Ryczałt 12% or 8.5%? Classification decides, not your job title

No question comes up more often on a B2B contract, and almost none is phrased worse. People ask which rate to pick; the statute offers no choice. The rate follows from how the services you actually perform are classified.

How the provision is built

The flat-rate income tax act (ustawa o ryczałcie) attaches rates to categories of services described by PKWiU codes — Poland's statistical classification of products and services. The categories cover activities, not professions or job titles.

• 12% (art. 12 ust. 1 pkt 2b lit. b ustawy o ryczałcie) — this point names software-related services outright, the ones carrying PKWiU code 62.01.1. With the wording in the statute, building software leaves little room for argument.
• 8.5% (art. 12 ust. 1 pkt 5 lit. a ustawy o ryczałcie) — the residual category. It catches whatever the legislator did not assign in the other points of the catalogue, so you reach it by elimination.

Order is not the rule — the reservation written into the provision is: the services rate yields to earlier points and to the later ones it names, and only what none of them covers is settled at it.

Why the dispute is about classification

"Developer" names a profession, not a position in the classification, which is why it settles nothing. The same person writes code in one period, runs a workshop in another, and watches a budget in a third; each is classified on its own, by what it actually consists of. "I work in IT" leads to no rate at all.

Work on the border

Some scopes resist a clean answer. These come up again and again, and none has one answer for everyone:

• Support and maintenance — patching code and handling user tickets are different activities, whatever the contract calls them.
• Testing — writing automated tests is one thing; manually verifying a finished product is another.
• Training — running sessions is often classified separately from producing software, even for the same technology.
• Consulting — analyzing requirements and recommending a solution is not implementing it.
• Project or team leadership — organizational work is assessed differently from engineering work.

The label on an invoice line settles nothing — the substance does, and that is what a tax authority reads.

How much certainty an individual ruling gives

The strongest safeguard is an individual tax ruling from the Director of the National Revenue Information (Dyrektor Krajowej Informacji Skarbowej) — with one caveat: you state the PKWiU code yourself, as an element of the facts, and the authority does not examine it. The ruling protects the tax consequence attached to the code you stated; the code itself is confirmed by a classification opinion from the statistical office. And it protects only where those facts match what you genuinely do — so describe activities, not a role.

Before filing, walk the scope of work through with an accountant or a tax adviser — no calculator substitutes for that conversation. The article on running a sole trader firm on a contract covers the formal groundwork.

How the rate lives in the app

You record the settled rate in the company settings with the date it takes effect. All nine statutory rates are available; the app does not narrow you to the two popular ones or suggest which is right.

A change takes force from the month you name as its start, and that date must be the first day of a month. Earlier months keep the rate in force then; a date named backwards re-settles them, so choose it deliberately. Sales invoices build the revenue ledger and the tax advance is worked out from it — a loop described on the page about accounting on a B2B contract.

One limitation upfront: revenue of the current period is settled at a single rate, the one in force for that period. If part of your services classifies differently, the app will not split revenue across two rates; that part you keep outside it. A second rate shows up in a month only when a korekta of an earlier period lands in it, settled at the rate of the period it restates.

The annual ryczałt limit

Ryczałt has a revenue ceiling: 8,517,200 zł a year. The limit looks back at the previous year, so crossing it does not strip the flat rate away mid-year — it closes the option for the following one, when you pick another form: the tax scale or podatek liniowy, within the statutory deadline. Closing in on the ceiling is a conversation to have with an accountant before December rather than after.

What the app does not deduct from the base

The statute lets you reduce revenue by the social security contributions paid and by 50% of the health contribution paid. Biurko does not apply that deduction — there is no contributions module, so the figure shown is higher than the final one. Treat it as a starting point to check, not a ready payment amount.

The article on the health contribution under ryczałt covers how it is calculated; the effect of both deductions on take-home pay is shown by the B2B calculator, which does subtract contributions from revenue.