Poland plans to scrap joint-and-several property tax liability for co-owners
Poland's Ministry of Finance has drafted a bill that would end the current rule allowing tax authorities to collect the entire real estate tax from a single co-owner, replacing it with taxation based on individual ownership shares.
The problem behind the reform
Under current Polish law, when an apartment, house, plot of land or garage has two or more owners, the municipality can demand the full property tax from any one of the co-owners, regardless of that person's actual share — the so-called joint-and-several tax obligation. In practice, this means that if co-owners are in conflict, one of them may end up covering the others' unpaid share as well.
Poland's Ministry of Finance has published the assumptions for a draft bill (listed under legislative work number UD466) that would abolish this rule. Going forward, tax on land, buildings, structures or parts thereof held in co-ownership, joint possession or perpetual usufruct would be calculated according to each owner's share.
How shares would be determined
For fractional co-ownership, the tax obligation would be tied to each owner's share in the property right. For joint co-ownership and joint possession, the share-based approach would generally apply as well, but with a legal presumption of equal shares.
The taxation of property held under marital community property will be regulated separately — a point not yet spelled out, so it remains unclear whether spouses would automatically each pay half. Tax expert Michał Nielepkowicz, quoted by Business Insider Polska, says the details will only become clear once the actual bill text is published.
Fewer formalities for buyers
The draft would also relieve individuals who do not run a business on the purchased property from having to separately file tax information after buying or selling real estate. Instead, a notary would — at the buyer's request — send the tax authority an extract of the notarial deed containing the data needed to assess the tax. Sources note that buyers often forget this separate filing, wrongly assuming the notary already handles it.
The bill would further exempt municipalities from paying property tax to themselves on land they hold under perpetual usufruct, and from filing declarations for tax-exempt items. Land and buildings used by municipal offices, county (powiat) offices, voivodeship marshal's offices and metropolitan offices would also be excluded from taxation.
Expert view and the current legal reality
Nielepkowicz says the change should remove the risk of the entire tax debt being enforced against a single co-owner, though he notes that businesses — the largest taxpayers — are still waiting for more far-reaching reforms not addressed by this project.
Meanwhile, gazetaprawna.pl (the only one of the three sources to report this) describes a court case in Świdnica in which a private co-owner of a plot was acquitted of failing to file a tax declaration on behalf of the other co-owner, a company, since he was neither its president nor a proxy. However, under the joint-and-several liability rule still in force, he could nonetheless be required to personally pay the company's unpaid tax — illustrating exactly the kind of situation the reform aims to fix.
