If you want to receive family benefits

Family benefits in Poland are funded by the state budget and the eligibility depends on the concerned family’s actual living and financial situation. Different from pension, for instance, it does not matter, however, whether the eligible person has been employed and insured.

The family benefits include the following:

• a family allowance for the parents or a guardian ad litem of a child; an allowance for an adult, who studies and brings up a child alone, an allowance for studying or handicapped children,

additions:

• an one-off addition in the event of childbirth, an addition for child-care during parental leave, an addition for  bringing up a child alone and lost eligibility for the unemployed allowance,
• carer’s benefits,
• carer’s allowance.

These are your rights:

1. The family benefits may be forwarded to any Member State, where you live. The institution responsible for the family benefit award in the country of your employment shall take into account all periods of employment, insurance, and self-employment, that you have earned in other Member States – if you have worked in more than one of them. According to the Polish regulations, the family benefit award shall not depend on insurance periods, therefore the principle of period aggregation shall not directly apply in Poland. This means that Poland shall not add the periods of your employment or insurance abroad, whereas the member State, where you claim the benefit, shall take in consideration – if necessary – the periods of your employment in Poland if your social insurance contributions were then paid.

2. If you are employed under contract of employment in a foreign country, or you are self-employed there – the family benefit eligibility criteria in effect in the foreign country shall apply to awarding the benefit to you. It does not matter, whether you family have stayed in you home country, or they live together with you.

3. Each Member State awards the family benefits in different amount. Therefore if you are entitled to receive the benefit from two countries – one shall pay you the entire amount, while the other shall compensate the difference between the higher and the lower benefit amounts in order to enable your receiving the benefit always in the highest amount provided for in the legislation of the country.

4. If you are employed in a Member State, while your wife and children live in another country – if your wife takes a job there – the payment priority falls with the state of your family members’ residence.

5. You are unemployed. If you receive the unemployment benefit from a Member State, and your wife and your children live in another state and do not work – you shall have the right to receive the family benefits from the same state that already pays the unemployment benefit to you.

6. Where the same family members at the same time are entitled to receive the family benefits from two Member States, but they live in neither state – the family benefits shall be awarded and paid by the state, where the higher benefit amount is provided for. In such case the competent institution of the second Member State shall return half of the amount paid by the first state, not more however than the benefit amount awarded by that state. If Poland were the country, where the benefit amount was higher, then the relevantlocal government body - commune (gmina) or the Regional Centres of Social Policy (Regionalne Ośrodki Polityki Społecznej - ROPS) should pay the entire amount of the benefit due and claim reimbursement with half of the benefit amount from the foreign competent institution.

The following forms shall be used in dealings relating to the family benefits:
Forms E400 type are being phased out now, they are replaced by documents SED type F (F001, F002, F026)