In 2025, Poland enacted 12,400 pages of new legislation, down 12% from the previous year. This was the lowest figure in 19 years. According to the 12th edition of the Legal Barometer, prepared by advisory and audit firm Grant Thornton and UN Global Compact Network Poland, the slower pace of lawmaking and the lower number of new regulations do not mean there is no room to improve their quality. Key concerns include excessively short vacatio legis periods and insufficient public consultation. Even so, the quality of Polish legislation is still rated highly compared with many other countries.
“The most important thing is that it is not only we, as parliamentarians, who see an improvement in the quality of lawmaking, but that experts see it too. As part of the Legal Barometer, Grant Thornton and UN Global Compact Network Poland reported that the quality of legislation has improved. There are fewer regulations, but they are being prepared more carefully,” Krzysztof Kwiatkowski, Senator of the Republic of Poland and Chairman of the Senate Legislative Committee, told Newseria. “It is quite exceptional that in the case of lawmaking, less and slower means better, because we are listening more carefully to the voices of experts, specialists, and social partners.”
In 2025, 12,400 pages of new legislation were enacted. That was 12% less than a year earlier and the lowest result in 19 years. In the record year of 2016, the figure reached 35,000 pages, while in 2023 it stood at 23,300. The last two years have seen a clear reduction in the scale of regulatory change.
“The latest edition of the Legal Barometer, which we have been preparing for 12 years, shows that the production of law slowed in 2025,” says Grzegorz Szysz, Partner at Grant Thornton. “In 2025, only one-third of the amount of law passed in 2023 was enacted. We are still dealing with a significant overproduction of legislation, but its scale has clearly declined.”
What may still be concerning is that last year 405 new regulations affecting businesses came into force, 772 existing provisions were amended, and only 47 were repealed. The system of business law remains highly volatile, making it difficult for companies to keep up with all the changes. Experts, however, view the ongoing deregulation process positively, both that led by the government and the one carried out by Rafał Brzoska’s “SprawdzaMY” team.
“Using football terminology, one could say that the government’s legislative ‘style of play’ improved significantly over the past year and became more offensive. What we mean is a clear shift toward deregulation and reducing the barriers that make doing business more difficult. There are several times more pro-business laws and regulations of this type than there were a year ago,” Grzegorz Szysz says.
The improvement recorded in quantitative indicators does not automatically translate into a more reliable legislative process or higher-quality regulations. Experts point to persistent weaknesses in the system, including the very fast pace of work on new laws. In 2025, the average time spent on a bill in parliament was 98 days. By comparison, in 2000 the time between the submission of a draft bill to the Sejm and the president’s signature was 201 days. Ten years later it had fallen to 170 days, and since 2016 it has remained in the range of 68 to 106 days.
The issue that raises the greatest concerns regarding the quality of lawmaking is the vacatio legis period, which remains very short by European standards. This is the period businesses are given by lawmakers to adapt to new regulations.
“There are also reservations regarding public consultations, which are conducted or documented improperly. We also have concerns about the language of legislation, which is difficult for businesses and citizens to understand when they have to familiarize themselves with it,” says the Grant Thornton partner.
The authors of the Legal Barometer emphasize that consultations were not documented for 29% of draft laws, while in the case of another 46%, the legislator did not respond to the comments submitted. Experts remind that the obligation to carry out reliable consultations on government draft laws stems from the Rules of Procedure of the Council of Ministers, yet in practice there are essentially no consequences for skipping them.
According to Krzysztof Kwiatkowski, improving the quality of legislation requires, above all, greater caution and genuine dialogue with participants in the legislative process.
“We must create legislation in a thoughtful way, be more open to public consultations, listen to the voices of those affected by these regulations, and avoid acting in haste. These are the most important conclusions if we want the quality of lawmaking in Poland to improve,” the senator stresses.
“We are fighting legal inflation, the so-called legislative diarrhea, so that Poland—as a highly developed country and the world’s 20th-largest economy—can rank appropriately high in terms of legislative quality, and so that international investors appreciate this through direct foreign investment in our country,” says Kamil Wyszkowski, Executive Director of UN Global Compact Network Poland. “In international rankings, Poland is doing better year by year. The best example is the World Bank ranking, where 76% of what comes out of the Polish parliament is rated highly in terms of legislative quality. That is a very good indicator, because two-thirds of countries around the world perform much worse.”
The authors of the report point out that the quality of law matters not only for the day-to-day functioning of businesses, but also for the country’s long-term development. Stable, transparent, and predictable regulations are, as the publication notes, the foundation for achieving sustainable development goals and building trust in the state. Reducing legal inflation is one of the conditions for strengthening Poland’s investment attractiveness.
“If an investor wants to entrust their funds to the care of a particular country, that country must ensure appropriate regulation and a solid legal framework, because such an investment—most often planned with a medium- to long-term horizon—must be based on legal stability and high-quality lawmaking,” says Kamil Wyszkowski.
