2025-11-11 18:00
publication
2025-11-11 18:00
The Polish 2050 Club submitted to the Sejm a draft amendment to the act, which assumes replacing the current local fee with a tourist fee. The project provides that the fee will be able to be introduced by any commune where natural persons stay for tourism, recreation or training purposes.
On Friday, a draft amendment to the Act on local taxes and fees and the Act on the income of local government units was submitted to the Sejm – the applicant of the draft is the Polska 2050 parliamentary club – their representative is MP Rafał Komarewicz.
The justification stated that the applicable local fee was intended to constitute income for municipalities – although, according to the applicant, the regulations do not fulfill their role because the formal conditions that a locality must meet to introduce such a fee “are not adequate to the actual conditions regarding tourism.”
The applicant noted that the minimum climatic conditions include, among others: maintaining permissible levels of pollution in a given air quality zone, and not exceeding permissible levels of electromagnetic fields. According to the applicant, this causes “many difficulties” because a town that meets the requirements may be located in a zone where the standards are exceeded in other municipalities, which makes it impossible to collect the fee.
“The zones overlap with specific cities only in the case of agglomerations (population exceeding 250,000) and cities with a population exceeding 100,000. In other cases, the areas of the zones cover the vast majority of counties,” the draft specifies.
Therefore, a significant number of communes, which are visited by a large number of people, cannot meet the statutory conditions for the introduction of a local fee, which deprives the communes of the means to compensate residents for the burden resulting from high tourist traffic.
According to the applicant, the current fee should be replaced with a local tourist fee. This fee will remain an optional fee and can be introduced by each commune where natural persons stay for tourism, recreation or training purposes.
Persons over 70 years of age, persons who are members of a large family – in accordance with the Large Family Card Act, and persons classified as severely disabled – in accordance with the provisions on vocational and social rehabilitation and employment of disabled persons would be exempt from the fee.
The maximum fee will be PLN 5 per day of the tourist's stay. It is to be indexed from 2028 by the Minister of Finance – just like the local fee so far, although municipalities will be able to vary its amount depending on a specific town or accommodation facility. The project – as we read – will not cause any social or economic effects; as emphasized, the project complies with European Union law. (PAP)
pab/ mt/ sdd/
