Polish version here: Od 2027 r. 22% CIT dla spółek objętych Pillar 2
Who will be subject to the increased 22% CIT rate?
The draft amendment to the CIT Act of 21 August 2026 (UD458) provides for an increase in the standard CIT rate from 19% to 22% with effect from 1 January 2027. The new, higher rate is to cover three categories of taxpayers:
- tax capital groups (PGK),
- taxpayers whose revenue in the preceding year exceeded the equivalent of EUR 50 million,
- taxpayers that are constituent entities of groups subject to the Pillar 2 regime.
Will the increased CIT rate cover every company within a group subject to Pillar II?
The proposed Article 19(1g) of the CIT Act is to apply the 22% rate also to taxpayers that are constituent entities of domestic or international (MNE) groups in a tax year in which the Act on Top-up Taxation applies to them.
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In practice, this means that 22% CIT may also affect a Polish company whose own revenue is significantly below EUR 50 million – what may prove decisive is that the group as a whole falls within the Pillar 2 rules, the scope threshold for which is based in principle on consolidated group revenue of EUR 750 million.
A separate question arises for domestic groups for which no domestic top-up tax is computed for the first five tax years – that relief, however, concerns the calculation of the tax itself and does not alter the fact that the provisions of the Act on Top-up Taxation do apply to such groups as a matter of principle. That would mean that, from 2027, CIT taxpayers belonging to the largest Polish groups may be subject to 22% CIT while paying no top-up tax at all.
As the explanatory memorandum to the draft indicates, extending the rate to constituent entities of Pillar 2 groups is an anti-abuse measure – it is intended to prevent situations in which business activity is dispersed among several entities within the same group so that none of them individually exceeds the EUR 50 million revenue threshold.
We would also draw attention to the practical doubts surrounding the proposed link between the 22% rate and the scope of application of the Pillar 2 rules. While the change itself is to apply from 1 January 2027, in many cases it will be possible to establish whether a given entity is subject to the Pillar 2 rules in Poland for a particular tax year only once the previous year has been closed and the group’s consolidated revenue confirmed.
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As a result, taxpayers may begin the year without certainty as to which CIT rate they should apply when calculating advance payments, which may give rise to the risk of tax arrears.
This appears particularly significant given the very design of the Pillar 2 rules, which provide for correspondingly longer reporting deadlines of 15 and 18 months precisely because liability has to be determined after the end of the relevant tax year.
In our view, this will therefore require clarification in the further course of the legislative process.
Extending the 22% CIT rate to constituent entities of Pillar 2 groups is a change that may affect a far wider range of taxpayers than the EUR 50 million revenue threshold alone would suggest – membership of a sufficiently large group is enough. The issue may well escape the attention of some taxpayers. Companies that have never analysed their Pillar 2 exposure from a CIT perspective should therefore do so as soon as possible – before the problem surfaces when settling advance payments for 2027.
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