Sunday trading after the Supreme Court ruling: a shop, warehouse and web-shop schedule PIP can inspect
On 21 August 2026 the Polish Labour Inspectorate confirmed that a reading corner does not exempt a store from the Sunday trading ban. The next lawful trading Sunday is 30 August. Every other Sunday this year — December aside — also covers warehousing and stocktakes. This article sets out the Sunday trading schedule that keeps shop floor, wholesale depot and online orders apart when an inspector asks who was on site, and on what legal basis.
On 21 August 2026 the National Labour Inspectorate (PIP) published “A reading room will no longer help you dodge the trading ban?”. The piece turns on a Supreme Court judgment of 10 June 2026, case file III KK 26/26. The Court allowed the Prosecutor General’s cassation and backed PIP: opening a readers’ corner or a book club inside a retail outlet does not change what the outlet is for. A supermarket remains a supermarket. The exception in Article 6(1)(10) of the Act of 10 January 2018 on restrictions on trading on Sundays, public holidays and certain other days applies to retail outlets inside establishments for culture, sport, education, tourism and recreation — not the other way round, when a shop bolts on a bookcase.
PIP also restates the calendar. In 2026, work in retail is still allowed on four Sundays; the next is 30 August. On the remaining Sundays the ban covers trading, activities related to trading, and assigning such work to an employee or to anyone engaged on another basis. The 2025 inspection figures in the same notice are not an anecdote: irregularities were found in 33.2 per cent of inspections. Among 185 large-format stores inspected the share was 41.1 per cent; in smaller shops, 32.5 per cent. The findings covered 1,567 employees, 820 people engaged other than under a contract of employment, and 36 people working with no contract at all.
For a local e-commerce business or a B2B wholesaler this is not an argument about supermarket furniture. It is whether your Sunday trading schedule distinguishes the high-street shop, the warehouse, a builders’ yard, the online order desk and click-and-collect. Article 3(1) of the Act lists a wholesale depot and a mail-order house as a placówka handlowa (trading outlet) in so many words. The Ministry of Family, in its questions and answers, writes that warehousing and stocktaking for the same trader do not cease to be “activities related to trading” merely because they happen in a different building from the till. At the same time Article 6(1)(20) carves out online shops and internet platforms. Those two sentences sit side by side. A panel that does not keep them apart leaves you with a spreadsheet and a shift manager’s oral interpretation.
GESOFT — Paweł Matusiak, Laravel, Vue, Android — builds that panel when off-the-shelf SaaS does not know your sites: a shop with collection, a warehouse out of town, a B2B wholesale panel and an online shop on one stock file. We do not replace PIP, the court or a law firm. We do not scrap a working rota system if it already holds the Sunday, the exception and the person. Write via contact: how many sites, whether the warehouse sits in the same building as sales, whether the web shop is picked from the shop floor, who is allowed on the premises on a Sunday. A quote comes back within 24 hours. If a subscription product will do, we will say so plainly.
What the Supreme Court actually confirmed — and what you must not read into the PIP notice
The facts in the notice are narrow, and they are worth keeping narrow. A company argued that it fell within the exception for outlets carrying on cultural activity because it ran a readers’ club. Staff worked on Sundays covered by the ban. PIP acted as public prosecutor. The first-instance court acquitted. The second-instance court upheld that judgment. The Supreme Court held the Prosecutor General’s cassation well founded. The reading of Article 6(1)(10) is linguistic: the ban does not apply to retail outlets “in” establishments for culture, sport, education, tourism and recreation. The provision does not cover the reverse — extra cultural activity inside a shop.
Chief Labour Inspector Janusz Krasoń cites the earlier line: Supreme Court 16 November 2023, I KK 346/23, and 10 July 2024, V KK 491/23. Setting aside a bookcase and a few seats does not turn the outlet into a library or a reading room. That is a quotation from the notice, not a flourish of ours. The notice does not state the fine in that particular case, does not name the chain, and does not say how many shops in Poland run a “book point”. We do not invent those figures.
The penalty for assigning work against the ban sits elsewhere in the Act. Article 10 — in the wording the Ministry of Family gives in its FAQ — is an offence punishable by a fine from PLN 1,000 to PLN 100,000. The same band applies to failing to keep, or keeping incorrectly, the monthly sales register when you rely on exceptions built on prevailing activity. The 21 August notice does not repeat those amounts; they come from the Act and the ministerial FAQ, not from the news item. Anyone who writes “we will cut inspection risk by 70 per cent” into a software proposal is selling weather. You are buying a file: which exception, which site, which person, which day.
PIP cites the consolidated text of the Act as Journal of Laws 2025, item 301. The Family Ministry FAQ is older (last amended 4 February 2022) but remains the fullest official commentary on trading, activities related to trading and trading outlet. The 2026 calendar of trading Sundays is on Zielona Linia as at 31 December 2025. Three sources, three regimes. The panel replaces none of them. It has to show which one you are using when an inspector is standing at the warehouse gate.
The 2026 calendar: 30 August and three December Sundays that belong in the system, not in the manager’s notebook
Article 7 of the Act lifts the ban on tightly listed Sundays. Zielona Linia names eight dates in 2026: 25 January, 29 March (the Sunday before Easter Sunday on 5 April), 26 April, 28 June, 30 August, 6 December, 13 December and 20 December. PIP’s 21 August notice speaks of four remaining Sundays this year and points to the next: 30 August. That matches the calendar: after 21 August you have August and the three December dates. If a public holiday falls on the last Sunday of January, April, June or August, the ban returns — in 2026 that collision does not arise on the dates listed.
- 25 January 2026 — last Sunday of January (already passed).
- 29 March 2026 — Sunday immediately before Easter.
- 26 April 2026 — last Sunday of April.
- 28 June 2026 — last Sunday of June.
- 30 August 2026 — last Sunday of August, the next one after the PIP notice.
- 6, 13 and 20 December 2026 — the three Sundays before Christmas Eve.
A schedule that only knows “Sunday / not Sunday” is too short. You need a day type: a trading Sunday under Article 7, a Sunday under the ban, a public holiday under Article 1 of the Act on public holidays, 24 December after 14:00, and Easter Saturday after 14:00. The ministerial FAQ states that the cut-off after 14:00 on Christmas Eve and Easter Saturday also applies when Christmas Eve falls on a Sunday. The employee keeps pay for time not worked because the day was shortened. That is a field in the HR module, not a slide about work-life balance.
Sunday under the trading-restriction Act is 24 consecutive hours from 24:00 on Saturday to 24:00 on Sunday. The Ministry stresses that the employer cannot move that boundary in the work rules. The different hour in Article 151⁹ § 2 of the Labour Code (usually 06:00–06:00) applies to the work listed in Article 151¹⁰ and — on the Ministry’s view — does not apply to trading outlets. If your rota product was written for a hotel or a factory and lets you set “Sunday from six”, that configuration lies in a shop. A stocktake started at 22:30 on Saturday and finished at 01:15 on Sunday is already a statutory Sunday, even if the work rules still show 06:00.
Operationally, 30 August is straightforward: you open as you would on a Saturday, unless another restriction applies. 31 August, 6 September, every following Sunday until 6 December — not, unless you fall within a specific Article 6 exception. A panel that lets everyone through on 30 August and asks for a basis on 6 September saves you an explanation at inspection. A panel that treats both days the same because “Sunday is Sunday” is decoration.
Trading, activities related to trading, the warehouse: three ideas that collapse into one spreadsheet column
The Family Ministry FAQ splits notions your warehouse picker will not split if the rota only says “shift A”. Trading is the sale, the exchange of goods for money. Activities related to trading in an outlet cover both work tied directly to the transaction and warehousing and stocktaking. The Ministry treats as directly related, among other things, taking and fulfilling orders, display, culling, removing defective or expired goods, packing, handing over goods later than the sale, preparing tills, distributing cash, briefings, counting takings, checking locks and setting the alarm.
Work not treated as directly related to trading includes site security, cleaning by a cleaning crew, and maintenance or servicing of equipment. The Ministry adds a rider: it would treat as circumvention the assignment of those tasks as extra duties to people who already trade, or already perform related activities, from Monday to Saturday. A cashier seconded “to security” on Sunday does not become security. A rota that on a non-trading Sunday labels a salesperson as security / maintenance and on Monday as sales again is a document an inspector will read together with the contract and the job description, not apart from them.
A separate trap: the warehouse. The FAQ asks whether an outlet must carry on trading and related activities together to fall under the Act. The Ministry says no. For the same trader, warehousing and stocktaking need not take place where the sale happens. “It does not seem right to assume that locating warehouse space away from the point of sale, or assigning that space to several shops, automatically takes the work done there outside the bans in Article 5.” The quotation is long because it matters. A depot with a separate shed, a dark store with no customer floor, a stockroom through the back wall — the Act does not reward splitting functions by address.
That does not mean every warehouse in Poland is closed on Sunday. It means the Sunday trading schedule must know whose warehouse it is, what it is for and who is standing in it. A logistics operator’s shed that is not your outlet is a different set of facts from your stock assigned to three shops. We do not decide that distinction for a law firm. We record it as a site attribute: owner, address, whether there is selling on site, storage only, whether the building is shared, which exception — if any — you rely on. The inspector will ask anyway. Better the answer lives in the panel than in the memory of the duty manager who has been on since Friday.
Article 6(1)(20): the online shop is an exception. The floor you pick from may not be
Point 20 is short: the ban does not apply “in online shops and on internet platforms”. Zielona Linia repeats the point in its shortened list of exceptions. That is as far as statutory certainty goes. The Act’s FAQ does not say whether a packer standing on Sunday at a shelf in your high-street shop “is an online shop” because the order arrived from WooCommerce. It does not say whether a courier collecting a pallet from your depot legalises the warehouse worker’s presence. It does not describe click-and-collect when the customer has a code from the web shop and the person handing over the bag is the same colleague who stands at the till on weekdays.
So we will not tell you that “e-commerce on Sunday is always allowed”. We will tell you what the panel should keep apart so you and your solicitor can see the risk. An order placed on the site on a non-trading Sunday is distance selling; point 20 exists on purpose. Fulfilment of that order in a trading outlet by an employee or other engaged person — receiving it, picking from the shop shelf, packing, handing over in person, loading — is already work the FAQ describes as directly related to trading or as warehousing. If it happens in an Article 3(1) premises, Article 5 is back in play unless you point to another exception (the owner trading in person, a bakery, a filling station, a pharmacy).
In a local firm those states share one address. In the morning the site takes orders. At noon someone from the shop floor goes into the back because “it is only the web shop”. In the afternoon a customer rings to collect from the shop door because the parcel locker is full. In the evening a courier waits at the dock. If all of that falls on one person on a civil-law contract and on one premises registered as a shop, the Sunday point-20 exception is not an automatic shield. It is an argument you have to defend with location and the scope of the work — or you do not use it, and you do not let staff onto the floor.
The online order panel we describe with a shop for a local business should therefore know the day status and the pick location. A non-trading-Sunday order can go into a “pick from Monday 06:00” queue or to a site your solicitor treats as covered by point 20. That is an operational and legal decision, not a marketing toggle labelled “we sell 24/7”. A customer-facing status (“we will take it today, we will dispatch on Monday”) is cheaper than explaining why Sunday CCTV shows three packers in shop-branded vests.
Click-and-collect, parcel lockers and couriers: three Sunday scripts that wreck a single rota
Click-and-collect on a non-trading Sunday looks harmless: the customer paid online on Thursday, the code is in an SMS, the shop door is ajar “for collections only”. Handing over goods later than the sale is listed in the FAQ as work directly related to trading. If an employee or contractor hands it over in the outlet, you are inside Article 5. If a sole trader hands it over in person, in their own name and on their own account, you are in point 27 — provided you are genuinely not using engaged staff. The difference is the person at the door, not whether the fiscal printer is switched off.
Parcel lockers. Dropping a bag into a machine on Sunday by an employee who left your shop with a sack of parcels is still work on fulfilling the order. The machine is not a trading outlet under Article 3(1), but the starting point — shop or warehouse — may be. Trading from vending machines is a separate exception (point 21) and concerns sales from a machine, not the logistics of your web shop. Do not merge those two regimes in one field called “automat”.
Couriers. If on Sunday an operator’s vehicle rolls onto the dock and loads pallets you picked on Saturday, and none of your staff is on site, the facts differ from a warehouse worker opening the gate, scanning codes and signing the consignment note. The rota has to be able to say: on Sunday 7 September at Okęcie warehouse we scheduled zero people on employment or civil-law contracts; any courier entry is handled by site security that does not trade Monday to Saturday. Or the reverse: two people are scheduled to pick under an exception you cite by article and point. An empty field “the courier will let themselves in” is not a procedure.
In B2B wholesale those scripts slide to Monday morning. Partner shops want goods at 06:00. Someone has the idea that a Sunday pick “does not sell anything”, it only prepares delivery notes. Delivery notes, picking, loading, a stocktake ahead of the Monday peak — that is warehousing and activities related to trading. Article 5 does not ask whether a customer with a basket was on the floor. It asks whether you assigned work in an outlet. A B2B panel with customer-specific price lists may take orders on Sunday; the question is whether anyone on your staff fulfils those orders on Sunday on the depot floor.
Wholesale depots, yards and mail-order houses sit in the definition of an outlet. B2B is not a side door
Article 3(1) lists examples: shop, stall, stand, wholesale depot, coal yard, builders’ merchants, department store, mail-order house, sales office — if work there is done by employees or other engaged persons. A wholesaler does not fall out of the Act because it keeps consumers out. A mail-order house does not fall out because it has no street window. There is one condition: work by people the Act covers. It covers employees, agency workers and people on civil-law contracts who perform paid work for a trader carrying on commercial activity for profit.
For your firm that means a B2B rota cannot be “looser” because “this is not retail”. It can be different, because the rhythm is different: orders gathered through the week, releases in the morning, routes, pallets, returns. A different rhythm does not change the ban. It changes the fields: customer, order number, loading window, whether loading is on Sunday or on Monday at 05:30 (that is no longer a statutory Sunday). 05:30 on Monday is lawful under this Act. 23:30 on Sunday is not, if you assign work in an outlet with no exception.
Agri-food wholesale markets have their own carve-outs (Article 6(1)(30) and (31)). Point 30 covers markets run by companies whose prevailing activity is letting and managing property for wholesale trade in agri-food products. Point 31 covers outlets run by businesses that buy goods on the premises of such markets, as regards activities related to trading. That is not an exception “for every food wholesaler in the county”. If you are not on such a market, do not paste point 31 into the rota because it sounds familiar.
A builders’ yard sits in the definition next to the wholesale depot. A firm that sells insulation off the yard on weekdays and on Sunday “only releases online orders for a developer” is still standing on a yard. Point 20 may cover taking the order through the website. A warehouse worker releasing it from the yard — you are back to location. The stock panel we discuss with a local online shop and with wholesale should block a pick job on a banned day when the site is an outlet and no exception is set. A block that a named person can override, with a legal basis field, is more honest than a silent export into a WMS that does not know what Sunday is.
Exceptions that need a sales register: 40 per cent, one PKD code and a regulation an inspector may demand
Some Article 6 exceptions rest on prevailing activity: flowers (point 2), souvenirs and religious articles (point 5), press, tickets, tobacco, lottery coupons (point 6), a postal outlet (point 7), bakery, confectionery, ice-cream shop (point 28), catering (point 29), and — correspondingly — the markets in point 30. Prevailing activity is three conditions together: the kind stated as prevailing on the REGON application, actually carried on in that outlet, and at least 40 per cent of monthly retail sales revenue within the meaning of the retail sales tax Act. KRS and CEIDG record one prevailing activity. The Ministry’s FAQ is blunt: you cannot add flowers and catering to make 40 per cent.
Outlets using those carve-outs keep a monthly register of sales revenue, split between revenue from the activity named in the exception and revenue from everything else. The finance minister set the form and method in the regulation of 28 January 2022 (Journal of Laws 2022, item 229). During an inspection a labour inspector is entitled to demand that register. Not keeping it, or keeping it contrary to the rules, is a fine from PLN 1,000 to PLN 100,000. That is a separate duty, whether or not a reading corner exists.
In the sales panel those 40 per cent cannot be “the owner’s feel for the month”. You need receipts and invoices split into rates / categories that map onto the excepted activity and the rest. Bread versus detergents in the same bakery. Takeaway coffee versus a grocery shelf in a café attached to a shop. Flowers versus pots, cemetery candles and ribbon, unless you are at a cemetery (point 25 is a separate, narrower exception: flowers, wreaths, sprays and candles at cemeteries). If POS categories are “goods / services”, you will not build the regulation’s register from them.
A local shop that is a general grocer on weekdays and on Sunday “becomes a bakery” because bread is 35 per cent and coffee 12 per cent does not pass the FAQ test. Not REGON, not 40 per cent in the outlet, and often not actually carrying on that activity as prevailing. The rota should not flip PKD by itself on Sunday. It can show: this outlet has a named exception, July’s register shows X per cent, the 40 per cent threshold is / is not met, opening needs a confirmation. A lie in the exception field is worse than a closed door. The inspector reads the register with the rota, not instead of it.
The owner behind the counter: point 27 works, but not for a company and not for a member of staff “popping in”
Article 6(1)(27) carves out outlets where trading is carried on by a natural-person trader solely in person, in their own name and on their own account. They may have unpaid help from a spouse, their own children, a spouse’s children, adopted children, parents, a stepmother, a stepfather, siblings, grandchildren or grandparents. Those people must not be employees or otherwise engaged in that outlet. The FAQ confirms: on days not covered by the ban, staff may trade; on Sunday and a public holiday — in person, with no employees or contractors on the floor.
A registered partnership: the trader is the partnership; a partner acts on the partnership’s account. The FAQ says point 27 does not apply. A civil partnership: partners may use the carve-out if they trade in person, without employees or other engaged persons; PIP notes that a civil-partnership partner is neither an employee nor an engaged person, so that issue lies outside the Inspectorate’s remit. A franchisee — on the Ministry’s prevailing view — acts in their own name and on their own account; they may open on Sunday if they trade solely in person, even if they employ staff on weekdays.
A rota that on a non-trading Sunday sets the owner as “shift manager” and two students “to help on the till because of the queue” is not a point-27 rota. It is a document PIP will read as assigning work. If the student has a civil-law contract during the week, they do not become a “child within point 27” on Sunday, even if they really are your child — the Act bars help from people who are at the same time engaged in the outlet. That is a person status field: employee, civil-law contract, agency worker, natural-person trader, family member on the list, outsider. Without that status, the point-27 exception is a Facebook post.
In a web shop, point 27 meets point 20. The owner packing parcels alone on Sunday in a garage that is not registered as a shop is a different set of facts from the owner plus three packers in the warehouse behind the shop. The panel does not decide which garage is an outlet. It records who was there, in what role, at which address, from when to when. A photo of the darkened shop floor and order-system logs (“pick: owner, location: house storeroom”) are more use at an inspection than a “open 24/7” badge on the site. The badge is for the customer. The file is for PIP.
What a PIP inspector asks in the shop and on the yard — and which files you will not assemble from email in time
The 21 August notice is not an inspection manual. It is a summary of case law and 2025 statistics. The Act, the FAQ and practice supply the steps: the inspector checks whether, on a Sunday covered by the ban, work in trading or related activities was assigned. They ask on what basis you were open. They ask who was there. They ask for contracts. They ask for the sales register if you cite an exception built on prevailing activity. CCTV, attendance lists, till logs, delivery notes, consignment notes, rotas in a spreadsheet with three tabs “old / new / to fix” — all of that becomes one picture. A date mismatch between the till and the rota is worse than an empty Sunday.
Keep the 2025 figures in mind without theatre. 33.2 per cent of inspections found irregularities. 41.1 per cent in 185 large-format stores. 32.5 per cent in smaller shops. 1,567 employees, 820 people engaged other than on a contract of employment, 36 people with no contract. PIP writes that breaches arise mainly from incorrect use of the point-10 exception. After 21 August 2026 that argument (“we have a reading room”) is weaker than a year earlier. If your chain’s procedure still uses a “culture zone” as the basis for opening, the procedure needs a withdrawal date, not a webinar.
In a local shop that also sells online, the inspector does not need to know your Shopify. They will ask why picking was visible on the floor. You show: Sunday orders, status waiting for Monday, no delivery notes dated Sunday, a rota with zero hours. Or you show: picking under point 20, site X, persons Y and Z, a law-firm note attached. There is no third way of “it just happened because the courier was waiting”. The third way ends in explanations and — if work was assigned — Article 10.
A separate thread the 21 August notice does not develop, and PIP does develop in other August updates: civil-law contracts. On 18 August 2026 the Inspectorate described the first results of inspections into whether a civil-law contract was the right choice after the 8 July reform. Complaints come from retail among other sectors. If on Sunday a person on a contract of mandate is on the floor, and during the week they do the same work under direction in shop hours, you have two topics at once: the trading ban and the basis of engagement. A rota that hides contractors because “they are not on the books” needs a rewrite. The basis of engagement field should be visible, not buried in HR.
What fields the panel needs so that Sunday is not just a colour on the calendar
An off-the-shelf rota product usually knows leave, sick pay and overtime. It rarely knows Article 7, Article 6 point 20 and 24:00 on Saturday. So the “SaaS or custom” question on Sundays is not a religion. It is a field test. The list below is a list of fields, not a slide about a comprehensive solution. If your current system has them and keeps one truth with the till and the WMS — stay with it. If it has a Sunday colour and nothing else, you will not grow the colour with a webinar.
- Statutory day type: trading Sunday (Article 7), Sunday under the ban, public holiday, 24 December / Easter Saturday cut after 14:00, ordinary day.
- Day boundary: 24:00–24:00 for a trading outlet, with no shift to 06:00 in the work rules.
- Site: address, selling or storage only, shared building, owner of the premises.
- Article 6 exception: point number, valid from, who approved it, attachment (opinion / REGON / sales register).
- Person: basis (employment, civil-law, agency, natural-person owner, family on the point-27 list), whether they are engaged in that outlet.
- Activity: sale, picking, stocktake, handover, loading, security, cleaning, maintenance — separate codes, not one “duty”.
- Order / delivery note / consignment note: whether the document may be created on that day at that site.
- Override of a block: who, when, which basis, an indelible log.
- 40 per cent sales register: POS categories mapped to the Article 6 activity and to the rest, month, threshold.
- Inspection export: rota, people, exceptions, warehouse documents for a chosen Sunday, in one PDF or ZIP.
Those fields will not replace a law firm. They give it material. They also give the shop manager a you cannot schedule this pick button instead of a call to the owner at 22:40 on Saturday. If the pick is to go ahead, the system asks for an exception. If there is none, the pick falls to Monday and the shop site shows the customer a real dispatch time. That is the rota joined to the online shop, not an HR ornament.
Android on the floor — scanner, pick list, clock-in — must know the same day type. A picker should not receive “take 40 lines, non-trading Sunday, location shop” only because the back office dumped the backlog on Friday. The app shows a block or it shows the exception. Offline: a queue of scans with timestamps; once the network returns, the flag performed on a banned Sunday does not vanish. A phone timestamp lies less often than a notebook.
A block you can walk through at go-live. On Saturday at 16:40 the manager adds a shift: Anna K., civil-law contract, picking, site Główna 12 shop, Sunday 7 September, 08:00–14:00. The system reads the day type: Sunday under the ban. The site record has sales and a stockroom in one entry. The person is not the owner. The exception is empty. The save fails. The message is not “error 403”. It reads: 7 September 2026 is a banned Sunday for this outlet. Cite an Article 6 point or move the pick to 8 September from 00:01. If the manager may override, a second screen demands the point number, a note and — for point 20 — confirmation that the work is meant to run under the online-shop regime, not the sales floor. Without those three fields the button stays grey. That is the whole idea of the panel in one click a spreadsheet cannot take away.
Stocktakes after 24:00. A Saturday count planned for 21:00–23:30 in practice ends at 01:10 because the handhelds ran out of battery and a delivery nobody expected came back. The Act does not ask when it was meant to finish. It asks when staff were warehousing. The panel should split attendance at 24:00: until midnight — Saturday; after midnight — Sunday. If Sunday is under the ban, the part after 24:00 either goes through an override with a basis, or it is an absence you explain on Monday. Leaving a single 21:00–01:10 shift labelled “Saturday” in a time-clock copied from a factory is exactly the day-boundary shift the Ministry forbids.
One building, three regimes: shop, stockroom and web shop on Sunday 7 September
Take a typical local firm from the GESOFT catalogue: a home-goods shop, online sales with collection, wholesale for renovation crews through a B2B panel. One address. A sales floor from the street. A warehouse at the back. An office upstairs where someone clicks invoices. Sunday 7 September 2026 is not a trading Sunday. 30 August was. Staff remember August and want to “clear the online backlog”.
Scenario A. A natural-person owner opens the door, packs twelve parcels from Saturday orders themselves, takes them to a locker themselves, nobody who is engaged comes in. The sales floor is dark, tills off, B2B takes orders for Monday. Point 27 and point 20 can be defended here if the facts really look like that. Rota: one person, role trader, activity web-shop pick, site back room, exception 27, no delivery notes for B2B customers, no receipts.
Scenario B. The same Sunday, two warehouse workers on civil-law contracts “because we cannot keep up in season”, picking from sales-floor shelves because the back is short, three click-and-collect handovers “since we are here anyway”, one load for a crew that drove in for plasterboard. Tills still off. The site says “the online shop is open”. That is not point 20 in a clean form and it is not point 27. It is assigning activities related to trading in an outlet. A rota that records it as “e-commerce — exception” is lying. A rota that will not let those shifts through without an exception and an override log protects the firm from its own hurry.
Scenario C. The warehouse is two kilometres away, a different unit, no sales floor, stock reserved for the web shop and B2B. Three people pick on Sunday. The ministerial FAQ warns that hiving off a warehouse does not automatically switch off Article 5 for the same trader. Here the panel’s job ends and the law firm’s begins: whether that unit is a trading outlet, whether point 20 can be argued, whether the work is “in an online shop”. The panel stores the opinion, the date, the author, and may still block shifts until someone in management confirms the risk. A block with confirmation is better than a silent nod from the duty manager.
Invoices for Sunday orders can still go out on Monday through KSeF in the company application. Date of sale / date of performance and date of issue are separate fields. Do not mix them with the warehouse worker’s attendance date. KSeF does not legalise a Sunday on the floor. KSeF records an invoice. PIP asks about people. Two authorities, two documents, one building. A system that ties tills, KSeF and the rota to a single “document date” will lose an inspection that asks about hours, not about XML.
A receipt on a non-trading Sunday is a separate alarm. If the till at Główna 12 Shop prints receipts on 7 September and the rota shows zero people, the inspector does not need a reading room to ask the question. Either someone traded off the rota, or the till lives in another time zone, or the owner issued receipts in person and the rota is silent. On a banned day the POS should either block fiscalisation on a sales-floor terminal (except the natural-person trader role under point 27) or demand the same basis the rota demands. A daily till report for a banned Sunday, attached to the PIP export, saves you half an hour explaining why “the till started itself”. Tills do not start themselves.
SaaS, custom work, what we will not scrap, and what to ask a vendor before 30 August
If you have three identical shops, one warehouse and the Article 7 calendar is enough — look for rota SaaS and do not buy yourself a project. If you have a shop + web shop + B2B + a builders’ yard + an owner who packs alone on Sunday and in December you open three trading Sundays with a full crew, a boxed product usually has no model of site and exception. Then custom work (Laravel, Vue, Android) makes sense. The comparison of an off-the-shelf programme and software to order is there so you do not build a subscription that still ends in a spreadsheet.
We do not scrap a working time-clock if it already counts hours and Sundays can be added as a layer: day type, exception, pick block. We do not replace PIP. We do not replace the fiscal till, KSeF, a WMS that actually releases stock, or the books. Integrate — yes. Pretend one “compliance” tile settles Article 10 — no.
- Is the 2026 calendar (including 30 August, 6/13/20 December and the 24 December cut after 14:00) in the system, or in a file HR pastes by hand?
- Is the Sunday day 24:00–24:00, or can it be moved to 06:00 as in a factory?
- Does a site have an outlet attribute and a separate “storage only / shared building” attribute?
- Is the Article 6 exception a dictionary with a point number, or a free-text field “other”?
- Can picking and delivery notes be blocked on a banned day without an exception?
- Are contractors and employees distinguished, and does a natural-person owner have a separate role under point 27?
- Does the 40 per cent sales register join POS categories, or does it live in the bookkeeper’s spreadsheet?
- Does a PIP export assemble the rota, people, exceptions and warehouse documents for one Sunday?
- Who may override a block, and can the log be deleted?
- What happens when the web-shop API accepts an order on Sunday — a Monday queue, or an automatic pick?
“We have an e-commerce module” and “we have HR” are not answers. The e-commerce module sells. HR books leave. A trading Sunday is the crossing of both and of an Act a SaaS product from another country has not read. If the vendor cannot show point 20 and point 27 as separate paths, they will not “tune it after go-live”. Either they have the model, or you will deliver it with your own panel.
A checklist for 30 August and for the Sundays that are no longer trading Sundays
30 August 2026 is the last trading Sunday before December. Use it not as “one more Saturday” but as a dress rehearsal of the rota. That day the system should let through a normal crew in outlets that do not rely on exceptions — and at the same time show that the next Sunday already needs a basis. If 30 August and 6 September look identical in the panel, the Article 7 calendar is not alive in the system.
- Load the eight Zielona Linia dates for 2026 and the 24 December and Easter Saturday cuts after 14:00.
- Mark every site: sales / warehouse / mixed / shared.
- An Article 6 exception dictionary with a point number; remove “reading room / nook / culture zone” as a point-10 basis.
- Assign people: employment, civil-law, agency, owner, family on the list; mark who is engaged in the outlet.
- Join picking, delivery notes and tills to the day type — a block on a banned Sunday with no exception.
- Set the web-shop queue: accept 24/7, fulfil by site and day.
- If you use the 40 per cent exception — check the register for the last full month and the POS category map.
- Prepare an export of one Sunday (people, hours, exceptions, documents) as if the inspector arrived on Monday.
- Read the off-site warehouse scenario with a solicitor; store the opinion against the site or do not plan shifts there.
- Tell customers the real dispatch time after 30 August before the rota lets through a quiet pick “as usual”.
December 2026 has three trading Sundays in a row: 6, 13 and 20. Between them sit Sundays under the ban. Staff who have “already switched into Christmas mode” easily stay on the floor on 27 December or 3 January. The calendar does not forgive a mode. A panel that lets a full crew through on 20 December and on 27 December asks for point 27 or shuts picking does the job a manager’s notebook will not do after a third shift.
Finally, something the PIP notice does not say and that will land on you anyway: a web-shop customer does not know Article 6. They know a dispatch promise. If after 30 August you promise “posted on Sunday” and staff should not be on the floor, the site is lying, not the Act. Shorten the promise rather than lengthen the attendance list. The Sunday trading schedule is there so those two things — the promise and the list — stop living in separate worlds.
What to do this week, before 30 August passes like an ordinary Saturday
The 21 August notice is short. The 10 June Supreme Court judgment is shorter in its operative part than it looks. The Zielona Linia calendar fits on one page. The Family Ministry FAQ is long, but you read it once, against a named outlet, not “about retail in general”. This week it is enough to read off which of your sites is an outlet, who really comes in on Sunday, which exception — if any — you cite, and whether the system will hold that after 30 August. The rest, including the reading corner, is already settled by a line of case law the Inspectorate does not intend to let go.
If after that checklist you see that the spreadsheet, the time-clock and the web shop say three different things about Sunday — write via contact. We will not arrive reciting the Act. We will arrive with a model of site, day and person. Where configuring a boxed product is enough, we will say “stay with it”. Where shop, depot and web shop share stock and staff, we will say you need your own panel, not another colour on the calendar.
Frequently asked questions
- Does a reading corner or a book club let you open the shop on a non-trading Sunday?
- No. The Supreme Court judgment of 10 June 2026 (III KK 26/26), confirmed in PIP’s notice of 21 August 2026, holds that extra cultural activity inside a trading outlet does not use Article 6(1)(10). That exception covers a shop in an establishment for culture, sport, education, tourism or recreation, not the reverse.
- When in 2026 may you trade on Sunday without an Article 6 exception?
- According to Zielona Linia: 25 January, 29 March, 26 April, 28 June, 30 August, 6, 13 and 20 December. After PIP’s 21 August notice the next is 30 August, then the three December Sundays.
- May an online shop take orders on a banned Sunday?
- Article 6(1)(20) carves out online shops and platforms. Taking an order through the site is not the same as picking, packing and handing over by staff in an outlet. The Ministry FAQ treats order fulfilment, packing and warehousing as activities related to trading when they take place in an outlet.
- Is a warehouse out of town outside the ban because there are no tills there?
- Not automatically. The Family Ministry writes that, for the same trader, a different warehouse address does not switch off Article 5. A wholesale depot, a yard and a mail-order house sit in the definition of an outlet (Article 3(1)). A solicitor assesses the particular unit; the panel records that assessment, it does not guess it.
- What penalties apply for assigning work against the ban?
- Article 10 of the Act — a fine from PLN 1,000 to PLN 100,000. The same band applies to missing or incorrect monthly sales registers when you use exceptions built on prevailing activity.
- May the owner open the shop alone?
- Yes, if they are a natural person and trade in person, in their own name and on their own account (point 27), without employees or other engaged persons. Unpaid help from listed family members is allowed, provided they are not engaged in that outlet. A registered partnership does not use this exception.
- From which hour does Sunday run in a shop?
- From 24:00 on Saturday to 24:00 on Sunday. The Ministry of Family says that boundary is not moved in the work rules. The 06:00 hour in the Labour Code does not apply to trading outlets under this Act.
- Does a bakery or a café inside the shop open the whole outlet?
- Only if you meet the prevailing-activity test: one code in REGON, actual performance in that outlet, at least 40 per cent of monthly retail sales revenue, plus the register under the finance minister’s regulation of 28 January 2022. You do not add several activities together.
- Will GESOFT replace PIP or say that a web shop always legalises a warehouse?
- No. We do not replace the authority, the court or a law firm. We build a panel for rotas, sites and exceptions. Whether a particular depot fits point 20 is for you and your solicitor.
- How fast is a quote, and when does custom software make sense?
- A quote comes back within 24 hours after contact. SaaS is enough for a simple Article 7 calendar. Custom work (Laravel, Vue, Android) — when shop, web shop, B2B and depot share staff and stock, and a boxed product has no model of exception and site. We do not scrap a working time-clock as a matter of principle.
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