Finance and Economy Minister Andrzej Domański said last week that the government plans to contract the construction and renovation of 18,000 homes this year, using funds from Poland’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan, an EU-backed post-pandemic investment program.
The money is to support both social housing and homes for people in the “rent gap,” those who earn too much to qualify for social housing but cannot afford to buy a home.
Domański’s announcement suggests the government is now making housing supply, rather than subsidized borrowing, the center of its policy.
The announcement marks a significant shift in housing policy under Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s coalition government.
After months of internal disagreement, the government has dropped plans for a new mortgage subsidy program and is instead directing record funding toward increasing housing supply.
Before the 2023 parliamentary election, Civic Coalition, the largest party in the current government, promised a 0 percent mortgage for first-time buyers. But the idea split the coalition after Tusk took office.
Development Funds and Regional Policy Minister Katarzyna Pełczyńska-Nałęcz argued that subsidized loans would drive up housing prices and mainly benefit developers. The government eventually halted work on the proposal.
That decision breaks with a long-running pattern in Polish housing policy.
For years, successive governments backed programs aimed at boosting demand, including Family on Its Own, Housing for the Young, and Safe Mortgage 2 Percent. Critics said such schemes supported buyers in the short term but did little to solve the deeper shortage of housing, and in some cases pushed prices higher.
The previous Law and Justice (PiS) government also tried to expand supply through its Mieszkanie Plus rental housing program, but the project failed to deliver on expectations.
Builders completed around 208,400 new homes in Poland last year, 4.1 percent more than a year earlier, the country’s statistics office reported earlier this month in an updated estimate.
At the end of 2025, there were about 16.2 million dwellings across the country, data showed.
(rt/gs)
Source: IAR, PAP