Doctor-councillors: annual income public by law.

A doctor who becomes a member of a municipal, county or regional council files an asset declaration every year. In it the doctor enters income from each source separately: from the practice, from employment in a hospital, from contracts, from a company. The public part of the declaration is published in the Public Information Bulletin (BIP).¹ For a councillor, then, one can see at once what nobody adds up for other doctors — income from many workplaces in a single year.

The X user Tomo (@tomo9000p) collected 183 such declarations. We compared each amount with the declaration in BIP. Much of the dataset turned out to be wrong, so the figures below come from the corrected rows, separately for 2025 and 2024.² We do not give names: we are interested in the mechanism, not in people.

Why a councillor’s income is public

The obligation comes from three local government acts: on municipal self-government (Articles 24h and 24i), on county self-government (Articles 25c and 25d) and on regional self-government (Articles 27c and 27d). A councillor files a declaration every year by 30 April, as of the end of the previous year. The information in it is public, except for the address and the location of real estate.¹ Income in a declaration filed in 2026 therefore concerns 2025 — and that is how we count the year in the dataset.

The same provisions cover, among others, heads of local government units, including directors of local government hospitals. We describe their declarations in our analysis How much hospital directors earn. A doctor who is neither a councillor nor a director does not file a declaration. No public source adds up such a doctor’s income from several facilities — we describe this mechanism in Lack of transparency.

What the declarations show

For 2025 the dataset has 135 rows, and we confirmed the amount of income from work in 113 of them. The median is PLN 632,598 (≈ €144,000). The number of people with income of PLN 500,000 or more: 74; of a million or more: 14. The highest income is PLN 2,149,835 (≈ €488,000).² Rzeczpospolita gave the same highest amount for 2025 in its own analysis of councillors’ declarations.³

For 2024 the dataset is smaller: of 44 rows we confirmed the amount in 39. The median is PLN 586,943 (≈ €133,000), and the number of people with income of a million or more: 7.² We do not combine the years, because these are incomes from different periods, and some people are in the dataset for only one of them.

Income from work: median PLN 632.6 thousand for 2025 and PLN 586.9 thousand for 2024

	For 2025	For 2024
Rows in the statistics	113 of 135 (including 17 with a single “revenue and income” amount)	39 of 44 (including 6 with a single “revenue and income” amount)
Median	PLN 632.6 thousand	PLN 586.9 thousand
PLN 500,000 and more	74 of 113	22 of 39
PLN 1 million and more	14 of 113	7 of 39
Highest	PLN 2,149,835	PLN 2,027,109

Most confirmed incomes for 2025 are between PLN 250,000 and a million. Above a million the distribution thins out quickly: the highest amount, PLN 2.15 million (≈ €488,000), is the only one above one and a half million.²

For 2025, 14 of 113 doctor-councillors declared at least a million zloty of income from work

1. under PLN 250,00011
2. PLN 250,000–500,00028
3. PLN 500,000–750,00035
4. PLN 750,000 – 1 million25
5. PLN 1–1.5 million13
6. PLN 1.5 million and more1

The practice is not everything

The original dataset had a single “income” column, described as income from medical activity. In 58 rows, however, it was the sum of several sources: the practice, employment in a hospital, a company and contracts.² We separated them. Income from the practice alone — from a sole proprietorship, a medical office or a doctors’ partnership — looks different from total income from work.

The practice alone: median PLN 499.7 thousand for 2025

	For 2025	For 2024
Rows in the statistics	104 of 135 (including 17 with a single “revenue and income” amount)	37 of 44 (including 6 with a single “revenue and income” amount)
Median	PLN 499.7 thousand	PLN 420.4 thousand
PLN 500,000 and more	52 of 104	14 of 37
PLN 1 million and more	12 of 104	4 of 37
Highest	PLN 2,149,835	PLN 2,027,109

In 21 of the 142 confirmed rows in which we know both amounts, the practice is less than half of income from work. The rest comes from employment or contracts in hospitals. Another 11 councillors do not run a practice at all: their income is employment, contracts or a dividend from their own medical company.² The same doctor is thus often both an entrepreneur and an employee of several facilities. What follows from this for transparency we describe in Contract or employment.

Revenue is not income

Revenue is what the practice takes in before costs are deducted: staff pay, rent, equipment. It can be many times higher than income. In the dataset the highest revenue from a practice, PLN 7.31 million (≈ €1.66 million), yielded PLN 779,002 (≈ €177,000) of income.² That is why we calculate the statistics on income only.

In 20 declarations only revenue is given for the practice — usually for doctors taxed at a flat rate on revenue (ryczałt), who do not calculate income. The original dataset then entered revenue as income. We leave income blank, and these rows are not included in the statistics. In another 24 declarations the practice has a single amount in the “revenue and income” box. We count it as income, but in the tables we state how many rows this applies to.²

What the declarations do not show

The form is filled in by hand, and everyone fills it in differently. The same amount goes once into the box on business activity, once into “other income”. Some declarations are internally contradictory or give a year in the text different from the filing date.² Comparing declarations therefore requires reading each one separately.

Why this is not a picture of a typical doctor

The dataset is selective. Councillors are doctors who stood for election and won, most of them with their own practice. The dataset was compiled by one person, and we do not know what share of all doctor-councillors it includes. Nor does it cover doctors who work only as employees and hold no office in local government.

The result depends on whom the dataset covers. The Co w Zdrowiu website analysed a different dataset — 160 declarations of doctor-councillors — and obtained a median of about PLN 285,000 (≈ €64,700) and a highest income of PLN 4.9 million (≈ €1.11 million).⁴ Neither of these medians says how much the average doctor in Poland earns. They only show how wide the spread of incomes is among people whose income happens to be visible.

We collect individual top settlements of doctors from other sources — pay lists, audits, hospitals’ answers — in Record payments to doctors. We do not repeat people from this dataset there.

How we checked the dataset

The declarations were collected by Tomo (@tomo9000p); we checked each amount in the declaration.² We opened the declaration at the link in each row, and where the link led to a list, we found the councillor’s file in BIP. Most files are scans of handwritten forms, so we read the amounts from the image of the page. We counted the year from the filing date: a declaration from April 2026 concerns 2025. We did not find three declarations — the dataset had no working link to them.

Data collection

Tomo

@tomo9000p

Collected the asset declarations of doctor-councillors on which this analysis is based. Thank you!

@tomo9000p on X

127 of 182 rows matched the declaration, we corrected 46

Status	Rows	What it means
Matches the declaration	127	the dataset’s amount and year are in the declaration; in 43 of these rows the amount was a sum of several sources of income, which we split into the practice and total income
Corrected	46	the dataset had a different amount, a different year, revenue instead of income, or a loss added instead of subtracted — we entered the values from the declaration
Uncertain	6	the declaration does not settle it: contradictory amounts, an amount without description, a year in the text different from the filing date, or the profession not confirmed
No declaration	3	the dataset has no working link, and we did not find the declaration

The errors were not random. A few types recurred, and one row could have several. Apart from merely calling a sum of sources “income from the practice”, 47 rows had an error, i.e. one in four.²

The most common error: a sum of several sources or revenue instead of income

What was wrong	Rows
A sum of several sources (practice, employment, company, contracts) given as income from the practice	58
Revenue entered as income — the declaration gives revenue only	20
A different amount: a typo, a missing digit, a corrected declaration	12
Wrong year — a declaration for a different year than in the dataset	9
No year in the dataset	5
Amount rounded to thousands	3
A loss added instead of subtracted, or omitted	2

We excluded two rows from the compilation. One concerned the wife of a councillor rather than a councillor herself — the dataset’s author had already excluded it. The other concerned a person against whom criminal proceedings are pending: we exclude rows of people with pending proceedings. We do not publish names, and we give the specialty after the dataset’s author, because the declarations do not contain it. Each row in the table below links to the declaration in BIP, where the amount can be checked.

An earlier version of this page treated 183 declarations as one group and gave a median of about PLN 633,000 and 30 people with income of a million or more. These figures mixed 2024 and 2025, revenue with income, and sums of different sources with income from the practice. After the corrections, the number of people with income from work of a million or more is 14 for 2025 and 7 for 2024. The median income from work for 2025 came out the same as the former median of the whole dataset, but that is a coincidence: it is calculated from different rows and with a different definition, and the median of the practice alone for 2025 is PLN 499.7 thousand.²

See an error in a row? Write to sprostowania@zarobkilekarzy.pl — we will correct it after checking the declaration.

Full dataset

Rows grouped by income year, in each group from the highest income from work. For each row we give the amount from the original dataset and the verification status. Council names are given in Polish.

What follows

Councillors’ declarations show that a doctor’s annual income from many workplaces can be gathered in one document and published. This is done, however, only for people who hold office in local government, and in a form that cannot be compared without reading each scan. For other doctors no such total exists in any public source.

We call for the total payments from public money to each person working in facilities with an NFZ contract to be public under a permanent identifier, without names. We describe the details on the page of our proposal.

Notes 4laws, data and statements we relied on

1. The obligation to file asset declarations and their public nature: Act on municipal self-government (in Polish; consolidated text Dz.U. 2026 item 662), Articles 24h and 24i; Act on county self-government (in Polish; consolidated text Dz.U. 2025 item 1684), Articles 25c and 25d; Act on regional self-government (in Polish; consolidated text Dz.U. 2026 item 720), Articles 27c and 27d. ↩ ↩²

2. Editorial compilation from the asset declarations of councillors who are doctors, published in the BIP of local government units. Dataset compiled by the X user @tomo9000p (as of 14.08.2026), each row compared with the declaration on 15.10.2026; link to the declaration for each row in the full dataset. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹²

3. Rzeczpospolita, “Ponad milion złotych za rok pracy dla lekarza radnego w Polsce. Wyniki analizy” (“Over a million zloty for a year’s work for a doctor-councillor in Poland. Results of an analysis”, in Polish) — highest income: PLN 2.15 million (declaration for 2025). ↩

4. Co w Zdrowiu, “Ile zarabiają lekarze-radni? Rekord to 4,9 mln zł” (“How much do doctor-councillors earn? The record is PLN 4.9 million”, in Polish) — analysis of 160 asset declarations of doctor-councillors (a different dataset from ours). ↩