IP Box at 5%: who actually qualifies

One shortcut travels faster than the statute: "a contractor in IT pays 5%". What the law grants is a good deal narrower, and the gap is expensive. Here is the relief, piece by piece.

The rate applies to income from a right, not to your company

The legal basis is art. 30ca i art. 30cb ustawy o PIT. The 5% rate covers income from a qualified intellectual property right — in software work, most often the copyright to a computer program. A right counts as qualified only when you created, developed or improved it as part of your own research and development activity.

Everything else your firm earns stays on its ordinary rate. That is why IP Box is best described as a layer on top of the taxation form you already use, not a cheaper form of its own.

The income itself has to be isolated as well. From the revenue on selling the right, licensing it, or from the part of a service price in which the right is embedded, you subtract the costs attributable to it, then adjust the result by the nexus ratio — the proportion of your own R&D work against work bought in from outside.

Two conditions with no way around them

• Research and development activity — creative, undertaken systematically, and either increasing the stock of knowledge or putting it to new use. Writing code to a client's order settles nothing by itself; what counts is the nature of the work, not the job title on the invoice.
• A separate register of qualified rights — required outright by art. 30ca i art. 30cb ustawy o PIT. It is kept as you go, isolating each right with its revenue, costs and income. A spreadsheet assembled after the fact, once an audit is underway, tends to get challenged — and the whole relief falls with it, even where the work genuinely was R&D.

The boundary is thinner than it looks, and only an individual tax ruling makes it certain. An accountant or a tax adviser belongs at the start of this, not at the end.

Ryczałt rules IP Box out

This is the misunderstanding that shows up most often on B2B contracts. Ryczałt (the flat-rate tax) is charged on revenue and never establishes income, while the 5% relief is computed from income. There is nothing to feed into it, and no register fixes that. If you settle at 12% or 8.5% — those rates are covered in the piece on ryczałt rates — IP Box stays out of reach until you change your taxation form. In practice the relief most often sits on top of podatek liniowy (the flat 19% income tax), but the tax scale (12%/32%) allows it too — ryczałt is the one form that rules it out. Changing form also changes how your health contribution is calculated and what you file at year end.

The calendar works differently than people expect

The preferential rate is not applied during the year: your monthly advances are paid at the ordinary rate of whichever taxation form you are on. Income from the qualified right is reported separately only in the annual return for 2026, and that is where the 5% rate applies. The overpayment comes back after the return is filed — so you lend the state the difference all year and see the benefit months later. For a sense of scale, the B2B calculator puts an IP Box column next to the other three paths.

The UD116 bill — status as at August 11, 2026

A bill numbered UD116 is in the legislative pipeline; it would narrow access to IP Box for sole traders. As at August 11, 2026 it had not been passed; the announced date of entry into force is January 1, 2027. Until that changes the current rules stand — but if you plan beyond a year, keep in mind that this relief is being reworked.

What Biurko does not do here

Plainly: there is no register of qualified rights in the app, and Biurko does not keep one. The IP Box column in the calculator is a comparison worked out from a share of income you set — not a product feature, and not a promise the app will settle it. Biurko does not file the annual return either: in the app you keep the revenue ledger, you get the ryczałt tax advance worked out from it — computed on revenue alone, with no ZUS contributions deducted — and you send the annual JPK_EWP file yourself. An IP Box register lives outside the app, ideally with someone who takes responsibility for it.