Residence legalisation in Poland: the four waves coming by 2031

Stabilisation, not a wave: the year of the great status switch

The total number of foreign nationals holding a valid residence document rose by 41,900 in 2025 — an increase of 2.1%. The group as a whole amounts to roughly 5.4% of Poland’s population. Ukrainian citizens account for 77.4% of it (1.56 million), yet their number grew by just 1.5%.

The real change happened in the structure. Over the year, the number of Ukrainian citizens under temporary protection fell by 21,300, while Ukrainian temporary residence permits rose by 27,100, EU long-term resident cards by 38.8% (from 33,800 to 47,000), and the number of people under subsidiary protection by 55%. This is not an inflow of newcomers but the settling-in and formalisation of people already here. A person moving from temporary protection to a standard permit is a person vetted in a full administrative procedure — fingerprints on file, a stable employment situation and a predictable tax status.

In the background, the mix of origins is diversifying. The number of Colombian citizens holding a valid residence document rose by 172% in a year (from 3,000 to 8,000), Nepalese citizens by 58% and Filipinos by 36%. The Georgian (−12%) and Russian (−8%) groups, meanwhile, shrank. Poland is becoming a country of multi-directional immigration — with everything that implies for official communication, conducted today mainly in Polish, English, Ukrainian and Russian.

The bottleneck is procedural, not substantive

In 2025, 509,200 people applied for a temporary residence permit — 10.6% more than a year earlier. Over the same period, officials issued outcomes for 416,700 people. The difference — around 92,500 — approximates how fast the stock of pending cases is growing, and it is widening: a year earlier it stood at 62,500. The system is processing more than ever (positive decisions rose by 18,300), and the queue keeps lengthening anyway.

The structure of 2025 outcomes rewards a careful read: 78.8% were positive decisions, 6.2% refusals, 2.9% discontinuations — and 12.1% applications left unexamined, meaning closed without substantive review. That last category, more than 50,000 cases a year, covers applications the office could not assess on the merits at all — because of formal defects, missing documents, an unpaid fee or a failure to appear. For comparison, refusals on the merits numbered 25,900. In Poland today, a formal error closes more residence cases than a substantive refusal does.

The scale of the problem is, moreover, extremely uneven. Among Ukrainian citizens, 6.2% of cases end up left unexamined; among Belarusians, 7.0%. But among Uzbek citizens the figure is 23.6%, among Colombians 39.9%, and among Georgians 41.0%. Counting success only among cases decided on the merits, a positive decision goes to 99.2% of Ukrainian applicants, 90.3% of Belarusian, 83.9% of Colombian and 71.2% of Georgian ones. The conclusion from these two series of figures is unambiguous: the main risk an applicant faces in the Polish system is not a negative assessment of their situation but a procedural stumble — and the risk of that stumble is distributed extremely unevenly across citizenship groups, pointing to an information and language barrier, not to differences in the merit of the applications.

Application completeness is the cheapest capacity reserve the system has. Every percentage point shaved off the “left unexamined” category is more than 4,000 cases a year (at the 2025 volume of outcomes) that nobody has to handle a second time — without hiring a single additional official.

The appeals system is running at full tilt

In 2025, the Head of the Office for Foreigners received 22,900 appeals in legalisation cases. Among resolved appeals concerning temporary residence, 47.5% ended in a decision favourable to the applicant (a year earlier: 33.8%), 15.6% were returned for reconsideration, and 20.7% of decisions were upheld (a year earlier: 35.6%). In EU long-term resident cases, the share returned for reconsideration jumped from 9.9% to 26.9%.

We do not read these figures as an indictment of officials — we read them as a gauge of pressure. Case volume is growing at around 10% a year, and a record-loaded first instance is being corrected by the second. The system works, and corrects itself. Except that every correction means a second, and sometimes a third, round — in the first instance, in the second, and in the first once again.

Four waves: 2026–2031

The legalisation system’s calendar for the next five years is no secret — it follows directly from the law and from the data. It can be laid out as four waves.

What works: a complete application the first time

Poland’s residence legalisation is an inherently distributed system: sixteen voivodeship offices, separate fee accounts, local practices, four main applicant languages — and, from this year, a fully electronic, do-it-yourself procedure in which no representative can fix anyone’s mistakes. In such an environment the cheapest intervention is not an extra staff position but information that makes the application complete the first time.

Digitalising procedures through MOS is a step in the right direction — register-level validation stops some errors before a case ever reaches an official’s desk. The second link is preparing the applicant. That is what dopomo.pl is for — a Polish legal-tech startup that provides verified information about legalisation procedures free of charge in four languages (Polish, Ukrainian, Russian and English). The platform’s AI assistant answers solely on the basis of official sources: when a question goes beyond them, it declines to answer rather than guess, and it attaches a source reference to every answer. The platform checks eligibility for the procedure and guides users step by step through the MOS application, creates a biometric photo and checks it against official requirements, and points to the correct, verified fee accounts for each voivodeship. The same information engine works for every next procedure and every next language group.

The goal is shared by all sides: fewer cases left unexamined, fewer summonses and fewer fees irretrievably lost a second time — and shorter queues, including for Polish citizens handling their own affairs at the same offices.

This report and the dopomo.pl service are for information purposes only and do not constitute legal advice in any individual case.

Four questions for the next five years

We make no policy recommendations — that is what state institutions are for. But four questions emerge from the data that will have to be answered whatever the political colours:

1. Exam supply. Will the national capacity of state Polish-language certificate exams suffice once a cohort several times today’s size starts applying for resident status?
2. Spreading out collections. Can 600,000–800,000 in-person card collections over a dozen-plus months be spread across time and space without bringing the rest of the voivodeship offices’ work to a halt?
3. The path after CUKR. What happens in 2029–2030, when the three-year cards start expiring with no renewal path in place?
4. Multilingual information. If a formal stumble closes more cases than a substantive refusal, and the next applicant groups speak Spanish, Nepali and Tagalog — whose job is the information that actually reaches them?

FAQ