Foreigners starting businesses in Poland: 36,000 new sole traders in a year, by nationality, region and industry

One in seven sole proprietorships registered in Poland in the last twelve months was founded by a foreign citizen. The Polish business register (CEIDG) records the citizenship of every sole trader, which makes Poland one of the few EU countries where this can be measured from public data rather than estimated. This article uses that data for the twelve months from October 2025 to September 2026: how many businesses foreigners founded, from which countries, in which regions and cities, and in which industries. It covers sole proprietorships only; foreign-owned companies are a different population, recorded in KRS without the founders' citizenship.

36,000 new businesses in a year

Source: CEIDG register via the bazy.biz warehouse, October 2026. Our mirror of the register has lower coverage for the earlier period, so the comparison of absolute numbers between the two years is indicative; the shares are comparable. Founders with dual citizenship including Polish are counted as Polish.

The monthly series has an unusual shape. From October 2025 to January 2026 foreigners founded 2,700 to 3,800 businesses a month. February and March 2026 saw 5,000 and 6,900, the highest months on record, and from April the number fell to 1,500 to 1,800 a month and stayed there. The register does not record the reason for a registration, so we report the pattern without attributing it.

Where the founders come from

Ukrainian citizens founded 28,800 businesses, 80% of the total and 10.7% of all new sole proprietorships in Poland. Belarusians (2,500) are a distant second. After that the list is a mix of EU neighbours and the countries of origin of Poland's IT and services workforce: Romania, Germany, Russia, Bulgaria, Italy, Spain, France and Latvia each account for 200 to 450 founders, with the United States, Portugal, India, Vietnam and the United Kingdom just behind. The Western EU countries in the top fifteen (Germany, Italy, Spain, France and Portugal) together account for 1,300 founders, most of them in consulting, IT and the creative professions in Warsaw and Kraków.

Where they set up

Masovia (10,300 foreign founders, 22.6% of the region's new sole traders) and Lower Silesia (4,800, 21.7%) are the two regions where more than one in five new businesses has a foreign founder. Lesser Poland (3,700), Greater Poland (2,700), Pomerania (2,500) and Silesia (2,300) follow in absolute numbers. The eastern regions, Podlasie, Subcarpathia, Warmia-Masuria and Świętokrzyskie, are below 6%.

By city, Warsaw had 7,600 foreign founders, Wrocław 3,200, Kraków 3,000, Poznań 1,500, Gdańsk 1,200, Łódź 1,000 and Szczecin 860. Wrocław's figure is remarkable for a city a quarter the size of Warsaw: it reflects both its large Ukrainian community and its IT sector.

What they do

Construction is the largest industry by count, but IT is where foreign founders weigh most: 27% of all new IT sole proprietorships in Poland were registered by foreign citizens, almost all of them developers working on B2B contracts. Personal services (23%) and restaurants and catering (22%) are the other two industries where more than one new business in five has a foreign founder.

The industry mix differs by nationality. Ukrainian founders are concentrated in construction (5,400), hairdressing and beauty (3,600), IT (3,500), retail (2,500), transport (1,800) and cleaning (1,100). Belarusian founders are IT first (590 of 2,500), then construction. For Russian, Indian and Turkish citizens IT is also the largest category, with restaurants second for Indian and Turkish founders.

Why this matters for a foreign company

Three practical uses of the data. First, market sizing: a business founded by a Ukrainian or Belarusian citizen is a customer for banking, accounting, insurance, telecom and software products in their own language, and the 36,000 a year are a well defined segment. Second, recruitment and partnerships: the IT sole traders are the contractor pool that Polish and foreign software companies hire from. Third, a reminder about contact rules: these businesses are natural persons, so their data are personal data under GDPR, and the Polish rules on prior consent for marketing e-mail and calls apply to them as to any business; see our guide to B2B outreach in Poland.

A list of businesses founded by citizens of a given country, in a given region and industry, with founding dates and public contact data, is one of the lists we build on request. Describe the segment and we will reply with the count and the price.

Figures are from the CEIDG register as mirrored in the bazy.biz warehouse, October 2026. The register publishes citizenship for a majority of new entries; months are compared on the basis of entries with founder data.