Ever since we opened our Poland program in 2020, it’s been one of our most popular teaching destinations. Poland is a fast growing, safe country that that offers amazing travel opportunities and culture in the heart of Europe.
I greatly enjoyed my recent visit there, and many of our teachers decide to stay in Poland longer-term.
When I discuss our Poland program with candidates, the structure of how Polish schools work and how they may employ you is a regular topic of conversation.
In this blog post, I’ll cover the two main ways schools may employ you, and the pros and cons of each.
Direct employment
Direct employment is the most straightforward, and probably in line with how you’ve worked in your home country.
You agree to work for a school, and they put you on their payroll. You get paid once per month, and you pay 20-25% percent tax depending on your salary.
Pros
The most important benefit of working this way is that it is straightforward and simple, and you don’t need to do anything to set things up or keep track of. You do your work, and you get paid knowing your employer has taken care of your taxes.
Cons
You pay significantly more tax in this setup than as a freelancer, more on this below.
Business to Business, working as a freelancer
The alternative to being employed directly by a school is that you get registered as a freelancer in Poland, and effectively have your own registered business in Poland.
Sounds complicated? It’s not nearly as difficult as it sounds, because there are agencies in Poland that specialise in doing this quickly and efficiently, and can do it for you.
Pros
Freedom to do additional work.
Being a freelancer means you may very well work fulltime for your school, and have a committed and regular work load with them.
But if you so choose, it gives you the option of working for multiple schools or individuals. So you can pick up freelance hours at a second school, or offer your services as a teacher on an hourly basis to people you’ve met in Poland.
Tax rate
Because you are a registered freelancer in Poland, you are effectively a small business. This means that you pay the business tax rate rather than the employee rate, and the tax rate for this sort of work is only 6%. So that’s a significantly lower number than the 20-25% you’d pay as a direct school employee, and the more hours you work, the greater the tax savings.
Cons
Paying a monthly fee to the Polish law firm
As mentioned above, it’s not as complicated as it sounds, but you will still need a Polish law firm to sort out your paperwork to register you as a freelancer and make sure that your taxes are filed each month. The monthly cost for this is 350 zl (£70 / $87) at the time of writing.
As mentioned above, the extent to which this fee is worth it largely depends on how much you work. I recently spoke to one of our teachers in Poland, and he calculated that if he works more than 36.5 hours per month, he is better off as as a freelancer than an employee, as the tax savings pay for the monthly fee to the Polish law firm.
Proof of content creation requirement
This low tax rate is a part of the Polish tax system called an ‘author’s contract’. This means that those working as freelancers need to submit original materials every month to prove they are eligible for this tax rate. For teachers, original materials means either lesson plans, or sometimes they may be audio recordings of lessons. But lesson plans are most likely, and the amount of materials you need to send depends on your income that month. Usually the requirement is that you submit 1 page of lesson plans per 500zl of income, so for 4500 zl you’d need to submit 9 pages of lessons plans.
Based on talking to our teachers over the years, I think this is something that takes some getting used to, but once you get in the swing of things, getting this done and sent off becomes routine and won’t take much time.
Considerations for Polish schools
Currently, we work with a range of schools in Poland, and they all view these choices differently.
Some hire teachers as direct employees by default, whereas others exclusively work on a b2b basis and require you to be registered as a freelance. Other schools are open to either option and leave the choice to you.
Schools in the latter category offer different pay rates for those that work as freelancers and those that work as direct employees. For example, those working as direct employees are paid 39zl per hour, and those working as freelancers are paid 45zl per hour.
This is because the school has less responsibilities for freelancers than for employees when it comes to things like health insurance.
This also means that from a competitive point of view, some schools have told me that they want to work b2b because they fear that if they don’t, their school is not attractive enough compared to other schools teachers may work for.
What it all means for you
I hope this post has helped makes sense of what how things work in Poland. It can be a little complicated, but both options outlined are legal and widely used. Poland is an amazing place to work and live, and it will be more than worth it!
If you have a strong preference for one of the options, we’ll do our best to accommodate it. In general, most kindergartens and primary schools work on a direct employee basis, and most language schools that work with adults operate on a b2b/freelancer basis.
Thanks for reading, if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact me: arnold@impact-teaching.com
If you would like to apply to teach in Poland, you can do so here.
