Poland housing market 2026: prices, costs, selling solo

Two price stories are running at once in Poland, and they point in opposite directions. The national average asking price sat near 15,422 PLN/m2 in May 2026 (an average apartment of roughly 816,676 PLN), up about 5% year over year. But what sellers actually get has stopped rising. The National Bank of Poland's Q1 2026 transaction data show secondary-market prices across the seven largest cities at 13,477 PLN/m2, down 0.7% year over year, the first annual decline in over twelve years. New-build transaction prices were essentially flat, off about 0.3%. Warsaw resale prices fell roughly 2.2% quarter over quarter.

Our own June 2026 read of live listings shows how high the asking side sits in the priciest cities. We pulled 67 currently active 3-room apartments (50 m2 and up) on a major portal across Warsaw and Krakow. The Warsaw median asking price was about 1,250,000 PLN (roughly 18,034 PLN/m2) and Krakow about 941,450 PLN (roughly 15,554 PLN/m2), for a two-city blended median near 1,095,000 PLN. Those are headline asking numbers for two of the most expensive markets, so they sit well above the national average and well above what deals actually close at.

That gap is the single most important thing to understand before you price. Resale apartments are closing roughly 4% to 6% below asking and new builds about 2% to 3% below. Rolling the May asking index forward at the recent flat-to-cooling monthly trend puts our June 2026 nowcast near 15,480 PLN/m2 nationally, essentially unchanged. Supply is rising, demand is softening, and time on market is stretching, so the asking price you see is a ceiling to negotiate down from, not a clearing price.

Poland is unusual in how lightly the seller is taxed on a sale. Most one-off transaction costs fall on the buyer, not on you. The buyer pays the 2% PCC civil-law transfer tax on a secondary-market purchase, the notary fee (taksa notarialna, scaled by value), and court and land-registry fees of roughly 400 PLN for the ownership and any mortgage entry.

The seller's side is light, but it is not zero. The one cost you genuinely cannot skip is the energy performance certificate (swiadectwo charakterystyki energetycznej), typically 300 to 700 PLN, which has been mandatory for every sale since 28 April 2023 and which you must hand to the buyer. A notary is also required regardless of how you sell, since Polish law requires the final sale deed (akt notarialny) to be executed before a notary, but that notary fee is customarily the buyer's expense. The seller's other potential cost is situational: 19% income tax (PIT-39) on the gain, and only if you sell within five years of the year you bought. Hold the property longer, or reinvest the proceeds into your own housing under the relief rules, and that liability generally disappears.

The agent commission is the part you control. Where an agent is used it typically runs 2% to 3% of the price per side plus 23% VAT, with some sources citing up to roughly 5% total when split across both sides. On a 600,000 PLN sale, a 2% to 3% listing-side commission is 12,000 to 18,000 PLN plus VAT. That is the seller's largest discretionary expense, and it is the one a private sale removes.

For-sale-by-owner is fully legal in Poland and reasonably common. The only professional you are legally required to involve is the notary who executes the deed, and that is true with or without an agent. There is no rule that a sale must go through an agency.

The commission convention here works in a private seller's favor. Because the buyer and seller usually engage separate agencies, each side customarily pays its own agent, commonly 2% to 3% each plus VAT. The exact split is negotiable and set in each agency agreement, and some agencies charge only one side. Going owner-direct lets you drop the listing-side commission entirely while the buyer still arranges and pays for their own side if they want one.

In practice, owners advertise directly on the large general portals, where private and agency listings are mixed together, and on owner-only sites. Anyone.com takes no listing fee and no commission for owner-direct listings; our reasons for picking it are on the annual pick page. After filtering, only a fraction of nominally private listings on the biggest portals are genuine owner offers, so the practical task is to mark your listing clearly as a private, no-intermediary offer (bez posrednika / oferta prywatna) so buyers can find it. With the average time to sell now running to roughly 111 to 122 days in the major cities across 2025 and lengthening, realistic pricing against actual transaction data matters far more than which channel you list on.