Poland

A big Polish city is a gmina and a county at once. Since January 2025 its share of taxes is worked out from its residents’ income, 8.6% of it, and 2.2% of firms’ income, not from the tax left after reliefs. The government expected the change to bring local government almost PLN 25bn more in its first year. The list below shows what that money can and cannot buy.

• Broadband: private operators build and the regulator UKE regulates and auctions spectrum. A city cannot order fibre or 5G; the fast 5G band was auctioned only in 2023, after a first auction was voided in 2020.
• Public transport: gminas organise their own buses and trams. From January 2026 a city of more than 100,000 may buy only zero-emission buses for its routes.
• Clean-transport zones: a city may create one, and one of more than 100,000 people must when the State’s air assessment shows a breach of the annual nitrogen dioxide limit. The government’s voivode reviews every city resolution and can take it to court.
• Policing and cameras: city guards run city cameras, but the data-protection authority said in 2025 that a gmina has no legal basis to give the police a live feed.
• Heat and energy: planning heat, power and gas supply is a gmina’s own task by law, and many own their heat companies, though Warsaw sold 85% of its own in 2011.
• Coal stoves: only the voivodeship assembly can ban them; gminas enforce the ban and run the paperwork for the State’s Clean Air grants.
• Planning: every gmina needs a new general plan. By the deadline of 31 August 2026, 877 had adopted one, 35%; the rest can no longer approve new local plans.
• Open data and online services: the State runs the national data portal, which helped put Poland third in Europe on open-data maturity in 2025, the mObywatel app and electronic registered mail, which town halls have had to use since January 2025. Cities plug in rather than build.
• Cybersecurity: the national cybersecurity law now covers local government, and when the State offered every local government a grant of up to PLN 850,000, 2,517 of the 2,807 eligible applied.
• Skills: the State plans more than 2,000 digital-skills clubs in town halls and adult-education centres, paid for with EU funds.

Polish cities are strong where the law gives them the asset and the duty together: heat, urban transport and, as below, participatory budgets. They are weak where the State keeps the platform. A city cannot shape the citizen’s digital front door, ban a coal stove, give the police a live feed from its cameras or order fibre. Two features shape what Polish cities can do: a government-appointed voivode in every region who can annul a city’s decision or take it to court, and a president whose vetoes can stop the national laws cities ask for.

The State works through its agencies: COI builds mObywatel, NASK handles cybersecurity, and the national environment fund runs Clean Air. NIK, the Supreme Audit Office, is the most useful source on what any of it achieved. The cities speak through the Association of Polish Cities, with 389 members, and civil society through groups such as the Panoptykon Foundation, which watches surveillance, and Polish Smog Alarm.

Donald Tusk leads a coalition of his Civic Coalition (KO), the agrarian PSL, the Left, Polska 2050 and Centrum, a group that split from Polska 2050 in February 2026 but still backs the government, with a narrow majority in the Sejm, the lower house. President Karol Nawrocki, aligned with the right-wing opposition, issued 41 vetoes in his first year, a record, and the coalition lacks the three-fifths needed to override them. The next parliamentary election is due in autumn 2027.

Digital affairs sit with Krzysztof Gawkowski of the Left, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Affairs; cities and regional policy with Katarzyna Pełczyńska-Nałęcz at the ministry of funds and regional policy. Her ministry is drafting a law on the balanced development of cities and their surrounding areas, which it has offered Kraków instead of a metropolitan law of its own.

In June 2026 the government adopted a Digital State Strategy to 2035. It promises every key public service fully online and every household within reach of fibre and 5G by 2030, and 85% of adults with basic digital skills by 2035. Gawkowski puts the cost at PLN 100bn. We found no published count of how many key services are fully online today.

The cohabitation reaches into the digital state. In January 2026 Nawrocki vetoed the law that would have let the telecoms and broadcasting regulators order illegal content removed, and Gawkowski said the veto “weakens citizens’ rights”. The government then split the law in two. In September Nawrocki signed the first, which makes the head of UKE Poland’s coordinator under the EU’s Digital Services Act. The second, on removing illegal content, is still before the Sejm.

EU money arrived late and then fast. Poland’s recovery plan of €54.7bn was frozen over judicial independence until the Commission accepted the reforms in February 2024. The fourth payment, approved in April 2026, took Poland’s total to €34.15bn, 62.4% of the plan. With the fifth, €7.9bn paid on 1 October, Poland has received 77%. Digital aims take 21.3% of the plan.

Five Polish cities, Kraków, Łódź, Rzeszów, Warsaw and Wrocław, are in the EU mission for climate-neutral and smart cities. All five received the mission label in May 2025, and they run one joint pilot, NEEST, led by Kraków, to produce a guidebook for other towns.

The State is also building its own capacity. Two EU-backed AI factories, PIAST in Poznań and Gaia in Kraków, are each half paid for by Poland. The digital strategy calls for more open-source software in administration, including for local government, but we found no programme with money for it yet.

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Surveillance is the State’s scandal, not the cities’. In 2024 the prosecutor general reported that three services had used Pegasus spyware against 578 people between 2017 and 2022, under the previous Law and Justice government. In July 2026 the Sejm passed a law strengthening judges’ control of secret surveillance, and the President signed it in September. Wojciech Klicki of the Panoptykon Foundation said it had been written by the coordinator of the special services, and that people surveilled are still told only if they are charged.

Sopot ran Poland’s first civic budget in 2011, an idea first tried in Porto Alegre. Four more cities followed in 2012 and more than 70 gminas by 2013, by choice. A law of January 2018, passed to increase citizens’ participation, then made civic budgets a duty in every city with county powers, at least 0.5% of spending, and barred councils from removing or materially changing the projects residents chose.

Jaworzno ran Poland’s first electric bus in public service in 2015; in May 2025 its 49 e-buses were 68% of its fleet. Since January 2026 every city of more than 100,000 may buy only zero-emission buses for its routes, and Poland had 1,633 zero-emission buses by August 2025.

Clean-transport zones began in the law, not in a city. The 2018 electromobility act let councils create them; Warsaw used it in July 2024, and average nitrogen dioxide at stations inside its zone fell 18% between 2023 and 2025, against 5% outside, which experts call a promising signal rather than proof. A 2024 amendment then made a zone compulsory in cities of more than 100,000 people where the annual limit is breached. Szczecin opened a small zone in April 2026, and Katowice one in June because the law required it, over about half a square kilometre of its centre.

Kraków’s zone, compulsory because the city’s air breached the limit, took effect in January 2026. The government’s voivode had challenged it as unequal. In January a court upheld the exemption for residents but annulled the rule defining them by registered address, and the voivode has asked the Supreme Administrative Court to annul the zone entirely. Protests over the zone fed a referendum that recalled the mayor in May 2026. In October an independent, Łukasz Gibała, won the run-off with 62.1% of the vote, having promised a referendum on the zone.

Kraków’s air shows what a regional rule backed by city money can do. Since September 2019 no fuel other than gas, LPG, biogas or light heating oil may be burned to heat homes in the city, under a ban adopted by the Małopolska assembly; between 1995 and 2022 the city removed over 45,000 solid-fuel heaters with subsidies. In 2023 every monitoring station met the PM10 standard, though benzo(a)pyrene stayed above it. Other regions copied the instrument, but NIK found stoves being replaced too slowly in all five regions it audited, Małopolska included.

Metropolitan co-operation needed a law for each region. The Upper Silesian metropolis, GZM, was created by law in 2017 for 41 gminas; its bike share, Metrorower, has 7,069 bikes and over 2 million rentals in two years. A second metropolitan law, for Gdańsk, Gdynia, Sopot and the gminas around them, came only in June 2026, nine years later, and the union is not yet running.

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Pomerania shows the regional tier building the platform itself. FALA, the voivodeship’s journey-planning and ticketing system, run by its company InnoBaltica, is the only place Gdańsk and Gdynia season tickets are sold. Its app is rated 1.1 on Google Play, and in November 2025 the competition authority, UOKiK, opened an inquiry into the exclusion of commercial apps such as JakDojade.

After the 2016 flood Gdańsk ran Poland’s first citizens’ panel, 63 residents drawn by lot whose recommendations the mayor agreed to follow if 80% backed them. Warsaw, Wrocław and Poznań held panels later, by choice; no law requires one. Wrocław’s electric car share, Vozilla, commissioned by the city and run by the firm Enigma, closed in April 2020; the city said it was not self-sustaining, partly because energy prices rose.

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In the IMD Smart City Index, a survey of how residents see their city, Warsaw ranks 31st of 148 and Kraków 70th. Their residents are the most positive of 19 cities in Germany, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium and Poland on 11 of IMD’s 43 statements, including that an online platform for residents’ ideas has improved city life. They also say that processing ID documents online has cut waiting times, although, as above, few Poles request official documents online. Warsaw residents rate their medical services lowest of the 19.

Sopot’s civic budget spread by imitation first, to more than 70 gminas within two years, and the 2018 law then made it a duty in every big city and stopped councils overriding residents’ choices. Clean-transport zones went the other way: the law offered them, Warsaw took the offer, and a later amendment made them compulsory in big cities where the air fails, which in Kraków helped cost a mayor his job. Nine in ten local governments applied when the State offered each a cybersecurity grant. Kraków’s coal ban travelled as an instrument but not as a result. The citizens’ panel spread by persuasion alone, and Wrocław’s car share ended when it did not pay.