If you came to Warsaw for a job with a Polish employer, the filing you almost certainly want is the single permit — zezwolenie na pobyt czasowy i pracę, the temporary residence and work permit that legalises both in one case. If your contract pays at least 13,355.34 zł gross a month in base salary for 2026 and you hold a relevant degree, the EU Blue Card is the better filing and you should read the section on it before you start. Everything else on the list below is a narrower answer to a narrower situation.
The reason this question is confusing is that “karta pobytu” is not a permit. It is the plastic card that gets printed once a permit is granted, and the same card comes out of half a dozen quite different procedures with quite different conditions. People search for the card and find guides that answer about the statute. What you actually have to choose is a permit type, and that choice is made once, at the start, in a portal that will not let you change it later without starting over.
Everything below was checked on 3 September 2026. Sources are named in each section. This describes a process and what applicants are asked for; it is not advice about your case, offices exercise discretion, and the point where you need a lawyer is marked.
What a karta pobytu is, and what it is not
The card is a residence document. It is issued after a permit is granted, it carries your photo and your fingerprints, and together with a valid travel document it evidences your identity and your right to be in Poland.
Three things it is not, and each of them costs people money:
- It is not the permit. The permit is the administrative decision. The card is produced afterwards and collected separately. A decision granting a permit is the thing that matters; the card follows.
- It is not a work authorisation on its own. Whether you may work, for whom, and on what terms, depends on which permit produced the card. A card from a family-based permit and a card from a single permit look almost identical and permit very different things.
- It is not something you get on arrival. You file for a permit from inside Poland, on a legal stay, and then wait — in Warsaw, at present, for a long time. The wait at the Mazowieckie office is its own subject and the honest number is nine to fourteen months against a statutory sixty days.
So the useful question is never “how do I get a karta pobytu”. It is “which permit am I applying for, and does my life actually fit it”.
The permit most people arriving for a job need
The single permit — jednolite zezwolenie na pobyt czasowy i pracę — covers residence and work in one procedure and one decision. It is the default for a non-EU national who has come to Warsaw to work for a Polish employer and intends to stay more than three months.
What it binds you to matters. The decision names the employer, the position, the working time and the remuneration. Those conditions are part of the permit, not background information, which is why an employer change during the case is a live problem with its own rules — see the post on an employer change mid-application.
Two things about it changed recently and most guides still have the old version.
The labour market test is gone. The Act of 20 March 2025 on the conditions for permitting work to foreigners (ustawa o warunkach dopuszczalności powierzania pracy cudzoziemcom, Dz.U. 2025 poz. 621), in force from 1 June 2025, abolished the informacja starosty — the county-level opinion that used to have to establish no Polish or EU candidate was available. It also moved work-permit proceedings entirely onto praca.gov.pl, with no paper route. In its place the same act allows a starosta to publish a list of occupations closed locally because of labour-market conditions; whether such a list exists for your occupation in your county is worth checking rather than assuming, because it is new machinery and it varies by district.
The salary floor is the national minimum wage, whatever your hours. For 2026 the minimum wage is 4,806 zł gross a month and the minimum hourly rate 31.40 zł gross, set by the Council of Ministers’ regulation of 11 September 2025 (Dz.U. 2025 poz. 1242). Your remuneration cannot be below the monthly minimum regardless of working time or contract type — a half-time contract at half the minimum wage does not satisfy it. Where you work for more than one entity, the sum across the attachments is what is measured.
When the EU Blue Card is the better filing
The Blue Card (Niebieska Karta UE) is a temporary residence permit for work in an occupation requiring high qualifications. If you clear its threshold, file for it rather than the ordinary single permit: it carries mobility rights across the EU that the single permit does not, and the rules were loosened in 2025.
The threshold is a multiple, not a number. It is 150% of the previous year’s average gross monthly wage in the national economy, announced each year by the President of Statistics Poland (GUS). GUS announced the 2025 average as 8,903.56 zł on 9 February 2026, which sets the 2026 floor at 13,355.34 zł gross per month — around 160,264.08 zł over a year — applying to applications from 1 January 2026, as the immigration practice Fragomen reported. Write the multiple down alongside the figure, because the figure changes every February and any guide quoting only złoty is wrong from that day.
Three details that decide cases:
- Only base salary counts. Bonuses, variable pay and benefits do not close a gap.
- The contract minimum is now six months, reduced from one year under the 2025 changes that implemented Directive (EU) 2021/1883 into Polish law.
- Qualification means a relevant higher-education degree, or documented professional experience in the field — the second route exists and is regularly overlooked by people who assume a degree is compulsory.
The full arithmetic, and what happens when a raise lands mid-case, is in the post on the Blue Card threshold.
If you are self-employed, a family member, or studying
These are real routes, and each is a different permit with different evidence.
Self-employed. Running a JDG — a sole trader registered in Poland — does not by itself produce the single permit, which is built around an employer. The self-employment route to temporary residence exists and is evidenced very differently: what the business earns, what it pays, whether it employs anyone. It is also the route where the residence question and the tax question become one decision, which is the whole of the Working section on this site.
Family. A spouse or child of a Polish citizen, and a family member of an EU, EEA, Swiss or UK citizen, are on separate tracks with separate rules — and, importantly, some of those cases are among the narrow set still filed on paper after April 2026. Do not assume the portal is your route until you have checked which category you are in.
Study. A student permit is its own class, and this site covers it only as a residence question. University admissions are a different subject with better-placed publishers.
Any of these will produce a karta pobytu at the end. None of them is a substitute for the right one at the start.
Permanent residence and the EU long-term resident card are not entry points
Both of these produce a card, both appear in searches for “karta pobytu”, and neither is something you file for on arrival.
Permanent residence (zezwolenie na pobyt stały) is granted on specific grounds — among them holding a Karta Polaka, documented Polish descent, and being married to a Polish citizen for at least three years with two years of continuous residence on a temporary permit. The permit is indefinite; the card that evidences it is replaced periodically without repeating the procedure.
EU long-term resident status (zezwolenie na pobyt rezydenta długoterminowego UE) is the five-year route, and it is the one most working readers eventually reach. It asks for five years of legal, continuous residence, a stable and regular income, health insurance, and documented Polish at B1 or above — a state certificate, a Polish-medium school diploma or a degree taught in Polish. “Continuous” has a technical meaning: absences from Poland of no more than six months at a time and no more than ten months in total, and time spent studying counts only at half.
The B1 requirement is the part that surprises people, and it is the reason the language question belongs on a residence timeline rather than a New Year’s list. Both permits, and what the five years actually count, are in the post on renewal and the long routes.
What each one costs
Two separate payments to two separate accounts, and the office will summon you to pay if you have not. These are the stamp duty (opłata skarbowa) for granting the permit and the fee for issuing the card, as published on the government business portal biznes.gov.pl and the voivodeship information pages, checked 3 September 2026:
| Permit | Stamp duty | Card |
|---|---|---|
| Single permit (residence and work) | 440 zł | 100 zł |
| Single permit, where the applicant is a board member of a sp. z o.o. or S.A. | 340 zł | 100 zł |
| Permanent residence | 640 zł | 100 zł |
| EU long-term resident | 640 zł | 100 zł (50 zł for a minor under 16) |
These are the office’s fees and nothing else. They are not what a filing service charges, and a service that quotes you a single all-in figure is quoting its own margin on top of these. The portal is free to use and UDSC states that a foreigner can file without an intermediary.
Where the choice is actually made
Every guide to this answers at the level of the Act. The decision is taken by a voivode, and which voivode depends on where you live — for Warsaw and the surrounding region, the Mazowiecki Voivode, through the Wydział Spraw Cudzoziemców at ul. Marszałkowska 3/5, 00-624 Warszawa (telephone 22 695 65 65, wsc@mazowieckie.pl; open Monday 10:00–18:00 and Tuesday to Friday 8:00–16:00, with client service ending half an hour to an hour earlier).
That matters more than the statute does, for one reason. Mazowieckie takes the largest share of residence applications in Poland and runs furthest behind: nine to fourteen months on the legal publisher LegalSol’s 2026 reporting, against a statutory 60 days under Article 112a of the Act on Foreigners, with the government’s own business portal describing practice as around twelve months. Choosing the wrong permit type does not cost you a form. It costs you a year.
How you file, since 27 April 2026
The mechanics moved this spring, and a large share of the ranking web still describes the old ones.
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. You log in through login.gov.pl with a trusted profile (profil zaufany) or a qualified electronic signature. UDSC’s own question-and-answer page states that paper applications arriving after 26 April 2026 are not examined — the arrival date, not the postmark.
Two consequences people are still being caught by:
The passport stamp is gone. In its place there is a zaświadczenie, a certificate of filing you download from your MOS account, and it is issued only after an official has verified that the application was filed in time and is free of formal defects. UDSC also says plainly that you get no email telling you the application was filed; you check the status in the portal.
The in-person visit survived. The office still summons you to give fingerprints and a signature specimen and to present your original travel document. Digital filing changed the channel, not the contact — and it is that appointment, not the submit button, that usually completes the file. When the 60-day clock actually starts turns on exactly this.
The step-by-step is in the post on filing in MOS 2.0.
When the obvious answer is the wrong one
Four situations where the default choice is a mistake, and they are common:
You clear the Blue Card threshold but file the single permit anyway, because your employer’s HR department files single permits and always has. You lose the mobility rights and gain nothing. Check the base-salary figure against 13,355.34 zł before you let the form be chosen for you.
You are moving to B2B in a month and file as an employee. The permit names your employer and your conditions of work. Filing for a situation you are about to leave produces a decision describing a job you no longer have, nine months from now, and the reporting obligations run against you in the meantime.
You have been here four and a half years and file another temporary permit out of habit. Look at the five-year route first. The B1 certificate takes planning; the temporary renewal does not stop the clock, but it also does not advance anything.
You do not have a PESEL yet and assume you can file today. The trusted profile is the ordinary way into MOS, and a qualified electronic signature is the documented alternative — which is why PESEL and profil zaufany sit at the front of the first-week sequence rather than in the middle of it. Sort the identity stack before the deadline, not after.
When to pay a lawyer
Not to choose between the single permit and the Blue Card. That comparison is two numbers and a diploma, and you can make it in an afternoon.
Pay one when the facts are genuinely tangled: a family case mixing nationalities and jurisdictions, a refusal already on your record, a period of stay whose legality is unclear, a business structure that has to be described accurately to two authorities at once, or a case where the permit type you need is not the permit type your employer files. Those are drafting problems, and drafting is what you are buying.
Do not pay one to press submit. MOS is a portal, filing through it is an afternoon of careful form-filling and document scanning, and the office does not sort its queue by who submitted.
What this post does not cover
Asylum, international protection and the temporary-protection regime for people who arrived from Ukraine are different statutes with different deadlines and different remedies, and this site does not cover them. UDSC and the established migrant-assistance organisations are the right first call.
Nor does it give you an entitlement. Every permit type above has conditions, the voivode exercises discretion within them, and no page — this one included — can tell you that you will be granted anything. What it can do is stop you filing for the wrong thing and finding out eleven months later.
Each permit type, filing step and renewal, in its own post
- MOS 2.0: filing your residence application since 27 April 2026 — Since 27 April 2026 a Polish residence application is filed only in MOS. What the portal asks for, in what order, and the two steps that are not in it.
- The single permit against a separate work permit — Poland lets you legalise work and residence in one case or two. The route you are on decides who files, what it costs, and what a job change does to you.
- The EU Blue Card and its 13,355.34 zł threshold — Poland's EU Blue Card salary floor for 2026 is 13,355.34 zł gross a month. It is a multiple of a GUS figure that resets each February. Here is the arithmetic.
- What the Mazowieckie office checks, in the order it checks it — The Mazowieckie office in Warsaw works a karta pobytu file in a fixed order: timeliness, formal defects, then substance. That tells you what to fix first.
- Biometrics, and when the 60-day clock actually starts — Poland's 60-day residence term does not start when you file in MOS. It starts on the last of three events, and the fingerprint appointment is usually it.
- Renewal, permanent residence, and the EU long-term resident card — After your first Polish karta pobytu: renewing a temporary permit, the grounds-based permanent residence route, and five-year EU long-term resident status.