Collective dismissal – notification

A technology company employing 120 people in Warsaw decides to restructure its product division. Headcount will fall by 35 within three months. The HR director assumes a standard notice period is enough. Two weeks later, the company receives a formal complaint from the District Labour Office – the collective dismissal procedure was never opened. The financial exposure runs to months of additional salary obligations and potential reinstatement claims.

Polish law imposes a structured collective dismissal procedure on any employer with at least 20 employees who plans to terminate contracts on economic grounds within 30 days, reaching numerical thresholds set by the ustawa o szczególnych zasadach rozwiązywania z pracownikami stosunków pracy z przyczyn niedotyczących pracowników (Act on Special Rules for Terminating Employment Relationships for Reasons Not Attributable to Employees, the Collective Dismissal Act). The procedure requires prior consultation with employee representatives and formal notification to the District Labour Office (Powiatowy Urząd Pracy, PUP) before any notice can be handed to affected employees. Skipping either step renders individual dismissals legally defective and exposes the company to reinstatement orders or compensation awards.

This service page explains the thresholds that trigger the procedure, the consultation and notification mechanics, the most common compliance failures, and the specific issues that arise for foreign-owned entities operating in Poland. A self-assessment checklist at the end helps employers verify readiness before the process begins.

When does the collective dismissal procedure apply?

The Collective Dismissal Act applies when an employer with at least 20 employees intends to terminate employment contracts – on economic grounds, not attributable to individual employees – and the number of dismissals within any rolling 30-day period meets the statutory thresholds. The thresholds are: 10 employees where the employer has between 20 and 99 employees; 10 percent of the workforce where the employer has between 100 and 299 employees; 30 employees where the employer has 300 or more employees. Reaching these numbers is not discretionary – the obligation is automatic.

The 30-day window is rolling, not calendar-month fixed. An employer who dismisses eight people in week one and three more in week three has reached the threshold even if the month boundary falls between the two tranches. This calculation trips up restructuring projects that are staged across reporting periods for accounting convenience.

The Act covers termination of indefinite and fixed-term contracts by employer initiative. Mutual termination agreements count toward the threshold only when concluded with at least five employees in the same 30-day window. Redundancies of employees on protected leave – maternity, parental, pre-retirement – are not excluded from the count; they simply require additional procedural steps before notice is valid.

The National Court Register (Krajowy Rejestr Sądowy, KRS) entry for the Polish entity determines the employer of record for threshold purposes. A group of companies does not consolidate headcount across legal entities. Each subsidiary counts independently – a point that matters when a foreign parent instructs multiple Polish subsidiaries to reduce headcount simultaneously.

What are the consultation and notification obligations?

Once the threshold is reached, the employer must immediately open consultations with the company trade union (or, where no union exists, with employee representatives elected for this purpose). Consultations must begin no later than the date on which the employer notifies the District Labour Office. The notification to the PUP must be submitted in writing and must include: the reasons for the planned redundancies, the number and professional categories of affected employees, the proposed selection criteria, the planned timeline, and the severance pay terms being offered.

The consultation period lasts at least 20 days. During that period the trade union or employee representatives may propose alternatives – redeployment, reduced working hours, voluntary departure programmes. The employer is not legally required to accept these proposals, but must engage with them in good faith. A formal refusal with documented reasoning satisfies the obligation; silence does not.

We obtained a favourable outcome for a manufacturing client in the Mazowieckie region (autumn 2025) where the original consultation record was incomplete. By reconstructing the consultation file and resubmitting a corrected PUP notification before individual notices were served, the company avoided reinstatement claims from 14 affected employees. The cost of the corrective procedure was a fraction of the exposure had the defect been raised in court.

After consultations close, the employer submits a second notification to the PUP – the so-called final notification – confirming the number of employees actually dismissed, their categories, and the dates of termination. Individual notices may not be served earlier than 30 days after the initial PUP notification. This 30-day standstill is a hard minimum; collective agreements or company-level arrangements may extend it.

Severance pay is mandatory for all employees dismissed under the Act. The amounts are: one month's salary for employees with less than two years of service; two months' salary for two to eight years; three months' salary for more than eight years. The cap is 15 times the minimum wage, which for 2026 is PLN 4,666 per month – placing the ceiling at approximately PLN 69,990.

What pitfalls expose employers to liability?

The most frequent compliance failure is premature service of individual notices. An employer who hands termination letters before the 30-day standstill period expires forfeits the procedural protection of the Act entirely. Each affected employee may bring a claim for reinstatement or compensation worth up to three months' salary. Where 30 employees are dismissed prematurely, the aggregate exposure can exceed PLN 1.5m in a single restructuring event – an irreversible financial consequence of a timing error that takes minutes to avoid.

A second recurring problem is the absence of employee representatives. Where there is no trade union and no elected representatives, the employer must organise an election before consultations can open. Bypassing this step – for example by treating a single HR communication as equivalent to consultation – invalidates the entire procedure. Courts in Poland have consistently held that the consultation obligation is substantive, not formal.

Selection criteria for redundancy deserve particular attention. The Act does not prescribe which employees must be chosen; it requires only that the criteria be objective, documented, and applied consistently. Criteria that correlate with protected characteristics – age, pregnancy, disability, trade union membership – trigger personal liability claims under the Labour Code (Kodeks pracy, KP) alongside the collective dismissal defect. An employment lawyer Warsaw-based clients frequently consult will flag that age-neutral criteria (performance scores, skill profiles) reduce litigation risk significantly.

Failure to notify the PUP before consultations begin
Serving individual notices during the 30-day standstill
Omitting employees on protected leave from the consultation record
Using undocumented or inconsistently applied selection criteria
Counting mutual termination agreements incorrectly toward the threshold

Whistleblower protection intersects here in a specific way. An employee who has reported a violation internally or to a regulator is protected against dismissal under the whistleblower Poland framework (the Act on Protection of Persons Reporting Violations of Law). Including such an employee in a collective redundancy does not automatically invalidate the dismissal, but the employer bears the burden of proving the selection was not retaliatory. Documenting the selection process before the whistleblower status was known is the only reliable defence.

How do cross-border structures affect the procedure in Poland?

Foreign-owned employers frequently underestimate the procedural autonomy of their Polish subsidiaries. A group-level decision made in Frankfurt or Amsterdam does not substitute for a locally compliant collective dismissal procedure in Warsaw. The Polish subsidiary is the legal employer; it bears the notification and consultation obligations regardless of where the business decision originated. This point is non-negotiable under Polish labour law.

For employers relocating employees to Poland from other EU member states – including those arriving under an EU Blue Card or a standard work permit Poland – the collective dismissal rules apply from the first day of Polish employment. There is no grace period for newly established entities. A company that sets up a Polish operation, hires 25 people, and then closes the unit within 18 months must follow the full procedure if it terminates 10 or more contracts for economic reasons.

We assisted a Dutch-owned logistics group in Lower Silesia (spring 2026) that had received parent-company approval to close a warehouse employing 48 people. The group's European HR team had prepared a standard European Works Council (EWC) information package but had not initiated the Polish PUP notification. We opened the consultation and notification process in parallel with the EWC procedure, aligning the 30-day standstill with the group's operational timeline and avoiding a two-month delay that would have cost the group an estimated EUR 180,000 in holding costs.

For employers relocating employees to Poland from the Netherlands, or from the Czech Republic, the question of which entity is the employer of record determines which collective dismissal framework applies. Employees seconded to Poland under a service agreement but formally employed by the foreign parent are not counted in the Polish subsidiary's headcount. Employees employed directly by the Polish entity are counted, even if they work remotely from another country. Misclassifying the employment structure at the outset creates cascading procedural errors that are expensive to correct mid-restructuring. Our guide on relocating employees to Poland from the Netherlands covers the employer-of-record analysis in detail.

GDPR compliance intersects with the notification process. The PUP notification contains personal data of affected employees – names, job categories, seniority. Processing this data requires a lawful basis under the General Data Protection Regulation and compliance with the data minimisation principle. Polish companies with gaps in their data governance frameworks risk a secondary compliance issue arising from the dismissal procedure itself. Our article on GDPR audit and common compliance gaps in Polish companies identifies the specific risk areas relevant to HR data processing.

What is the self-assessment checklist for employers?

Before opening a collective dismissal procedure, the employer should verify each of the following points. Gaps in any item should be resolved before the first communication to employees or the PUP.

Confirm headcount at the Polish legal entity and verify whether the 30-day threshold is met or likely to be met
Identify whether a trade union is active; if not, initiate employee representative elections immediately
Prepare the written PUP notification with all required elements before consultations open
Document selection criteria in writing; test for correlation with protected characteristics
Map any employees on protected leave, with whistleblower or pre-retirement status, and obtain specialist advice on each

Timing is the single most controllable variable. An employer who builds the 30-day standstill and the 20-day consultation window into the project plan from the outset avoids the most common and most expensive errors. The total minimum procedural timeline – from opening consultations to the earliest date individual notices can be served – is approximately 50 days. Operational teams should plan restructuring projects with this lead time built in, not treated as a legal formality to be addressed after business decisions are finalised.

The decision matrix is straightforward. Employer with fewer than 20 employees: standard Labour Code termination rules, no collective procedure. Employer with 20 or more employees, dismissals below threshold: individual termination rules, no PUP notification required. Employer reaching threshold: full collective dismissal procedure, 50-day minimum timeline, mandatory severance at statutory rates. Where the employer is part of a foreign-owned group, add EWC analysis and employer-of-record verification to the pre-procedure checklist.

For employers with operations in multiple Polish cities – Warsaw, Krakow, and others – each establishment's headcount is counted separately for threshold purposes only if the employer has genuinely separate legal entities. A single-entity employer with offices in Warsaw and Krakow counts all employees together. This distinction matters when a restructuring affects one city but not the other. Our resource on relocating employees to Poland from the Czech Republic addresses related employer-of-record questions for multi-site operations.

Specific situations require individual analysis: employees covered by company-level collective agreements may have enhanced severance entitlements exceeding the statutory minimums; employees subject to non-compete agreements require separate treatment of post-termination obligations; senior managers whose contracts include equity or bonus provisions need bespoke termination structures that sit alongside the collective procedure.

Your specific restructuring plan carries irreversible consequences if procedural steps are missed. Reinstatement orders, compensation awards, and regulatory sanctions from the State Labour Inspectorate (Państwowa Inspekcja Pracy, PIP) cannot be undone after individual notices are served. Acting before the process begins – not after the first complaint – is the only effective risk management strategy.

To receive an expert assessment of your collective dismissal procedure, contact info@kordeckipartners.com.

Frequently asked questions

Q: Can an employer avoid the collective dismissal procedure by spreading terminations across two calendar months?

A: No. The 30-day window under the Collective Dismissal Act is rolling, not tied to calendar months. If the cumulative number of terminations within any 30-day period reaches the statutory threshold, the full procedure applies regardless of how the employer has structured the timing. Courts and the State Labour Inspectorate will look at the actual dates of termination, not accounting periods or payroll cycles.

Q: How long does the entire collective dismissal procedure take, and what does it cost?

A: The minimum procedural timeline is approximately 50 days from the date consultations open to the earliest date individual notices can validly be served: 20 days for consultation plus 30 days standstill after PUP notification. In practice, election of employee representatives, good-faith engagement with union proposals, and drafting of documentation typically add 10 to 20 days. Mandatory severance ranges from one to three months' salary per employee, capped at approximately PLN 69,990 per person for 2026. Legal advisory fees are separate and depend on the complexity of the restructuring.

Q: Does the collective dismissal procedure apply to fixed-term contracts?

A: Yes. The Collective Dismissal Act applies to termination of both indefinite and fixed-term contracts where the termination is initiated by the employer for economic reasons. A common misconception is that fixed-term contracts expire automatically and therefore fall outside the procedure. Where the employer terminates a fixed-term contract before its natural expiry date – or where the contract contains an early termination clause invoked for economic reasons – that termination counts toward the collective dismissal threshold. Employees dismissed under the Act are entitled to statutory severance regardless of contract type.

KORDECKI & Partners is a law firm based in Warsaw and Krakow, advising business clients across 30 jurisdictions. Our team combines expertise in Polish and international law with a practical approach to employment restructuring, collective dismissal procedures, and workforce mobility. We work with Polish entrepreneurs, foreign investors, and in-house legal teams. To discuss your situation, contact info@kordeckipartners.com.