The step-by-step plan for Poland

As a Dutch citizen you need no visa: you drive across the border and nobody asks anything. The first three months you may be there without conditions. That is exactly why this journey is underestimated.

If you stay longer, Poland has two separate registrations for you, at two counters, with two clocks. The zameldowanie is the address registration at the municipality, within thirty days of moving in, and it gives you the PESEL number everything hangs on. The rejestracja pobytu is the registration of your right of residence as an EU citizen with the voivode, no later than the day after your first three months end. Whoever does one often thinks they're done.

One group falls outside the second: whoever holds Polish nationality alongside the Dutch is not an EU citizen in Poland but a Pole, and registers no right of residence. The address registration and the PESEL do apply.

Two things most Dutch-language pages still tell from the time before 2022.

The tax. The treaty of 2002 placed your pension with Poland. The protocol that entered into force on 30 April 2022 reversed that: pensions and social security payments that come from the Netherlands may be taxed in the Netherlands. So the Netherlands taxes your occupational pension and your AOW, and Poland credits the Dutch tax against its own. A wage tax exemption as with Spain or Portugal no longer exists here.

Healthcare. Poland is a treaty country. With a Dutch statutory pension you go through the CAK: an S1 form, registering with the NFZ, and you're treated as if you were insured there. The treaty contribution comes off your Dutch pension.

Warsaw, Kraków, Wrocław and the Tricity on the Baltic have the international schools, the English-speaking doctors and the direct flights. The countryside of Podlasie, Lubelskie or the Carpathians has the prices and, for many readers of this route, the family.

Go and look in January, not in July. The winter is a settlement factor: cold that lasts for weeks, and in the cities the winter air quality you don't see on a summer visit. And count the language in. At the counter, at the notary and at the GP, Polish is the working language; in the big cities you manage with English, outside them not.

The paperwork here is almost free: the registrations cost nothing, the driving licence doesn't need exchanging, and the car comes along without excise duty if you meet the conditions. The money sits in the move itself and in the first months.

With this destination this conversation is for many families one about going back, not about going away: one generation knows the country, the other knows it from holidays. Children who grew up in the Netherlands then move to the country of their parents and not to their own.

Discuss the language and the school too. Whoever spoke Polish at the kitchen table in the Netherlands doesn't automatically speak the Polish of a Polish classroom.

From here everything counts back, and this journey has four clocks you have to start yourself. Thirty days after moving in for the address registration. The day after three months for the residence registration. Thirty days after the car's entry for the registration plate, and twelve months after settling to bring it in without excise duty at all. Put all four in your diary on the day your date is fixed.