Payment orders from Poland’s e-court: filings and outcomes in 2010–2025

Where these numbers come from

The Ministry of Justice keeps records of the electronic writ-of-payment procedure: how many claims arrive, how many the court resolves and in what way, how many carry over to the next year. Leksio pulls this data straight from the government open-data service and turns it into the charts and takeaways below - no retouching, no cherry-picking.

The whole procedure is run by one district court in Lublin. A claim is filed online; the claimant identifies evidence and gives reasons for the claim, but does not attach evidence to the statement of claim. The e-court conducts no evidentiary proceedings before issuing an order. The records count cases, not people: one entry is one claim, no matter how many the same creditor filed that day.

Where the data comes from and how Leksio computes it

The source is the dataset “EPU - electronic writ-of-payment procedure (e-court)” published by the Ministry of Justice at dane.gov.pl - a single resource covering 2010–2025, the entire life of this track. Leksio fetches the resource through the API, normalises it and computes every value on this page from it. “Payment order” corresponds to the reporting category “granted in full or in part”, and “moved to ordinary proceedings” to “closed under art. 505(33) §1 of the Code of Civil Procedure”. That wording applied until the turn of 2019 and 2020; since the change, cases that used to go to the competent court end at the e-court as discontinued proceedings and are reported there.

The procedure is run by the District Court Lublin-Zachód in Lublin. A claim is filed electronically without evidence attached, and the payment order is served on the defendant. Under the law in force on 18 August 2026, the defendant may object, generally within two weeks of service. Evidence is not attached to the objection, and the e-court discontinues the proceedings to the extent that the order has lost effect. The claimant may then bring the same claim outside EPU. In an individual case, the current provision and the instructions served with the order should be checked.

The last two columns of the report are indicators computed by the ministry, not case counts: the clearance rate in per cent and the duration of proceedings in days under the CEPEJ methodology. We report them as published and never mix them with case counts. In one year the summary row of the source repeats a value from the neighbouring column; the figure was reconstructed from the sum of case types, after which the report balances again, and this is flagged under the relevant chart. Any takeaway missing its data is simply not shown. The report describes statistics, not an individual situation - it is not legal advice.

One court, the scale of a country

Filings run into the millions a year and have moved in jumps across the dataset. Rapid growth was followed by a peak, a deep fall and a partial rebound. The dataset shows the scale of those changes but cannot by itself attribute them to a particular amendment, the pandemic or creditors’ behaviour.

The chart shows three quantities at once: new cases, resolved cases and the backlog carried into the next year. The gap between the first two lines says more than either on its own - in years when the court resolves less than arrives, the backlog grows and rolls into the following year.

How a claim ends

The most common outcome is a payment order: the claim is granted in full or in part. The order is issued without a hearing and without evidentiary proceedings. The defendant may object, generally within two weeks of service; the current law and the instructions served with the order determine the effect.

Cases not ending with an order are split into several categories. “Transfer to the competent court” is a historical category from the period governed by the former rules. After the legal change around 2019–2020, the statistics instead show discontinuations in the e-court. The series must not be read as one unchanged procedure across the whole period.

When the claim is defective

Returned and rejected claims form a separate group. They are distinct procedural outcomes, but the records do not give the reason for each decision. Their counts are therefore not a simple measure of claimants’ care or the quality of bulk filings.

A returned or rejected claim ended 34,175 cases in 2025, 2% of those resolved; the most such outcomes came in 2019 - 103,156.

How fast the order arrives

The records also carry two indicators computed by the ministry: the clearance rate, that is resolved cases against incoming ones, and a duration indicator for proceedings. The latter is given in days, whereas ordinary court cases are discussed in months - Leksio’s report on case duration puts those orders of magnitude side by side.

The indicator does not measure the life of a single case, though: it is the backlog at the end of the period against average disposal. A year in which the court cleared a jam looks excellent in it, a year in which the jam grew looks dreadful. The swings between years therefore describe the state of the court, not how long one particular creditor waited.

Speed is not the whole assessment of the e-court

Gov.pl publishes a separate, user-facing average waiting time for a payment order in 2025. It is not the same measure as the Disposition Time chart, which relates the pending stock to the rate of disposal. The two measures must be named separately; neither guarantees a deadline in an individual case.

A 2026 Institute of Justice study and a peer-reviewed 2024 analysis of digital exclusion add another dimension: access to the e-court also depends on digital skills, effective service and a genuine opportunity to object. Claim and order volumes do not measure those features, so a high caseload is not by itself evidence either of procedural fairness or of its absence.

Datasets - dane.gov.pl

• dane.gov.pl - dataset 124

  Primary open-data source from which the figures and charts in this report are computed. Individual files, reporting years, transformations and missing measurements are documented in the expanded methodology.