Court fees in Polish civil procedure

Fees related to civil litigation in Poland

As a rule, litigation in Polish courts is chargable. This rule is expressed in art. 126(2) § 1 of Polish Civil Procedure Code. This article states, that court will not undertake any action if request is not paid by applicable fee. The detailed specification of amount and method of counting court fees applicable to appropriate requests and pleadings are described in Polish Act on court fees in civil cases. Anyone who attends to pursue a claims in front of Polish courts should be prepared to incur the relevant expenditures in this scope. Court fees are divided into basic, fixed and relative.

Basic fee

The basic fee is 30.00 zł (approx. 7 EUR) and is charged on all those cases, which are not charged by fixed fee or relative fee.

Fixed fee

The amounts of fixed fees are established by particular regulations. These fees are amounting from several dozen to several hundred euros, e.g. fixed fee for divorce amounts to 600.00 zł. Nevertheless, in certain categories of cases fixed fees can reach up to 2,000.00 zł – e.g. action for dissolution the company or action for cancelling resolution of shareholders.

Relative fee

The relative fee is applicable only in cases related to property rights. As a rule, it amounts to 5% of the value of object of the dispute, but not less than 30 zł and not more than 100,000.00 zł. Therefore, any case in which value of the object of dispute exceeds 2,000,000.00 zł will be charged with maximum relative fee amounting to 100,000.00 zł. This situation may pose serious financial consequences for entrepreneurs and companies forced to pursuing their claims in such cases in front of court.

Exemption from court fees

The most popular category of such cases is related to claims for unsettled payments in business transactions, in which pursued claims often reach hundreds of thousands and even millions of euro. In such cases we advise to consider the possibility to filling motion for exemption from court fees. However, it should be noted that it is much easier to get an exemption form court fees for an individual than a legal person. According to Polish Supreme Court, in some cases even the bankruptcy of company is not sufficient for an exemption from court fees.

Nevertheless, it does not mean that obtaining the exemption for legal person is not possible. Recently, our legal team has obtained 50% exemption form court fees for the company in big commercial dispute.

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