Anonymous payments made online can qualify as donations even when the recipient does not know the donor’s full name, Poland’s Supreme Administrative Court has ruled. The judgment challenges the restrictive approach taken by the tax authorities in recent years and could have important consequences for streamers, online creators and fundraising platforms.
In a final judgment issued on July 7, 2026, case III FSK 113/26, the Supreme Administrative Court, or NSA, overturned both an earlier ruling of the Provincial Administrative Court in Bydgoszcz and an individual tax interpretation issued by Poland’s National Revenue Information Service.
The dispute concerned voluntary payments, commonly referred to as donations or “donejty”, made by viewers during online streams. The streamer received information about the value and number of payments through the Tipply platform but did not have access to the full personal details of the people making them. Donors could be identified only through nicknames or similar information.
Tax authority argued that the donor had to be identifiable
The tax authorities had taken the position that such payments could not qualify as donations if the person making the payment could not be identified. Under that interpretation, a nickname, login or email address was not sufficient to establish that money had been transferred by a specific donor as a gift.
This distinction had potentially significant tax consequences. Payments that did not qualify under Poland’s inheritance and donations tax regime could instead be assessed under other tax rules, depending on the circumstances.
The Supreme Administrative Court rejected the argument that knowing the donor’s full personal details is a necessary condition for a donation to exist.
NSA: what matters is the nature of the payment
The court referred to the essential elements of a donation under Polish civil law. For a payment to qualify as a donation, the parties must agree on what is being transferred, the transfer must reduce the donor’s assets and it must be made without compensation in return.
According to the NSA, an online donation can meet all three conditions. The fact that the donor’s personal details are not automatically disclosed to the recipient does not mean that the donor does not exist or that no donation has taken place.
The court also noted that the structure of a tax return cannot determine the legal nature of a transaction. In other words, the fact that a tax form asks for the donor’s personal details is not enough to conclude that a payment cannot legally constitute a donation when those details are unavailable to the recipient.
The judgment is particularly relevant to the digital economy, where “anonymous” frequently means that an individual chooses not to disclose their identity publicly rather than that there is no identifiable person behind the transaction.
PLN 5,733 tax-free threshold applies per donor
The ruling could be particularly important for small online payments. Under the current Polish inheritance and donations tax rules, a person outside the recipient’s family generally falls into the third tax group. The tax-free threshold for this group is PLN 5,733.
The threshold applies to the total value received from the same person over a five-year period. If the total remains below PLN 5,733, no inheritance and donations tax return is required.
Once that threshold is exceeded, the excess becomes subject to tax. Rates for the third tax group are progressive and amount to 12%, 16% and 20%, depending on the taxable amount. A taxpayer who exceeds the threshold generally has one month to file an SD-3 declaration.
For many streamers and online fundraisers, individual payments are typically far below PLN 5,733. This means that genuine small donations from individual supporters may often remain below the taxable threshold.
There is, however, an important practical complication: the limit is calculated separately for each donor. Where a recipient genuinely cannot establish who made individual payments, applying and documenting the five-year threshold may still raise practical questions.
Not every online payment is a donation
The NSA ruling does not mean that every payment sent to a streamer, influencer or online creator automatically becomes a tax-free donation. The fundamental condition is that the payment must be made without anything being provided in return.
If a viewer pays for access to additional content, promotion during a stream, advertising, a special ranking position or another benefit, the payment may instead be treated as consideration for a service. In such a case, income tax may apply and, depending on the circumstances, VAT may also become relevant.
The same issue can arise when collecting payments forms an organised and recurring part of a creator’s business model.
Court did not decide whether streaming was a business activity
This is one of the most important limitations of the judgment. The NSA explicitly stated that it was not deciding whether the streamer’s activities constituted a business or whether the payments were connected with that business.
That issue was outside the scope of the case and would require a separate examination of the facts. The ruling therefore settles a narrower but important question: an online payment does not cease to be a donation solely because the recipient does not know the donor’s full identity.
Whether a particular payment is ultimately subject to inheritance and donations tax, personal income tax or VAT still depends on the nature of the transaction and the relationship between the payer and the recipient.
For Poland’s growing creator economy and online fundraising sector, however, the judgment removes one of the broadest arguments previously used against treating anonymous online support as a genuine donation.
Sources: Supreme Administrative Court judgment of July 7, 2026, III FSK 113/26; Polish Ministry of Finance; inFakt.
