UK vs Poland Take-Home Pay: What a B2B Contractor Really Keeps Compared to UK PAYE

It depends where you land on the income scale, and the crossover is close to a £60,000 UK-equivalent income. Below that, UK PAYE tends to net more: a £45,000 UK salary nets £35,920 a year, versus roughly £32,983-worth of net income for a Polish B2B contractor invoicing the FX-equivalent PLN 19,000 a month under ryczałt. Above roughly £60,000-equivalent, Poland's flat, low B2B tax rate pulls ahead: at a £70,000-equivalent income, the Polish contractor nets roughly £54,279-worth versus the UK's £51,157. The gap widens the higher you go, because Poland's ryczałt rate stays flat at 12% while UK Income Tax keeps climbing through 40% and 45% bands.

Because that's genuinely how the two markets work, and pretending otherwise would be the unfair comparison. The overwhelming majority of Polish IT professionals invoice as B2B contractors (jednoosobowa działalność gospodarcza) rather than working as standard payroll employees (umowa o pracę), because it's tax-advantageous for both sides. A UK £60,000 PAYE salary and a Polish contractor invoicing PLN 25,000 a month aren't structurally identical, one is guaranteed employee pay with statutory holiday and sick pay built in, the other is invoiced revenue a contractor has to run through their own one-person business, choose a tax mode for, and manage themselves. This article compares the net cash each path actually delivers, using whichever Polish tax mode a real contractor would choose (ryczałt wins at every income level shown here), but the underlying employment relationships are genuinely different, not just relabelled versions of the same thing.

Because a Polish B2B contractor doesn't pay one fixed tax rate, they choose between skala podatkowa, podatek liniowy, and ryczałt for the whole tax year, and the winning mode changes with revenue. At every income level in this comparison, ryczałt (a flat 12% on revenue for software development work) comes out ahead for a typical low-cost solo contractor. See our companion piece on how Poland's three B2B tax modes actually work for the full mechanics and why the winner shifts at lower revenue levels.

Yes, and it's worth checking a live rate before making any real decision. This comparison uses £1 = zł 5.08, the mid-July 2026 rate, but GBP/PLN moves day to day, it ranged from roughly zł 5.00 to zł 5.08 within the first two weeks of July 2026 alone. A meaningfully weaker or stronger pound shifts every PLN figure in this article proportionally, so treat these numbers as a snapshot for relative comparison, not a fixed guarantee, and re-check the live rate close to when you'd actually be negotiating a contract or transferring money.

Quite a lot, and it's worth being honest about it. UK PAYE comes with statutory holiday pay, sick pay, an employer pension contribution, and employment protections that a Polish B2B contractor doesn't automatically get. A Polish sole proprietor has to fund their own gaps between contracts, doesn't get paid leave unless they build it into their rate, and carries the administrative overhead of invoicing, bookkeeping, and choosing (and living with) a tax mode for the year. The net-pay numbers in this article are a fair comparison of cash in hand, they are not a claim that the two arrangements are equivalent in security or benefits.

Yes, and this article's figures don't use it. New Polish sole proprietors can access a preferential reduced ZUS rate for their first 24 months of business (and a ZUS-exempt period for health insurance only in the first 6 months under "ulga na start"), which meaningfully improves net pay versus the standard "duży ZUS" rate used throughout this comparison and the companion three-mode article. If you're relocating to Poland to start B2B contracting for the first time, your real take-home in year one is likely to be somewhat higher than the steady-state figures shown here, worth factoring in when comparing an early-career move.