Not enough Polish citizens who invested in cryptocurrency have been paying taxes on their gains, and they may soon face the dire consequences.
Their country is now joining Europe’s framework for automated exchange of information on crypto users and assets, and the only way to avoid punitive taxation will be by filing correct annual returns.
Tax evading Poles may part with the bulk of their crypto profits
While it’s difficult to provide an exact estimate at this time, it’s widely believed that as many as 3 million people in Poland have bought digital currencies like Bitcoin.
According to local media, only around 1% of them have been paying their taxes. The rest are facing financial penalties that can reach 75% of their coin-related income.
The Polish tax authority will soon be able to find out who has invested in crypto and how much, the Bitcoin.pl portal warned readers this week.
This will be facilitated by a new law, signed by President Karol Nawrocki earlier in March, implementing the European Union’s DAC8 regulation in the nation with the largest coin market in Eastern Europe.
The eighth amendment of the EU Directive on Administrative Cooperation in Direct Taxation was adopted to specifically cover digital assets.
It extends the automatic exchange of information between member states to cryptocurrency flows and Poland’s National Revenue Administration (KAS) will certainly take advantage of that.
The European framework, including the Polish legislation, introduces new reporting obligations for crypto service providers across the Union.
A variety of platforms processing coin transactions, such as exchanges, brokers, and wallet services, are now required to collect user and transaction data and report it to tax offices.
The latter will share this information with each other. Thus, if a resident of one EU state trades on an exchange based in another, the tax body in their home country will learn they have invested in Bitcoin.
DAC8 is bringing significant changes to how crypto profits are tracked and taxed in Europe. As Cryptopolitan recently reported, Germany is already tightening the tax noose on investors under the same directive.
How is crypto income taxed in Poland?
Filing the PIT-38 form, the annual tax return for capital gains from the sale of various assets, including digital, will save investors a lot of trouble this year, the Polish edition of Business Insider noted in article last week.
The exchange of cryptocurrencies into traditional currencies, like Polish złoty and euro, as well as their use in payments for goods and services, are subject to taxation in Poland.
Profits from the sale of digital coins in 2025 are considered taxable income and must be calculated and reported by April 30, 2026, which is also the deadline by which the due tax should be paid.
Even if someone bought but didn’t sell the crypto, the expenses incurred for the acquisition should be nevertheless declared, too, the financial news outlet highlighted.
Poland applies a flat 19% tax rate to capital gains resulting from operations with cryptocurrency, mainly their conversion to fiat.
At the same time, earning crypto, in the form of mining or staking rewards, for example, is tax-free upon receipt, but taxable when disposed for fiat money.
In general, buying cryptocurrency with fiat, swapping one coin with another, transfers between own wallets, and long-term crypto holdings are not taxable.
It’s unclear for how long this status quo will remain unchanged, as Poland is yet to comprehensively regulate its crypto economy in line with the EU’s Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA) framework.
Attempts to do that in the past few months have proved fruitless. A government-proposed bill, criticized for introducing excessive regulation and fees, was vetoed twice by the Polish president.
An alternative, pro-crypto draft was recently submitted to parliament, but its future is uncertain. Poland must transpose MiCA into national law by July 1 to ensure its crypto businesses are legally operating in the common market.
Meanwhile, the legislation implementing the DAC8 directive will come into force two weeks after its publication in the official Polish Journal of Laws.