In a single year a doctor may work in several public facilities: as an employee in one, under a contract in another, on on-call duty in a third. Each pays separately and knows only its own part. Nobody publishes the total amount one person receives from public money.
This text concludes the description of mechanisms on this site. It explains where the amounts we know at all come from, and why for most doctors no such amount exists.
Each facility sees its own fragment
Payments to one person from different places were not added up even by AOTMiT (the Agency for Health Technology Assessment and Tariff System), the agency that collects pay data in healthcare. Its president admitted in an interview with the daily Rzeczpospolita that the agency sees earnings only at the level of a single facility.1 For the agency, the same person in several facilities was several unconnected entries. Since 5 August 2026 this may change, but only on the state’s side — we write about it below.
The gap covers most specialists, because according to AOTMiT data about 73% of them work under civil-law contracts, mainly as contractors.2 Salaried pay is set by a public act, while nobody collects contract amounts in one place — we describe this difference in Contract or employment. What combining facilities looks like in practice is shown by cases from Warsaw, Braniewo, Łosice, Sosnowiec and Płońsk, collected in our text on holding multiple jobs.
Where the large amounts we know come from
The amounts written about by the media and by this site did not come to light by chance. They arrived by one of three routes, and each route has its limit.
| Route | What it shows | What it does not show |
|---|---|---|
| Asset declaration | The income of a councillor or local-government manager from all sources, public in the Public Information Bulletin (BIP) | The income of people who do not file declarations — that is, most doctors |
| Media question or request for public information (FOI) | Payments by one facility, if it decides to answer | Payments to the same person in other facilities |
| Inspection by the owner or a new management | Settlements in the facility that someone has started to check | Nothing beyond that facility — and only after the fact |
Asset declarations
Councillors of municipalities, counties and regions, as well as, among others, heads of local-government organisational units, must file asset declarations every year (oświadczenia majątkowe). In them they state their income from each source separately. Information from the declarations is public by law, except for the address and location of property, and is published in the Public Information Bulletin (BIP).3 For a councillor who is a doctor, the whole picture is therefore visible — including work in several facilities and private practice.
That is why most is known about doctors who are councillors. In the declarations for 2025 that we checked, 14 of 113 doctor-councillors reported at least PLN 1 million (≈ €227,000) of income from work, and the highest income was about PLN 2.15 million (≈ €488,000).4 Rzeczpospolita gave the same highest amount in its own analysis of the declarations.5 We compile the distribution and links to the declarations in our analysis Doctors who are councillors.
Local-government acts do not name hospital directors explicitly, but the declarations of some of them are published. The amounts in two 2026 cases that we describe in our text on holding multiple jobs come from asset declarations: a doctor who is a councillor in Warsaw, and the director of a county hospital.67 In these cases the media publicised amounts that had already been public.
Media questions and requests for public information
The second route is a question put to a specific facility. The regional hospital in Włocławek gave a local news portal aggregate data for 2025. Of 315 doctors, 245 worked under contracts, 61 as employees and 9 under other civil-law contracts. Payments totalled about PLN 84 million (≈ €19.1 million), and the highest annual settlement was about PLN 1.47 million (≈ €334,000).8 This is, however, the amount from one facility. Whether the same person also earned elsewhere does not follow from the answer.
Whether an answer comes at all depends on the facility. The Brzesko Medical Centre treated journalists’ questions about doctors’ pay as “processed information” (informacja przetworzona), estimated that the answer would take 32 hours of work, and made its release conditional on payment of PLN 1,500 (≈ €340).9 When Sieć Obywatelska Watchdog Polska, a Polish transparency organisation, sent the same request for payments to doctors to more than a thousand facilities, only a small proportion of them sent full annual payroll lists.10 We have compiled these lists in Disclosed hospital pay lists.
Inspections
The third route is an inspection. At the Białystok Oncology Centre, a hospital with an NFZ contract worth more than PLN 400 million (≈ €90.8 million),11 an audit by the regional government office (urząd marszałkowski) carried out at the end of 2025 found that one of the doctors had billed almost PLN 3 million (≈ €681,000) in 2024. The hospital’s management did not respond to most of the inspection’s findings.12 At the county hospital in Braniewo, the settlements of a doctor who in 2024 reported more hours than there are in a year were noticed by the new management when it began checking payments.13
An inspection, however, sees only the facility it checks, and acts after the fact. We compile the highest known amounts from all three routes in Record payments.
What is nowhere to be found
These three routes share a limit. A declaration is filed only by those whom an act requires to do so. An answer to a question and the result of an inspection concern one facility. For a doctor who is neither a councillor nor a director and works in several facilities, the total amount from public money is not in any public source.
This is not changed by the Central Register of Contracts of Public Finance Sector Units (Centralny Rejestr Umów), which receives contracts concluded from 1 July 2026. Units of the sector, including independent public healthcare facilities (SPZOZ), enter into it contracts that are procurement within the meaning of the Public Procurement Law, and the act sets no threshold for their value. The register does not cover contracts for the provision of healthcare services, which the NFZ publishes on its own website. It is public and allows searching for individual contracts, but it does not add them up per person, and information subject to restrictions on access — among other things, for reasons of an individual’s privacy — is not made available in it.14 A doctor may have several contracts in different facilities, so nobody still sees the total for one person.15
The state can calculate, but does not publish
Since 5 August 2026 the minister of health may request from facilities pay data linked to the PESEL number and the licence to practise (PWZ) number. From such data, payments to one person from many facilities can be added up. Facilities, however, provide them only at the minister’s request, and the act does not provide for their publication.16 We discuss the provisions in our analysis The pay data act.
It is different, for example, in Sweden: there, the pay of a person employed by a public authority is a document that anyone may request, without giving a reason.17 We describe the comparison in our analysis Doctors’ pay: Poland compared with its neighbours.
What follows from this
The missing total works both ways. Settlements that one person could not possibly have worked are not visible. Nor is it possible to show that a doctor who does on-call duty in a neighbouring county, because otherwise the ward would have to close, earns an ordinary amount. Since nobody sees the whole, any amount can be imagined.
That is why we call for the total pay of each person working in facilities with an NFZ contract to be published every quarter as open data: added up across all workplaces, under a permanent identifier instead of a name. We describe the details on the proposal page.
Notes 17laws, data and statements we relied on
-
Rzeczpospolita, “625 lekarzy w Polsce zarabia powyżej 100 tys. zł. Dotarliśmy do wyliczeń” (“625 doctors in Poland earn more than PLN 100,000. We have obtained the calculations”, in Polish) — the president of AOTMiT on data at the level of a single entity. ↩
-
Rzeczpospolita, “Wypłaty lekarzy na kontraktach większe niż 100 tys. zł tylko w 1 proc. przypadków” (“Payments to contract doctors above PLN 100,000 in only 1% of cases”, in Polish) — AOTMiT data on specialist doctors’ forms of employment. ↩
-
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. ↩
-
Our compilation from the asset declarations of councillors who are doctors, published in the Public Information Bulletins (BIP) of local-government units: 135 declarations for 2025, of which 113 with a confirmed amount of income from work (practice, employment, contracts, excluding councillor allowances and rental); method and links to the declarations in our analysis Doctors who are councillors. ↩
-
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). ↩
-
TVN Warszawa, “1,6 mln zł w rok z umów w czterech szpitalach — kontrola i interwencja izby lekarskiej” (“PLN 1.6 million in a year from contracts in four hospitals — an inspection and an intervention by the medical chamber”, in Polish) — amount from the asset declaration for 2025. ↩
-
Wirtualna Polska, “Łosice — 1,7 mln zł w rok z pracy lekarki i dyrektorki szpitala” (“Łosice — PLN 1.7 million in a year from work as a doctor and hospital director”, in Polish) — amount from the asset declaration for 2025. ↩
-
DDWłocławek, “Milionowe zarobki lekarzy także w szpitalu we Włocławku” (“Million-zloty earnings of doctors also at the hospital in Włocławek”, in Polish) — the Regional Specialist Hospital’s answer to the editors’ questions, data for 2025. ↩
-
Money.pl, “1500 zł za ujawnienie zarobków. Szpital zażądał pieniędzy od dziennikarzy” (“PLN 1,500 for disclosing earnings. A hospital demanded money from journalists”, in Polish). ↩
-
Sieć Obywatelska Watchdog Polska, “Ile zarabiają lekarze?” monitoring (“How much do doctors earn?”, in Polish) — requests to healthcare facilities and their answers on the fedrowanie platform. ↩
-
BFF Banking Group, “Liderzy Zarządzania — najlepsze szpitale publiczne w Polsce” (“Management Leaders — the best public hospitals in Poland”, PDF, in Polish), 21.11.2025 — category of hospitals with an NFZ contract above PLN 400 million. ↩
-
Kurier Poranny, “Milionowe wypłaty i pytania o wysokość dodatków. Audyt w Białostockim Centrum Onkologii i długa lista wątpliwości” (“Million-zloty payments and questions about allowances. An audit at the Białystok Oncology Centre and a long list of doubts”, in Polish) — audit by the Marshal’s Office of the Podlaskie Region, settlements for 2024. ↩
-
Interia, “Braniewo — doby rozliczone na 72 godziny w szpitalu powiatowym” (“Braniewo — days billed as 72 hours at a county hospital”, in Polish). ↩
-
Act of 4 December 2025 amending the act amending the Criminal Code and certain other acts and amending certain other acts (in Polish; Dz.U. 2025 item 1844) — new wording of Articles 34a and 34b of the Public Finance Act (Central Register of Contracts of Public Finance Sector Units): Article 34a(1) (contracts constituting procurement within the meaning of Article 7(32) of the Public Procurement Law), (5)(6) (exclusion of contracts for the provision of healthcare services published by the NFZ), (8) (restrictions under Article 5 of the Act on access to public information), (11) (public nature of the register), Article 34b(5) (searching); the provisions apply to contracts concluded from 1.07.2026. Independent public healthcare facilities in the public finance sector: Public Finance Act (in Polish; consolidated text Dz.U. 2025 item 1483), Article 9(10). ↩
-
Rynek Zdrowia, “Kontrakty roczne na milion złotych dla lekarza. Sprawdziliśmy centralny rejestr” (“Annual contracts worth a million zloty for a doctor. We checked the central register”, in Polish), 31.08.2026. ↩
-
Act of 19 June 2026 amending the Act on publicly funded healthcare services and the Act on medical activity (in Polish; Dz.U. 2026 item 972), in force from 5.08.2026 — new wording of Article 27a of the Act on medical activity. ↩
-
Fackförbundet ST, “Har jag rätt att få veta mina kollegors löner?” (“Do I have the right to know my colleagues’ salaries?”, in Swedish), updated 29.04.2026 — in public authorities pay data are a public document that anyone may request without giving their identity or purpose. ↩