Keep our news free from ads and paywalls by making a donation to support our work!

Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Polish citizenship was granted to a record 19,135 people in 2025, up by 17% from the previous year and almost five times year than a decade ago. Over half of recipients, 10,295, were Ukrainians, who make up Poland’s largest immigrant group.

The number of foreigners gaining Polish citizenship has risen steadily in recent years amid record levels of immigration. However, the government is currently working on legislation that would make it more difficult to obtain citizenship.

The new data, which come from the interior ministry, do not include people claiming citizenship through Polish descent. Under Polish law, such individuals are not granted citizenship, but simply have it confirmed. However, other foreigners can still obtain it in two main ways.

The most common route is for candidates to apply to the governor of the province where they reside. They must demonstrate stable income, housing and Polish language skills, while meeting the requirement for minimum length of residency.

For most applicants, that period is three years of permanent, continuous residence. However, it is shorter in certain cases, for example for spouses of Polish citizens, or for holders of the so-called Pole’s Card (Karta Polaka), which is mainly granted to ethnic Poles from former Soviet states.

The second option is to apply directly to the president for citizenship. This route does not have a requirement for a certain period of residency; decisions are simply at the discretion of the president. But applicants must present their personal histories and reasons for seeking citizenship, alongside proof of ties to the country.

After Ukrainians, the largest national groups granted Polish citizenship last year were Belarusians (6,519), Russians (763), Vietnamese (497) and Turks (116).

Last year, the interior ministry presented plans to toughen the rules for obtaining Polish citizenship. They would increase the minimum residency period for most people from three to eight years and require applicants to take a test proving they are integrated and sign a declaration of loyalty.

The government also wants all of the new measures to apply not only to people who go through the normal application route, but also to those who take the option of applying directly to the president, who currently has discretion to issue citizenship without the usual criteria.

However, the plans have not been put to parliament, with the ministry announcing last week that it was still “working on the changes”.

“Citizenship will be treated as an earned privilege, not a formal certificate,” said the ministry, which pledged to put an end to “automatism” in granting citizenship and to avoid the “mistakes of other countries”.

 

In response to the new citizenship figures for 2025, Krzysztof Bosak, one of the leaders of the far-right opposition Confederation (Konfederacja) group, called them “another inglorious record” that reveal a “dangerous situation”.

“Poland has extremely liberal criteria for granting citizenship…probably everyone from right to left agrees that tightening them is necessary,” he wrote on X, also accusing Prime Minister Donald Tusk of “torpedoing” various proposed reforms.

Poland’s main opposition party, the national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS), in October proposed its own bill that would, among other things, have raised the residency requirement to ten years and impose even stricter linguistic demands. However, the proposal was rejected by parliament in January.

Opposition-aligned President Karol Nawrocki last September also proposed his own bill to toughen citizenship requirements, including by increasing residency requirements to ten years.

W ubiegłym roku ponad 19 tysięcy imigrantów otrzymało polskie obywatelstwo. To kolejny z rzędu niechlubny rekord, i można się spodziewać, że w tym roku ta liczba będzie jeszcze wyższa.

Polska ma niesłychanie liberalne kryteria nadawania obywatelstwa i na poziomie deklaracji… pic.twitter.com/hqGQbhSbWl

— Krzysztof Bosak 🇵🇱 (@krzysztofbosak) May 14, 2026

Poland has over the last decade experienced levels of immigration unprecedented in the country’s history and among the highest in the EU.

For six years running, between 2017 and 2022, when PiS was in power, it issued more first residence permits to immigrants from outside the European Union than did any other member state. Tusk’s government has sought to introduce tougher migration controls, resulting in falling numbers of new arrivals.

Last month, government figures showed that the number of foreigners with residence permits in Poland has reached two million, making up just over 5% of the country’s population.

Over three quarters of those are Ukrainians (1.55 million), with the next largest groups being Belarusians (139,300), Indians (26,100), Georgians (22,200), Russians (19,500), Vietnamese (15,100) and Turks (14,500).

The number of foreigners with residence permits in Poland has reached two million, making up just over 5% of the country’s population, new government data show.

The largest national group by far are Ukrainians, followed by Belarusians and Indians https://t.co/SI09WtR7hR

— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) April 26, 2026

Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Main image credit: Jakub Zerdzicki/Pexels

Olivier Sorgho is senior editor at Notes from Poland, covering politics, business and society. He previously worked for Reuters.