Poland raises its own pass mark as the level rises

The state exams run in two groups, and they are not the same length. The adult group covers A1 to C2 — six levels. The group adapted to children and young people covers A1 to B2 — four. There is no C1 or C2 exam for a candidate under 18, at any price, in any session.

The age rule is exact rather than approximate. The adult group requires ukończone 18 lat — eighteen completed on the day of the exam, not in the year of it. The children and youth group is w wieku 14 – 17 lat. That leaves no overlap and no discretion: your date of birth decides which ladder you are on, and therefore whether C1 is available to you at all.

Who may sit it is narrower than most: Do egzaminu mogą przystąpić cudzoziemcy i obywatele polscy na stałe zamieszkali za granicą — foreigners, and Polish citizens permanently resident abroad. A Polish citizen living in Poland is outside the exam's stated population. How you prepared is explicitly irrelevant; there is no course requirement.

The thresholds are published per band, in the Commission's own words:

A1 and A2 — co najmniej 50% punktów z części pisemnej i 50% punktów z części ustnej egzaminu. B1 — co najmniej 50% punktów z każdej części egzaminu. B2, C1 and C2 — co najmniej 60% punktów z każdej części egzaminu.

This comparison is ours. Of the certificates documented on this site whose pass rule we have read first-party, the Polish state certificate is the only one where the percentage a candidate must reach changes with the level they registered for. Ukraine is the near-miss that shows what the claim is really about: its officials exam does hand out A1 at 30% and C1 at 70%, so its thresholds do move with the level — but the candidate never chooses one, so no Ukrainian candidate ever faces a higher bar for having aimed higher. Poland does that, deliberately, in a published rule. The DELF and DALF apply the same 50 out of 100, with the same 5-out-of-25 floor, from A1 to C1. The Goethe modules, the NT2 and the YKI hold their rules steady across their range. The JLPT comes closest to an exception and misses: its totals differ by level — 100 out of 180 for N1, 90 for N2, 95 for N3 — but that is a scaling artefact and it is not monotonic, since N3 asks for a higher share than N2. Poland's is a stated policy, and it only goes one way.

It is worth being clear about what that policy says. A B2 certificate is not merely a harder paper than a B1 certificate; it is a harder paper marked to a stricter line. Ten percentage points of the gap between a B1 and a B2 in Poland has nothing to do with your Polish and everything to do with the Commission's view that a higher claim should carry less noise.

The exam is a written part plus an oral part. The written part is not the same shape at every level.

At A1 the written modules are rozumienie ze słuchu, rozumienie tekstów pisanych and wypowiedź pisemna — listening, reading, writing. At A2 the reading module is widened to rozumienie tekstów pisanych z rozpoznawaniem struktur gramatycznych: reading, with grammatical structures recognised inside it. From B1 upward, grammar leaves the reading paper and becomes its own module, poprawność gramatyczna.

So Polish grammar is tested at every level and scored separately only from B1. Below that it is folded into reading, where a grammatical gap costs you comprehension marks rather than grammar marks. This is the same structural move the CELI makes at A1 and the DALF makes at C2, documented elsewhere on this site: a body fuses two skills into one mark wherever splitting them would measure the wrong thing. Poland draws that line at B1 and says so on the timetable.

The published time limits are ceilings, written as do — up to. Written: up to 120 minutes at A1, 160 at A2, 190 at B1, 250 at B2, 250 at C1, 290 at C2. Oral: up to 10 minutes at A1 and A2, 15 at B1 and B2, 20 at C1, 30 at C2. The oral exam trebles in length between A1 and C2 while the written part barely doubles.

Poland does not publish a price. It publishes a maximum, and lets each centre set its own beneath it: wysokość opłat ustala każdy z ośrodków egzaminacyjnych (podmiotów uprawnionych), nie przekraczając maksymalnej sumy.

The ceilings, in euro: €90 for the children and youth exams at A1–B2. €120 for A1 and A2 in the adult group. €150 for B1 and B2. €180 for C1 and C2. On top of any of those sits a separate €20 certificate fee, równowartość w złotych 20 euro, paid after you pass.

Two things follow that are easy to miss. First, the ceiling is tiered by level and by who you are: the same B2 exam is capped at €90 for a sixteen-year-old and €150 for an adult. Second, the €20 is not part of the exam fee — a candidate who passes pays it, and a candidate who does not, does not.

This comparison is ours. A published ceiling that centres may not exceed puts Poland with Celpe-Bras, whose R$247 is a legal maximum, and against the larger group on this site — JLPT, HSK, telc, CAPLE, DELF / DALF, Norskprøven, Norskprøven C1, IELTS, Cambridge English and Swedex — which publish no global figure at all and leave the number to the centre or the municipality. A ceiling is the middle posture: you cannot know what you will pay, but you can know what you will not pay more than.

From 9 June 2026, under art. 11a ust. 4 of the Ustawa z dnia 7 października 1999 r. o języku polskim, the Commission issues the certificate to people who never take the test.

The qualifying routes are all educational, and they are specific. A doctorate na podstawie rozprawy doktorskiej napisanej i obronionej w języku polskim — written and defended in Polish. A completed degree taught in Polish at an institution inside Poland's higher-education system. A świadectwo dojrzałości from the Polish school system. Schools at Polish diplomatic missions. Polish-medium secondary schooling abroad. A European Baccalaureate diploma that includes the Polish-as-mother-tongue exam result. Eleven or more years of Polish-language instruction through a registered organisation abroad.

The exclusion is stated as plainly as the inclusions: ukończenie szkoły policealnej oraz studiów podyplomowych does not qualify. A post-secondary school and a postgraduate course, both conducted in Polish, both leaving you fluent, both outside the door.

This is ours, and it is the reason this page exists. Of the certificates documented on this site, this is the only one with a route to the document that does not pass through the exam room. Every other body treats the certificate as a report on a performance: you sit, you are measured, you receive the measurement. Poland treats it as a record of a fact about your education — and once you frame it that way, a doctoral defence in Polish is simply better evidence than a 190-minute paper, so requiring the paper would be ceremony.

The cost of that framing is visible in the exclusion list. It admits the shape of an education, not the language ability the education produced, which is why a postgraduate course taught entirely in Polish is refused while a school certificate obtained at fourteen is accepted. An exam measures the person in front of it and is blind to how they got there. This route reads the paperwork and is blind to the person. Neither is wrong; they are answering different questions, and the Commission now answers both.

One caution, and it is the reason this section names no level: the Commission's own pages do not state which CEFR level the no-exam certificate attests. We looked, on the dedicated page and its legal-basis page, and found none. That is recorded here as a gap in what we read, not as an assertion that no level exists — if you need a specific level named on a specific document, ask the Commission before assuming this route produces it.

Poland publishes something almost no examining body does — ten consecutive years of candidate volumes, at system-certyfikacji/statystyki. It is worth reading, because it says something the syllabus does not.

The volumes: 1,111 candidates in 2016, then 2,803, 5,122, 7,440, 6,498 (2020, the pandemic year), 12,763, 15,300, 17,489, 21,781 and 27,518 in 2025 — 117,823 in ten years. Accredited centres went from 7 to 65 over the same period. This is an exam that grew roughly twenty-five-fold in a decade.

Then the distribution, across those ten years, and it is lopsided beyond anything the level table would lead you to expect: B1 — 82.79%. C1 — 8.34%. B2 — 6.28%. B2 for children and youth — 1.33%. B1 for children and youth — 1.00%. C2 — 0.25%. A2 — 0.01%. And A1 does not appear in the distribution at all.

This reading is ours. On paper the Commission runs ten separate examinations — six for adults, four for younger candidates. In practice it runs one, and administers nine others as a rounding error. More than four candidates in five sit B1. Fewer than one in ten thousand sit A2. The A1 exam is offered every session, in the regulations, on the fee schedule, and appears in a decade of statistics as nothing at all.

The interesting part is that the Commission publishes the distribution and declines to explain it. Its own FAQ asks the obvious question — Jaki poziom egzaminu wystarczy do ubiegania się o obywatelstwo polskie?, what level is enough to apply for Polish citizenship — and answers by sending you elsewhere: Informacje w tej sprawie można uzyskać w lokalnym urzędzie wojewódzkim, ask your local voivodeship office. So the body that knows exactly where 82.79% of its candidates are standing will not tell you why they are standing there.

The explanation is in a different building. The citizenship act — not the exam body — sets co najmniej B1 for recognition as a citizen (art. 30 ust. 2, read on isap.sejm.gov.pl on 11 September 2026), which is why four candidates in five sit exactly that level. The statute and seventeen other countries' are quoted in the citizenship-level comparison.

That refusal is defensible — an exam board is not an immigration authority, and a wrong answer about a legal threshold would be worse than no answer. It is also, for a candidate, the single most useful thing on the site that is missing. Whatever is drawing people to B1 is external to the exam, and the exam will not name it. Before you register for a level, get the requirement in writing from the institution that will read your certificate, because the Commission has said plainly that it is not that institution.

One practical consequence follows directly. If you are choosing a level for its own sake, note that B1 is where the Commission's threshold changes: it is the last level marked at 50% and the first where grammar is a module of its own. The most-sat exam in the system sits exactly on the seam.

The certificate never expires. Certyfikat ważny jest bezterminowo. That puts it with the JLPT, the DELE, the DELF/DALF, the NT2, the TestDaF and the YKI, and against the TOPIK at two years and SIELE at five.

There is no waiting period after a failure: Nie ma określonego czasu, który należy odczekać po niezaliczonym egzaminie, w związku z czym można do niego przystąpić już w kolejnej sesji egzaminacyjnej — you may sit again in the very next session. Sessions run several times a year at accredited centres.

The document itself is issued w terminie 30 dni from the moment the Commission receives the centre's exam protocol and the centre has paid the €20 certificate fee. Note where that clock starts: not on your exam day, and not on your payment — on the centre's paperwork reaching Warsaw. If a certificate is late, the centre is the party to ask.