Poland's Labour Code (Kodeks pracy) has governed working time for decades, but violations remain common - often because managers rely on habit rather than the actual text. Here are the numbers you need.

The Standard

8 hours per day, 40 hours per week. That's the baseline. Your settlement period can be up to 4 months, which gives you flexibility to balance heavy and light weeks. In some industries - construction, agriculture, guarding services - the settlement period can stretch to 12 months, but that requires a collective agreement or a workplace agreement signed with employee representatives.

Overtime Limits

Overtime kicks in above 8 hours on a given day or above the weekly norm at the end of the settlement period.

The hard cap: 150 hours of overtime per employee per year. A collective or workplace agreement can raise this - up to 416 hours in extreme cases - but 150 is the statutory default. Exceed it and you're in violation, regardless of whether the employee agreed.

Maximum average working time, including overtime: 48 hours per week over any settlement period. This is the EU Working Time Directive threshold, and Poland is bound by it.

Rest Periods

Every employee is entitled to:

  • 11 consecutive hours of rest in every 24-hour period
  • 35 consecutive hours of uninterrupted rest per week (which must include Sunday where possible)

Night shift workers get additional protection. If someone works between 21:00 and 05:00 for at least 3 hours of their shift, they qualify as a night worker - their working time cannot exceed 8 hours per 24 hours, and they're entitled to a pay supplement of at least 20% of the minimum hourly wage.

Overtime Pay

Two rates apply:

  • 50% supplement on top of normal pay for overtime on weekdays
  • 100% supplement for overtime at night, on Sundays, on public holidays, or on the employee's designated day off

Alternatively, you can give time off instead of a pay supplement - but if the employee requests it, you must grant it; if you initiate it, you give 1.5 hours off per overtime hour.

Penalties

The National Labour Inspectorate (Państwowa Inspekcja Pracy) can issue fines of up to 30,000 PLN (roughly €7,000) per violation. Each non-compliant employee counts separately. Systematic violations can lead to criminal liability under Article 281 of the Labour Code.

Inspectors check time records. If your records don't exist or don't match, the burden of proof shifts to you - and there's no easy way out of that.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Say you run a warehouse with 12 employees on rotating shifts. Settlement period is 3 months. In one busy month, three employees hit 180 overtime hours for the quarter. You've exceeded the 150-hour cap, you owe 100% supplements for Sunday shifts that weren't tracked separately, and your paper timesheets can't reconstruct who worked when.

This is the scenario that generates most labour inspections. Not malice - just missing data.

Keep daily records. Know your settlement period end date. Track each employee's overtime tally in real time, not retrospectively.

Rezano tracks daily and weekly overtime automatically, flags the 150-hour limit before you breach it, and generates reports per employee per settlement period. Setup takes under 10 minutes. Try it at rezano.lv.