal stay during proceedings, and an employer’s HR department will ask for it.
- Check what your file says about your employer. If your job changed since you filed, that is a live problem with its own rules — see the post on an employer change mid-application.
- Check your passport’s expiry against a fourteen-month horizon, not a sixty-day one.
- Do not book non-refundable travel outside Poland on the strength of the certificate. It is not a travel document, and the Border Guard is explicit about what it does not do.
What does not make it faster
This is the section the pages above this one in the results cannot write, because each of them is published by someone selling one of the things in it. None of them is doing anything wrong. It does mean the list has to come from somewhere else.
Paying an agency to file for you. MOS is a portal. Filing through it is an afternoon of careful form-filling and document scanning. An agency that files for you produces the same entry in the same queue on the same day, and the office does not sort by who submitted. Pay for help if the form defeats you or your case is genuinely complicated — not because a faster outcome is implied.
Calling weekly. The Mazowiecki office is handling a share of the national caseload with staffing that the Commissioner for Human Rights has repeatedly told the ministry is insufficient. Ringing more often does not move a file up. It occupies the same people you need deciding cases.
A ponaglenie, right now. For the reason set out above: the voivode does not forward it while the suspension runs. It has one remaining use, and that use is procedural rather than motivational. The post on it says exactly when to bother.
Filing a second application. Two open cases about the same permit is not two chances. It is a tangle the office has to resolve before it can decide either.
Anything advertised as an expedited or priority route. There is no published fast lane for an ordinary temporary residence case at Mazowieckie. If a service offers one, the question to ask is which provision it operates under, and the answer is worth hearing before you pay.
What genuinely helps is narrow and dull: a file with nothing missing, an address the office can reach you at, and answers to summonses inside the period given. That is most of it.
What happens when the decision finally comes
Worth knowing in advance, because the wait ends abruptly and the next steps have their own clocks.
If the permit is granted, the decision is not the card. The karta pobytu is produced and then collected, and Article 108’s protection runs until the decision becomes final rather than until the plastic is in your hand. Read what the decision names — the permit class, the period, and in a single permit the employer and the conditions of work — against what is actually true of your life now. After nine to fourteen months, a decision describing a job you left in month five is a live problem rather than a clerical one, and the employer-change post covers where that leads.
If it is a refusal, there is an appeal to the Head of the Office for Foreigners, and that stage carries its own statutory term of 90 days under the same 2022 amendment that introduced Article 112a’s 60. Appeal deadlines in Polish administrative procedure are short and strict, they run from service of the decision, and missing one is usually unrecoverable. If a refusal arrives, the sensible first call is a lawyer in the same week — not the same month.
Either way, check what the decision does to your right to work, which does not automatically follow the residence outcome, and to any family members whose position was built on yours.
When to pay a lawyer
Not for the wait itself. Nine months of silence in Warsaw is the ordinary state of the world in 2026, and no lawyer changes the queue. Paying one to file a ponaglenie that the statute says will not be forwarded is money for a piece of paper.
Pay one when the facts of your case have changed and the file has to change with them — a refusal, an employer change you did not report, a summons you could not answer, a passport that expired, a family member added mid-case — or when you are considering the administrative-court route, where the procedure is formal, the deadline is real and the drafting is the whole thing.
Where this post is uncertain, and what it does not cover
The exact end date of the current suspension is reported inconsistently, as set out above. The nine-to-fourteen-month range is a published market observation, not an official statistic: the voivodeship offices do not publish a live median. Where I give an official number — the application volumes, the NIK findings, the 2,700 days — it comes from the RPO’s published correspondence with the ministry and is dated there.
This site does not cover asylum, international protection, or the temporary-protection regime for people who arrived from Ukraine. Those are different statutes with different deadlines and different remedies, and a generalist’s approximation of them can cost someone far more than a delayed card. UDSC and the established migrant-assistance organisations are the right first call.