Freestanding or attached to the land? The Ministry of Finance explains how to calculate tax on parcel lockers.

• Polish law does not specify how parcel lockers should be taxed, which is a large-scale systemic problem.
• Deputy Minister of Finance Jarosław Neneman explains that parcel lockers are technical devices and municipalities should have no doubts about their taxation.
• The amendment to the Act on Local Taxes and Fees, effective from 1 January 2025, was intended to increase transparency, but it does not explicitly mention parcel lockers.

Polish law does not directly specify the form of taxation for parcel lockers. MP Lidia Czechak pointed out in a parliamentary question that this is a systemic problem of enormous scale.

Parcel vending machines are not explicitly mentioned in the new, closed list of taxable structures. This is not a minor issue – according to market data , as of the end of the third quarter of 2024, over 51,400 such machines were already operating in Poland , and their number has increased by over 15,600 in just one year. This means that a significant and dynamically growing portion of the country's economic infrastructure has found itself in a legal limbo in the context of property tax.

- indicates the parliamentarian.

According to Czechak, this loophole poses a direct risk of interpretational chaos on an unprecedented scale . We read further that municipalities may struggle to independently classify parcel lockers. Should a parcel locker be taxed as a "container object permanently attached to the land" or a "freestanding technical device"?

However, this approach is fraught with a fundamental legal flaw: it relies on an analogy to categories whose tax status has been the subject of numerous court disputes and inconsistent case law for years. Consequently, instead of legal certainty, the amendment in this area could lead to a proliferation of disputes , which is in direct contradiction to its original purpose.

- argues the MP.

Deputy Finance Minister Jarosław Neneman responded by pointing out that a parcel locker is generally considered a technical device . Depending on the circumstances, it may be a free-standing structure or attached to a building wall. Therefore, municipalities should have no doubts about which form of taxation to adopt.

The amended Local Taxes and Fees Act came into effect on January 1, 2025. As the Ministry of Finance emphasizes, its goal was to increase the transparency and precision of regulations regarding what constitutes a structure or building in the context of property tax.

It introduces an independent definition of a structure, without referring to regulations outside tax law, and also provides a detailed list of objects considered to be structures.