Poland’s largest regional immigration office has urged employers, relocation providers and foreign nationals to rethink appointments on Friday, 24 April, when biometric capture for residence-permit applications will be suspended across all Warsaw-area service points. In a notice dated 23 April, the Mazowiecki Voivodeship Office confirmed that its “Pobyt” (Stay) IT platform will be taken offline for a full working day so that technicians can migrate data to MOS 2.0 – the country’s new, mandatory e-filing portal for almost every residence-permit category. MOS 2.0 goes live nationwide on 27 April under the November 2025 amendment to the Act on Foreigners, which requires applicants and their corporate sponsors to complete, sign and pay for applications electronically before an in-person biometric visit can be booked. Although other case-handling functions will remain open, officers will not be able to collect fingerprints or issue physical residence cards on 24 April. As a result, the voivodeship is recommending that applicants reschedule to avoid making two separate trips. HR teams running large spring intakes of highly-qualified employees should factor in an extra week of lead time, particularly for non-EU assignees whose right to start work hinges on submission of biometrics. The temporary outage is part of a staged national rollout. Earlier this week, the Lubuski Voivodeship issued a similar alert, and several other provinces have quietly blocked late-April booking slots. Once MOS 2.0 is fully operational, paper submissions will be legally treated as “not filed,” and applicants will receive a digital filing certificate that can be downloaded and shared with HR or payroll. Authorities say the system will slash processing times by 20 %, but practitioners warn that missing mandatory uploads—even a scanned passport cover—will trigger automatic rejection. For global mobility managers, the message is clear: audit any employee whose appointment falls on 24 April, upload complete document sets in advance, and brief travellers that walk-in help-desk capacity will be extremely limited. Companies that manage their own postings to Poland should update onboarding checklists to reflect the MOS 2.0 workflow and budget for the unchanged state fees (PLN 340 for temporary residence and PLN 440 for the new three-year CUKR card for Ukrainians).
Source: Mazowiecki Urząd Wojewódzki
