A comprehensive guide for EU foreigners moving to Poland – part II – obtaining health insurance

This is a part of the guide. If you want to go back to main page, click here: main page

After your stay in Poland is legal the second most important thing to address is obtaining your public healthcare coverage. In Poland healthcare is predominantly tied to work or some other activity (bummer) but of course this is not america and there are multiple of ways on how to obtain coverage. The body responsible for your insurance is ZUS (pol. social security institutionliterally social security establishment) however the body that runs public healthcare is NFZ (pol. National Health Fundnational health fund).

All workers in Poland are automatically insured with state healthcare insurance (NFZ) through their employer. The employer is obliged to register you with ZUS and pay the contributions and deduct some contributions from your gross pay.^{Side note: This does not apply to self-employment and Work Agreement}

If you are studying – but only if you lost right to healthcare in your country, the university will arrange your insurance. Remember, the university is obliged by law to get you insured if you don’t have any other source of insurance (not employed, not covered by your home country). Then it’s them who register you with ZUS but you have to actively apply for them to do that.

There are also other ways to obtain the insurance (you can skip that part if you are employed or studying):

• paying for insurance out of pocket – if you don’t have any other title to insurance from the ones listed below, you can just register with ZUS and pay for your healthcare voluntarily. The rate is 9% of average pay (so as of 2024 726,93 PLN). The procedure on how to register for voluntary insurance is available here: https://www.nfz.gov.pl/dla-pacjenta/ubezpieczenia-w-nfz/jak-sie-ubezpieczyc-dobrowolnie/
• being insured with a parent or a spouse – pretty self explanatory, you have to tell this to whoever pays your deductions (employer, school or do it yourself is self-employed) and they will get your family member "added" to your insurance. You can do that at any time you have valid insurance. There are of course many details who can register which children etc. but we will not go into that here, ask in comments if you want to know.
• pension – pretty self explanatory, you don’t have to register since ZUS also pays out the pensions they know everything
• conducting business activity – you have to register yourself as the one insured and paying the ZUS deductions. This is complicated and you should ask your accountant about details on how to exactly do that.
• registered unemployed – if you find yourself unemployed you can register with any job office (pol. Labor Office) which will grant you insurance. The catch is you have to go to the training courses and job interviews that they provide for you and they are usually pretty shit. If you miss even one interview they deregister you and you lose healthcare.
• prisoner – self explanatory as well.