Occasional rental in Poland — what it is and what you need

Under an ordinary lease, recovering a flat from someone who refuses to leave is a court matter: a claim, a judgment, a ruling on the right to social housing, and then a wait until the municipality provides one. In practice this takes a long time, and throughout it the flat earns nothing.

Occasional rental removes the stage where a court decides on the eviction itself. The tenant has already agreed before a notary to leave, so the court only adds an enforcement clause. No social housing or temporary accommodation is awarded.

The protective period does not apply either — the ban on carrying out evictions between 1 November and 31 March. That ban concerns court judgments ordering a flat to be vacated, and here there is no such judgment.

That is the whole difference. In every other respect this is an ordinary lease: the same right to use the flat, the same repair obligations on the owner, the same protection against rent increases during the term.

On the owner's side — only a natural person who does not run a business of letting flats. A company, or a person for whom letting is a business activity, uses institutional rental (najem instytucjonalny) instead; that is a separate construction with a similar effect.

The lease must be for a fixed term of no more than ten years. An open-ended lease is not an occasional rental, even with a notarial deed attached.

There are no restrictions on the tenant's side: citizenship, source of income and whether someone holds a PESEL number make no difference here.

The notary's fee for the tenant's declaration is capped by statute at one tenth of the minimum wage. In 2026 the minimum wage is 4,806 zł, so the fee will not exceed 480.60 zł net, plus VAT and the cost of copies.

The statute does not say who pays — it is a matter of agreement. On the Warsaw rental market the tenant usually does, since it is their declaration, but splitting it or having the owner cover it is not unusual when a flat has been empty for a while.

The deposit in an occasional rental may not exceed six times the monthly rent, calculated at the rate applying on the day the lease is signed. An ordinary lease has no such cap.

Missing the tax office deadline. This is the expensive one: without the filing the lease still binds, but it loses the special effects of occasional rental, and recovering the flat goes back to the ordinary court route.

Counting the fourteen days from signing instead of from the start of the tenancy. If the lease is signed mid-month and the keys handed over on the first of the next, the clock starts at handover.

A fallback dwelling that cannot actually be moved into. If the tenant loses the ability to live at the address given, they have twenty-one days to name another. The owner may terminate the lease if they do not.

A verbal or email amendment. Changes to an occasional rental require written form on pain of nullity, exactly like the lease itself.

The common worry is: I am signing consent to my own eviction. Formally yes — but that consent only operates once the lease has ended or been effectively terminated and the tenant has failed to hand the flat back despite a written demand. While the lease runs and the rent is paid, the notarial deed sits in a drawer doing nothing.

Occasional rental does not give the owner a right to terminate whenever they please, or to put anyone out overnight. Termination follows the lease and the statute, exactly as with an ordinary tenancy.

It also works in the tenant's favour: an owner holding this kind of lease is far more willing to rent to people without a Polish credit history, without a permanent employment contract and without registered residence. On the Warsaw market that is often the difference between „I won't rent to a foreigner” and signing the same day.