On September 15, 2026, Poland's Council of Ministers promulgated the regulation (Dz.U. 2026 poz. 1213) setting the statutory minimum wage for 2027 at 4,950 PLN gross per month and the minimum hourly rate for civil-law contracts at 32.30 PLN, both effective from January 1, 2027. The Council of Ministers adopted the regulation on September 14, 2026, after the Social Dialogue Council (RDS) failed to reach agreement, exercising the government's fallback power to set the floor by the statutory September 15 deadline.
For employers and payroll teams operating in Poland, the new floor replaces the 2026 rates of 4,806 PLN (monthly) and 31.40 PLN (hourly), a 3% increase that touches every contract at or near the minimum, plus the statutory benefits and contribution bases indexed to it.
What are the new 2027 minimum rates, and from when do they apply?
From January 1, 2027, the minimum monthly remuneration for full-time employment under an employment contract (umowa o pracę) is 4,950 PLN gross. The minimum hourly rate for civil-law contracts, principally commission contracts (umowa zlecenie), rises to 32.30 PLN. Both figures are set out in the Council of Ministers regulation of September 14, 2026, published in the Dziennik Ustaw as item 1213, with the full text available as the official PDF.
Against the 2026 floor of 4,806 PLN and 31.40 PLN, the monthly increase is 144 PLN (3.0%) and the hourly increase is 0.90 PLN (2.9%). The government estimates that 1.58 million workers are paid at or near the minimum, making the adjustment a direct payroll cost for a large share of the Polish workforce.
Who must adjust payroll, and by what date?
Every employer with staff in Poland must apply the new floor from the first payroll period starting on or after January 1, 2027. The obligation is not limited to employment contracts: the 32.30 PLN hourly minimum binds commission contracts (umowa zlecenie) and certain mandate contracts, and the monthly figure anchors several derived thresholds.
Payroll and HR teams should reprice four categories for 2027 budgets now. First, employment contracts at the minimum move to 4,950 PLN gross. Second, the social-security contribution base reported to ZUS on the monthly ZUS DRA return rises for every employee at the floor, lifting total employer contribution cost by 173 PLN per minimum-wage full-time equivalent per month, according to specialist payroll coverage. Third, overtime premiums, calculated as a multiple of the hourly wage, reset upward. Fourth, the sickness-pay (chorobowe) floor and certain severance bases tied to the minimum wage reindex.
How does the minimum wage interact with the new mobbing and discrimination awards?
The 2027 floor has a less obvious but material downstream effect: it is the multiplier for statutory compensation awards under the anti-mobbing amendment to the Kodeks pracy (druk 2289, Dz.U. 2026 poz. 1046), which enters into force on November 5, 2026. That reform sets minimum awards of six times the minimum wage for mobbing, three times for a repeated equal-treatment breach, and one times for a single breach.
Because those multiples track the statutory minimum in force at the time of the award, the January 1, 2027 increase lifts the mobbing floor from 28,836 PLN to 29,700 PLN and the repeated-discrimination floor from 14,418 PLN to 14,850 PLN. Compliance teams updating anti-harassment procedures ahead of the November entry into force should plan the 2027 figures into their liability modeling, not the 2026 ones.
| Obligation | 2026 | 2027 (from January 1) |
|---|---|---|
| Minimum monthly wage (gross) | 4,806 PLN | 4,950 PLN |
| Minimum hourly rate (umowa zlecenie) | 31.40 PLN | 32.30 PLN |
| Mobbing compensation floor (6x minimum) | 28,836 PLN | 29,700 PLN |
| Repeated discrimination award floor (3x) | 14,418 PLN | 14,850 PLN |
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Four actions before January 1, 2027: reprice 2027 payroll budgets against the 4,950 PLN and 32.30 PLN floors, including the ZUS contribution-base uplift; update employment and commission-contract templates so no clause references the 2026 rate; brief the kadry and payroll function on the derived thresholds (overtime, sick pay, severance); and confirm that anti-mobbing and anti-discrimination award modeling uses the 2027 multiples from January onward. Continuous, per-jurisdiction real-time monitoring from Obsidian surfaces indexed threshold changes like this the moment the official journal publishes them.
