How to register a foreign Non-EU car in Poland?

I am both a Polish and American citizen living in Krakow. I bought a car in the USA and shipped it to Poland. I need to get Polish plates. I know there is a "resettlement property" that if I show at least 1 year living in the USA and a reason that I "moved" to Poland I will be exempt from paying VAT and taxes for the car. How can I start the paperwork for this in Krakow? I got a perm ID card already.

you also have to have it "modified" to fit european standards. E.G. those headlights you got, the ones that give you a broad field of vision, well they're made for wider north american roads so you gotta get them changed or blind every other driver on the road. the whole thing will need to get ceritified so don't fix anything yet, wait till they tell you what to get fixed. then you need documents translated and then you can reregister the thing. Look for a 1 month timeframe and don't be afraid to grease some palms to get your documents to the top of any pile.

Thread attached on merging:
How do I register a car in Poland?

How do I register a car in Poland?

I hope someone can help please :)

Is there a website I can go to to find out more details? Also is there importation duty / tax if I am Polish registering a UK / Japanese car in Poland?

Please help. Thanks a lot for your time in advance :)

you say a UK/Japanese car.

so just to check first of all - is this vehicle left hand drive or right hand drive?

You can register a jap import providing there is no LHD drive alternative, for example the nissan skyline, Mitsubishi FTO, Eunos Roadster (mx5 in europe)

Takes a bit of doing but there is a Skyline GTR tanking around Poznan on Polish plates, When I spoke to him he told me that he was able to register in in Poland due to there being no LHD alternative.

Don't ask!!!

I tried last week.

1) You cannot buy car insurance in Poland if your car is registered in a different EU country. (I was told that you CAN buy insurance there if your car is registerred outside the EU!!!)

2) You can only register a foreign car in Poland if you first pay import duty at the Urzad Celny. If the car has an engine over 2L this is 3% of the value of the car.

3) Foreigners are not permitted in law to pay the import duty!

4) The solution - I am told - is to give your car to a Pole and let him pay the import duty. Then he can register the car to himself without any difficulty. Then he can give it back to you, and you can then register it to yourself. This of course means paying the registration fees twice and waiting for all the documents to go through the Warsaw system twice.

5) Additionally you will have to pay the "Recycling" fee so that when your car expires it will not cost the Polish tax payer any money to get rid of it. Of course if you take it out of the country again before your car expires, you won't get the money back.

6) Then you have to go to the Urzad Skarbowy and pay the local sales tax. the amount depends on whether you bought the car in Poland or abroad.

7) In order to actually register the car you have to go to the Urzad Komunikacjne and pay them as well. They send all the documentation to Warsaw and about 4 weeks later you will receive your registration plates and documents.

8) You cannot register your car until it has been given a Przeglad at the local Stacja Kontroli Pojazdow. This equates to the UK MOT, but can be issued after a 5 minute glance at the car even if it has faulty headlights. They are not interested in any technical aspects of the car if it looks fairly new, but it MUST be left hand drive. In my case I was driving a UK registered LHD land Rover. I was told that they would not give me a Przeglad because they could not certify to say that the car had been safely converted from RHD. My protestations that as mechanics they should be able to see for themselves that the car had always been LHD and was not a convertion fell on stoney ground. They are only willing to listen if you have a document. I finally got a Przeglad when I was able to prove that the car had been built LHD by providing them with an officially translated copy of the purchase document showing the order for an LHD car.

9) You will also need to have the registration document and the purchase document translated into Polish by an authorised translator. Each translation costs approximately 80Zl.

Do you still want to do it?????

Mary

I was told of an interesting alternative by a US citizen living in Warsaw... he bought a car on an expat basis in Poland (I believe you get a big discount if you don't import it to the US for at least 6 months or something). He then registered it in Vanuatu (they do this because it's a good source of income from them) and insured it for Poland through a specialist insurer in Switzerland. Apparently it's all legit but it was a little too exotic sounding for me. Has anyone else heard about this?

Hi all ( Specially Mary),

Thanks for your useful info , the time & pain you've taken to come across to import or register a car in Poland. The info will definitely help me a lot . BTW, is there any Polish Govt. website in English that can help me get the official facts and figures myself ? Hope to hear soon . Till then.

Regards,

Emmy.

Would soemone having US number plates on a car really get stopped over that in Poland? Anybody had such experience?

If you are driving the car around at night the Policja may pull you over to check out that the car is not stolen , seems many stolen in Germany wind up in Poland...You will be asked for your passport , and your log book , and thats all...They seem to have no interest in seeing your insurance or m.o.t , sometimes they ask to see your licence , but out of the ten times i got stopped this happened only once...

Thread attached on merging:
Can foreign citizen register car in Poland?

Can foreign citizen register car in Poland?

The situation:
I am NOT Poland citizen.
I would to buy new or used car in Poland and then to register in Poland.

I understood that it may be possible.

So my questions:
Is it allowed to register car for foreign citizens?
What is the full process of legal registration of new or used car?
What is the cost of this registration including all green taxes, recycling taxes, taxes and duties.

Thanks in advance!

JB

I think this has been covered very fully on another thread , but yes , as long as the wheel is on the left side you can do it.....

Are you registered in Poland? This is basically the test - if you are, then you can register a car.

Hi I am foreigner and driving UK right hand car in Poland. Thinking to register here. Is it possible to register? Can some one help me giving information?

Regards
Senaka

In theory it is possible to register a RHD car here, but in practice it's not. Drive it back to the UK, sell it and get yourself another one here.

It's possible in Poznan -the official website even says so, and they've told me that there's no problem with it provided all the papers are in order.

Insurance will be your biggest hurdle let alone registering the car, websites say a lot of things, but it is when you get down to the finer details that is the problem as half of them don't know their ass from their elbow.

Hah, can you imagine going to one of those tiny insurance offices and asking them to process the paperwork for a RHD car? They'd have a heart attack!

But...why do people want to register RHD cars here anyway? I could understand in Germany or Spain, but given that you need to overtake constantly to get anywhere here, an RHD would be murder!

Or not it could be quite the opposite, overtaking causes murder and deaths so lack of it is a good thing, having a RHD becomes second nature after a while.

Has anybody noticed the amount of lunatic drivers on the roads over the festive period with UK plates? Its all those Poles back form the UK for Crimbo thinking their hard, pulling wheel spins in Ryneks and just generally being complete idiots.

hi thanks, what is the web site? can u send me? thx.

HI-

I brought my American car to Poland and registered it successfully. First I needed some kind of permission to bring my car to Poland exempt from tax (the duties and whatever else). I got this from the Polish embassy in the US. The nearest embassy was pretty far away so I sent my application and my American passport by courier and I sent a pre-paid envelope to get it back which I did after 3 days. No red tape involved. I had to prove that I was a resident of Poland and that the car was purchased before receiving residence. Why? Because you have the right to bring your possessions without paying taxes but you have to own them first I suppose.

Next I went to an import/export company in the US (I was there for Christmas) and sent the car. The car arrived about a month later and I picked it up. I had all the documents so I insured it (for a period of one month) before I picked it up. One month of insuring a foreign registered car costs about the same as one year of insuring the same car registered in Poland. In that one month I made all the changes needed, translated all the documents, got my inspection papers, registered the car and insured it.

I was stopped by the police often but not for the foreign plates but because my state in the US doesn't have plates on the front so the police who saw me from the front always directed me to pull over....ok, and once for speeding.

My biggest problem in registering the car was that I did not have a PESEL number at the time and without filling in that field in the computer, you cannot really register your car. There is a PESEL on my car documents but it is made up. Don't tell anyone.

I also had a problem because the production year and the model year were different and my engine did not have a serial number but we sorted it out somehow.

Good luck!

I'm doing a research for my assignment. if i want to export one of malaysian car into poland, is the car needed any modification...if yes or no, may i know what is it?

I want to bring my electric car(Chinese brand) from Moldova(Non EU) and register it on a Polish Company. If it is possible what should I do for that ?

It seems that our forum members who could tell you their first hand experience with registering such a car have gone on vacation. Do you want to wait 2 months until they return or look for the info somewhere else?

e.g,
business-in-poland.eu/ru/articles/view/car-registration-from-eu/

and a dozen others.

If you want any kind of official document at the moment then prepare for a long wait and the need to phone them many times to hassle them.

they don't work much in summer anyway.

they have a huge backlog after COVID

they have an awful lot of Ukrainians to process at the moment.

If I were you I would just drive your car around for a few months and if you get stopped just tell the cops the office was closed because of COVID / or that you were in isolation etc. But then I'm not a very risk averse person.