A guide for foreign investors and international corporate groups operating in Poland | ATL Law 2026

Introduction — why an internal transfer is still “posting”

Foreign investors operating in Poland through a subsidiary, branch, or joint venture routinely move people across the group: a manager sent from head office to set up the Polish entity, a Polish engineer seconded to a sister company in Germany, a specialist rotated between regional hubs. Inside the group, this is usually filed away as “internal mobility” — not something requiring the compliance machinery associated with cross-border service contracts.

That assumption is one of the most consequential misunderstandings in global mobility. Directive 96/71/EC expressly lists the transfer of an employee to an establishment or an undertaking owning the group to which the sending employer belongs as one of the three core forms of posting recognized under EU law. In practice, this means a group entity that sends an employee to another company within the same group — in either direction, into Poland or out of Poland — carries, as a rule, the same registration, documentation and substantive obligations as a business fulfilling a commercial service contract abroad.

For foreign investors, this cuts both ways. A Polish subsidiary sending staff to sister companies elsewhere in the EU triggers posting obligations abroad. Equally — and this is the part most international HQs overlook — a foreign parent or sister company sending an employee into the Polish subsidiary triggers Polish posting obligations, including registration with the Polish labour authority. This article sets out what intra-corporate posting is, why it is so often missed in international group structures, and what compliance and tax exposure it creates on both sides of the border.

What counts as intra-corporate posting under EU law

Directive 96/71/EC, as amended by Directive 2018/957/EU, recognizes three situations in which an employee temporarily working in another Member State is a posted worker for the purposes of EU law:

• contractual posting — the employee performs, in another Member State, a service that the employer supplies to a client (outsourcing, subcontracting, a service contract);
• intra-corporate posting (Article 1(3)(b)) — the employee is sent to an establishment or an undertaking owning the group to which the sending employer belongs;
• temporary agency posting — a temporary work agency assigns its employee to work for a user undertaking in another Member State.

The Posting of Workers Directive, the national implementing legislation of each Member State — including Poland’s Act on the Posting of Workers within the Framework of the Provision of Services — and the EU social security coordination rules (Regulations 883/2004 and 987/2009) apply to every one of these categories, regardless of whether the sending and receiving entities are independent businesses or companies within the same corporate group.

Why foreign-owned groups miss this

In our experience advising foreign investors, a recurring set of assumptions leads HR and mobility teams to overlook the posting analysis for intra-group transfers:

• “It’s all one company.” Operationally, group entities are often treated as branches of a single organization. Legally, each remains a separate employer in a separate jurisdiction, and the posting analysis is done entity by entity.
• Local employment at the host entity. Some groups avoid the issue altogether by having the receiving company locally employ the individual (“local hire”). This genuinely is not posting — but many hybrid arrangements keep the original employment relationship alive in parallel (dual contracts, unpaid leave, retainer arrangements), and those hybrids require a case-by-case analysis.
• Framing the assignment as “training.” A short trip framed internally as onboarding, a workshop, or knowledge transfer is often, in substance, work performed for the benefit of the receiving entity, under its direction. Genuine work performed within the receiving company’s structure tends to be classified as posting, whatever internal label is used.
• Assuming different rules apply to senior staff. Transferring a director, a board member, or a senior expert into a group company is posting in exactly the same way as transferring a junior employee — the Directive does not differentiate by seniority.

Typical scenarios in foreign-owned groups with Polish operations

The practical situations that qualify as intra-corporate posting rarely carry that label internally. Common examples we see in groups with a Polish presence include:

• A German or Dutch parent company sends a project manager to the Polish subsidiary for six months to oversee a plant setup or system implementation, while the manager remains employed by the foreign parent.
• A Polish subsidiary sends an IT engineer to a sister company in France or the Netherlands to support a systems rollout, while remaining formally employed in Poland.
• A regional manager rotates through group offices in several EU Member States, spending several months per year in each (the “regional rotation” model).
• An employee of the foreign head office is temporarily “lent” to the Polish subsidiary to run a project for a third-party client of the group.
• A project team from the foreign parent supports the launch of the new Polish entity (setup, training, pilot phase), with costs settled between group companies as a management fee.

In each of these scenarios, the employee physically works in another Member State, within the structure of and for the benefit of an entity based there, while remaining formally employed by the sending company. That is the textbook description of intra-corporate posting — whichever direction the employee is moving.

Compliance obligations that apply in full

Because an intra-group transfer is posting in the sense of EU law, the sending employer — whether that is the Polish subsidiary sending staff abroad, or the foreign parent sending staff into Poland — is, as a rule, subject to the full standard posting compliance package.

A1 certificate from the social security authority

If the employee is to remain in the sending country’s social security system during the posting, the sending employer applies for an A1 certificate under Articles 12 or 13 of Regulation 883/2004. Conditions typically include an uninterrupted employment relationship with the sending employer, the sending employer carrying out substantial activity in its home state, the posted employee not replacing another posted worker, an anticipated posting period not exceeding, as a rule, 24 months, and an appropriate allocation of working time between countries depending on the type of A1 sought.

Group affiliation between the sending and receiving entities has no bearing on how these conditions are assessed. Social security authorities do not grant any leniency because the receiving company is a sister or subsidiary — the same substantive test applies as for an ordinary posting.

Notification in the host state — including when the host state is Poland

Every Member State maintains its own advance notification system for incoming postings. Familiar examples include Meldloket (the Netherlands), SIPSI (France), Meldeportal (Germany), Limosa (Belgium) and the Dichiarazione preventiva (Italy). The obligation to notify arises before the posted employee starts work, and applies equally where the receiving entity is a company within the same group.

This works both ways for a foreign investor. When a foreign parent or sister company sends an employee into a Polish subsidiary, the sending employer — not the Polish subsidiary — is required to file a declaration of posting to Polish territory with the National Labour Inspectorate (Państwowa Inspekcja Pracy, PIP) before the employee’s first working day in Poland. The declaration can be filed electronically or on paper, in Polish or in English, and any subsequent change to the data it contains must also be reported to PIP. Foreign HQs sending staff into a Polish subsidiary frequently overlook this filing precisely because they assume that intra-group mobility into their own subsidiary falls outside the posting regime.

Penalties for failing to notify are material. Administrative fines in practice range from a few thousand to several tens of thousands of euros per infringement, and the group relationship between the sending and receiving companies is not a mitigating factor.

The hard core of employment conditions

The posted employee must be guaranteed the terms of employment in force in the host state in the areas listed in Article 3(1) of Directive 96/71/EC — including minimum pay, working time, paid annual leave, health and safety, and equal treatment. Following the implementation of Directive 2018/957/EU, this now covers full remuneration (not only the statutory minimum), and once the posting exceeds 12 months (extendable to 18), it extends, as a rule, to essentially the full set of employment conditions required by the law of the host state, with limited exceptions.

This obligation does not disappear because the receiving entity is part of the same group. If the applicable minimum in Poland is the remuneration resulting from a generally applicable collective agreement, or if the German minimum derives from a sectoral collective bargaining agreement, the sending employer must guarantee that level of pay even where the employee is working exclusively for a sister or subsidiary company.

Documentation at the place of work

Most Member States require a defined package of documents to be available at the place of work — the employment contract, working time records, evidence of wage payments, the A1 certificate, identity documents, and in some cases certified translations. In an intra-group model, the receiving entity often ends up as the practical custodian of these documents, which makes it important to agree, in an internal procedure, who is responsible for completeness in the event of a labour inspection.

A designated contact person

Most national systems require the sending employer to designate a person authorized to liaise with the local labour inspectorate and, in some states, a person responsible for representing the employer in dealings with social partners. In an intra-group model this role is often filled by an employee of the receiving company — which should be formally documented rather than left as an informal arrangement.

Tax traps — an often underestimated exposure

The tax dimension of intra-group secondments is, in our experience, even more frequently neglected than the labour-law dimension within corporate groups — yet it is where the most significant financial exposure tends to materialize.

The economic employer concept

The “economic employer” concept derives from the Commentary to the OECD Model Tax Convention and is applied by the tax authorities of many host states, although it does not have the status of a binding statutory provision everywhere. Its logic: if the actual beneficiary of a posted employee’s work is the entity in the host state — that is, the group company to which the employee is seconded — the host state may treat that entity as the employer for the purposes of Article 15 of the relevant double tax treaty, taxing the employee’s income from day one, without the benefit of the 183-day rule.

The economic employer test tends to be applied particularly strictly to intra-group postings. Factors that typically attract the attention of tax authorities include: the employee working within the structure of, and under the effective direction of, the receiving entity; salary costs being recharged to the receiving entity, with or without a markup; the business risk connected with the work product sitting with the receiving entity; the receiving entity providing tools, workplace and materials; and the receiving entity deciding on the number and qualifications of seconded staff.

The more of these factors are present, the higher the risk that the host state will treat the local group company as the economic employer and impose a withholding obligation from the first day of the assignment.

Permanent establishment risk

A second, frequently overlooked exposure is the creation of a permanent establishment (PE) of the sending employer in the host state. This can arise, for example, where the seconded employee has actual authority to conclude contracts on behalf of the sending company (a dependent agent PE), or where a sustained presence of seconded staff within the receiving entity’s infrastructure meets the criteria for a fixed-place-of-business PE.

The consequences are significant: taxation of profits attributed to the PE in the host state, registration obligations, and in some jurisdictions accounting and reporting obligations as well. For a foreign investor whose only presence in Poland was intended to be a lightly staffed liaison function, an unplanned PE finding can be a materially different tax position than the one originally modelled.

Non-EU nationals — the ICT Directive

A separate regime — often confused with EU posting, though it operates in parallel — applies to third-country nationals (from outside the EU/EEA/Switzerland) transferred within an international group from an entity in a third country to an entity in the EU. This is governed by Directive 2014/66/EU (the Intra-Corporate Transferee, or ICT, Directive), implemented in Poland through the rules on temporary residence permits for the purpose of performing work within an intra-corporate transfer.

For foreign investors bringing specialists from outside the EU into a Polish subsidiary — a common pattern for US, UK, or Asian parent companies — the ICT Directive, not the EU posting regime, is usually the relevant framework. It covers three categories of employee:

• managers — persons managing the host entity or a department of it;
• specialists — persons holding specialist knowledge essential to the host entity’s area of activity;
• trainees — university graduates transferred for career development purposes.

An ICT permit allows, subject to conditions, work at the receiving EU entity and short- and long-term mobility between Member States within the same group. The maximum transfer period is, as a rule, three years for managers and specialists and one year for trainees.

ICT is a distinct track from “classic” posting under Directive 96/71/EC and requires its own compliance analysis, in particular regarding the work and residence permit, employment conditions, and intra-EU mobility.

Common mistakes we see in international groups

• No posting notification in the host state, on the assumption that “it’s our own subsidiary, they’ll sort it out locally.” The sending employer, not the receiving entity, is the party obligated to notify.
• No A1 certificate — the employee goes “for a short while,” then “a bit longer,” until a routine inspection at the receiving entity reveals that social security contributions were not paid anywhere, or were paid twice.
• Failure to guarantee host-state employment conditions — minimum pay, collective agreements, allowances, working time — which a labour inspection audit in the host state can reach back several years to assess.
• Recharging salary costs between group entities without analyzing the economic employer and host-state income tax consequences for the employee.
• Applying EU posting rules by default to non-EU nationals covered by the ICT regime, leading to incorrect conclusions about the permits actually required.

Compliance checklist for foreign investors

A practical set of questions to work through before transferring any employee between group entities across a border — in either direction.

Status and legal framework

• Have we identified the transfer as posting under Directive 96/71/EC (Art. 1(3)(b) — intra-group transfer)?
• Does the employee remain employed by the sending entity throughout the posting?
• Is there an addendum to the employment contract governing the posting terms, place of work, duration and receiving entity?

Social security

• Has an A1 application been filed before the posting begins?
• Are the conditions for keeping the employee in the sending state’s social security system met?

Notification in the host state

• Have we identified the applicable national notification system (including PIP notification for postings into Poland)?
• Has the notification been filed before the posted employee’s first working day?
• Has a contact person for the local labour inspectorate been designated?

Employment conditions

• Have we verified the hard core of host-state employment conditions (pay, working time, leave, health and safety)?
• Have applicable generally binding sectoral or regional collective agreements been considered?
• Is there a plan for the 12- (or 18-) month threshold and the resulting extension of applicable conditions?

Documentation

• Has it been agreed where, and by whom, posting documentation will be kept (contract, time records, payment evidence, A1)?
• Have required translations for the host state been arranged?

Tax and intra-group settlements

• Has a cost recharge model between the group entities been agreed?
• Has economic employer risk been analyzed and, if needed, has host-state withholding been planned for?
• Has the risk of creating a permanent establishment in the host state been assessed?
• Has the employee’s tax residence status been determined for longer postings?

Non-EU nationals

• Has the possible application of the ICT regime been analyzed for third-country nationals?
• Have the required work and residence permits been obtained?

Frequently asked questions

Does posting to a group company require a contract between the two entities?

Directive 96/71/EC does not impose this as an express requirement, but in practice documenting the basis for the transfer — for example through an intra-group service agreement, a secondment agreement, or a group mobility policy — matters as evidence, both for labour inspections in the host state and for tax authorities examining transfer pricing and economic employer status.

If the employee signs a local contract with the receiving entity, is it still posting?

As a rule, no — if the original employment contract is suspended (for example through unpaid leave) or terminated, and the employee is locally hired. In practice, however, groups frequently use hybrid models (for example a dual contract with a minimal local salary alongside a continuing employment relationship with the sending entity), and these require individual analysis.

Is an A1 certificate enough if the employee is posted to a sister company?

An A1 certificate governs only which country’s social security legislation applies. It does not exempt the sending employer from the host-state notification obligation, does not address tax, does not guarantee the host-state employment conditions, and offers no protection against economic employer risk.

What if the posting is short, say two weeks?

As a rule, registration and substantive obligations apply from day one. Some Member States provide exceptions or simplifications for very short stays (training, meetings, initial installation), but their scope is narrow and needs to be checked for the specific state. “Two weeks isn’t really posting” is a dangerous simplification.

Does economic employer risk apply in every Member State?

Member States take different approaches to the economic employer concept — some apply it formally, supported by detailed guidance and case law, others apply it less intensively. Before a longer posting to a group company, it is worth obtaining a jurisdiction-specific analysis.

ABOUT ATL LAW

ATL Law is a law firm specializing in comprehensive legal and tax advisory services for foreign investors operating in the Polish market. We offer multilingual advisory services (Polish, English, German) covering corporate law, tax law, employee posting and global mobility, and labor law. We support our clients at every stage of their operations in Poland.