This is the pension that the Polish record holder gets. The amount is impressive

The highest pension in Poland is received by a resident of the Silesian Voivodeship – over PLN 48,000 is transferred to his account every month. How to approach this level? The rules are the same for everyone, the execution – much more difficult.
The highest pension in Poland is paid to a pensioner from Silesia. After the last indexation, the benefit is PLN 48,673.53. The recipe for a high pension? Long years of work. The man began receiving the benefit 20 years after reaching retirement age. He worked for 62 years and 5 months. During that time, he never once took sick leave.
The highest pensions in Poland
On the women’s side, the record holder is a woman from Kuyavian-Pomeranian Voivodeship. She worked for a slightly shorter period, for 61 years, and decided to end her professional career at the age of 81.
Their benefits are enviable, but in the mechanism in force since the pension reform in 1999, this is the only scenario that guarantees a high pension. Contributions must be paid for years – the benefits of people who worked under civil contracts for the first 20 years and only started paying full contributions around the age of 45 will be disproportionately lower than the pensions of people who paid even relatively small contributions, but regularly.
What influences the amount of your pension?
– The amount of the pension is significantly influenced by the length of service. The more contributions saved and the later the retirement, the higher the benefit. Each year worked after reaching retirement age increases the benefit – suggests Iwona Kowalska-Matis, regional spokesperson for ZUS in Lower Silesia.
Just one more year of work is enough for the pension to increase by 10-15 percent. In turn, a few years of continuing professional activity means that the benefit can even double.
The time of filing an application for retirement and starting to receive benefits is also important. It is best to do it in February or July. If we do it in February, then from March, we use the March indexation. If a senior citizen decides to retire in July, ZUS will calculate the benefit taking into account the indexation of capital from June.
More and more retirees are earning extra money
It is important to remember that retiring at the age of 60 (women) or 61 (men) is not mandatory. Once you reach this age, you can take advantage of the privilege of starting to receive a pension, but if your health and willingness allow, you can continue working. There is also nothing to stop you from working after retirement: retirees who have reached the general retirement age are not subject to earnings limits (more on them here).
We recently asked the ZUS spokesman how many people currently supplement their pensions. Paweł Żebrowski informed us that this number is around 900 thousand people.
The number of retirees who earn extra money is growing year by year. In 2022, 826,000 seniors worked, while in the previous year it was 812.9 thousand people, and in 2020 it was 777.6 thousand retirees.