Polish citizenship by descent: who qualifies

Who qualifies

• Likely already PolishA Polish parent when you were bornA child born to a Polish parent is Polish from birth, wherever they’re born.
• PossiblyA Polish grandparent or great-grandparentIf your ancestor was a Polish citizen from 1920 onwards and didn’t lose it before passing it on, each generation inherited it, and so did you.
• Usually notAn ancestor who left before Poland became independentMany emigrants left the Russian, German or Austrian empires before 1918 and never held Polish citizenship. Polish roots alone aren’t enough.

Where the chain usually breaks

Until January 19, 1951, Polish citizens could lose their citizenship in ways that also stopped it passing to children born afterwards:

• Becoming a citizen of another country. There were exceptions, for example for men who hadn’t yet done their Polish military service.
• Serving in a foreign army or taking a foreign public office without permission.
• A married woman generally followed her husband. If he lost Polish citizenship, she and their children under 18 usually lost it too.
• Before 1951, children of married parents took their father’s citizenship, so a line through a Polish mother married to a man who wasn’t Polish usually broke at that step.
• A man’s loss usually took his family with him. Before 1951, when a man lost Polish citizenship, the loss usually extended to his wife and his children under 18, unless the authorities decided otherwise. So a naturalization after a child’s birth can still break the line if the child was a minor.

Later border changes also matter for families from areas that are now in Ukraine, Belarus or Lithuania. These rules are tricky, and the governor’s office decides on the evidence.

What a Polish passport gives you

The right to live, work, study and retire across all 27 EU countries plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland. See what an EU passport lets you do.