Statutory severance pay
Statutory severance is due on dismissal for reasons unrelated to the employee at an employer with at least 20 staff — both on a collective redundancy and on an individual dismissal on the same grounds. The amount depends on tenure, and the upper cap is 15 times the minimum wage.
Statutory severance is not owed to everyone who loses a job. The Act covers only dismissals for reasons unrelated to the employee (organizational reasons, e.g. a redundancy) at an employer with at least 20 staff. A dismissal for reasons on the employee's side, or employment at a smaller employer, carries no severance under this Act.
How much severance — the tenure table
The severance amount depends solely on tenure with the given employer — there is no tenure floor that gates the entitlement itself; tenure sets only the number of months.
| Tenure with the employer | Severance |
|---|---|
| under 2 years | 1 month |
| 2 to 8 years inclusive | 2 months |
| more than 8 years | 3 months |
The boundary is precise: exactly 8 years of tenure is still the middle band (2 months), not the top one — the Act says "2 to 8 years" (inclusive of 8) and separately "more than 8 years" (strictly above).
Two routes to the same severance
Severance under this Act arises two ways. The first is a collective redundancy: an employer with at least 20 staff dismisses a qualifying-sized group of employees at once. The second — art. 10 — is an INDIVIDUAL dismissal at the same, at-least-20-person employer, where the organizational reason is the SOLE cause and the number dismissed in the period is below the collective-redundancy thresholds.
This matters because the most common wrong belief runs the other way: severance is not reserved for mass layoffs. A single redundant employee at an employer with at least 20 staff, dismissed purely for an organizational reason, still qualifies — via the individual route.
What the multiples multiply
The Act states no formula of its own for the monthly reference amount — it points to another set of rules:
Severance is worked out under the same rules used for the cash equivalent of unused annual leave — a month’s pay defined by a separate, incorporated-by-reference set of rules (the averaging window and which pay components count are not in this payload), never simply “your gross monthly salary”.
The upper cap
Severance has an upper limit: 15 times the minimum wage. The minimum wage that counts is the one in force on the date the employment relationship ends — not the start of the year, and not the date of hire.
At the 4,806 zł minimum wage in force for 2026, the cap comes to 72,090 zł. That figure is CALCULATED from the multiple and the minimum wage — the Act itself prints no amount in złoty, only the multiple.
Tenure aggregates — it does not reset with each contract
Tenure with the same employer aggregates across successive contracts — it does not reset to zero with each new contract with that employer:
The Act incorporates the Labour Code’s notice-seniority aggregation rule by reference, so a gap or a rehire with the same employer does not automatically start the tenure count over.
What the Act does not say
The Act does not settle whether severance stacks with pay for the notice period, or whether either reduces the other. That is a real gap, not an oversight of this page — art. 10 bundles the notice-timing rules with severance procedurally, but their monetary interaction is nowhere described. Do not assume either stacking or offset.