Your borrowing power just shrank, even though nothing in your life changed
If you had asked a bank in May how much you could borrow for a flat, you would have heard a different number than today — even though your income, savings and credit history stayed exactly the same. This isn't a rumour or a guess. According to a September review of bank offers published by the Polish industry portal ilezametr.pl and confirmed by analysis from Bankier.pl, five banks cut the maximum mortgage amount available to an identical client within a single month — in the most extreme case, the drop reached as much as PLN 70,000. Three other banks moved the other way and raised their limits, but far more modestly, by up to roughly PLN 20,000.
As a result, the average maximum borrowing capacity calculated for sample households fell in September by several to over a dozen thousand zloty compared with August. It's an easy shift to miss if you haven't rechecked your numbers since spring — and plenty of buyers are still planning their purchase budget around a calculation made back in May or June.
The culprit has a name: a tightened Recommendation S
The source of the confusion isn't a rate decision by the Monetary Policy Council, nor a sudden jump in interest rates — those have stayed unchanged for months. The culprit is a tightened Recommendation S from Poland's Financial Supervision Authority (KNF), in force since 19 June 2026. It's a set of guidelines that dictates how banks must calculate mortgage borrowing capacity — and this time the regulator tightened several screws at once.
First, banks must now add a higher safety buffer on top of the interest rate — at least 2.5 percentage points for fixed-rate loans, and more for variable-rate ones. This is effectively a stress test: the bank checks whether you could still cope if interest rates rose. The higher the buffer, the less you can borrow at the same income.
Second, the way the DSTI ratio (debt-service-to-income) is calculated has changed — KNF recommends caution above 40 percent for lower earners and above 50 percent for higher earners. Third, and probably the most tangible change in practice: banks can no longer understate a household's living costs down to the statutory social minimum if actual spending is clearly higher. In other words, if you realistically spend more on living costs than the legal minimum, the bank now has to factor that in — which automatically shrinks the amount theoretically available for your monthly instalment.
Taken together, these changes, according to analysts cited by ilezametr.pl, reduce the average client's borrowing capacity by 10–15 percent at the same income level compared with the situation before June.
Why banks are reacting at different speeds
One of the more interesting observations from the September review is that banks aren't implementing Recommendation S simultaneously or to the same degree. Each institution has its own scoring model and its own interpretation of the KNF's guidelines within the bounds the regulation allows. That's why, in the very same month, some banks slashed limits by tens of thousands of zloty while others — for an identical client profile — actually raised them. The regulator gave banks a phased implementation window, so the coming months will most likely bring further corrections in both directions as individual institutions keep adjusting their algorithms.
This has a genuinely practical implication: the spread between different banks' offers is noticeably wider today than it was back in spring. Calculating your borrowing capacity has stopped being a formality you can do at one bank and treat as representative of the whole market.
What this means for your wallet
If you're planning to buy a flat in the coming months, there are a few practical takeaways worth drawing from this.
- Refresh your calculation, even if you did one recently. A borrowing-capacity estimate from two or three months ago may already be out of date — regardless of whether your income has risen or stayed flat. It's worth checking current terms in our mortgage rankings before you sign any preliminary agreement with a developer or seller.
- Compare offers more widely than usual. Since banks now differ more than ever in how quickly they're rolling out the new requirements, an application rejected at one bank could well be approved at another — and vice versa. It's also worth checking personal loan offers if you're considering financing part of your down payment or renovation costs — just remember that any extra loan simultaneously reduces your mortgage capacity, because it adds to your monthly obligations.
- Consider a larger down payment. With borrowing capacity shrinking rather than growing, every extra percentage point of down payment genuinely improves your odds of approval and lowers the amount you need to borrow. If you still have time before buying, parking savings in a savings account or a fixed-term deposit lets you earn interest while building toward a bigger down payment, instead of leaving cash sitting in a current account earning nothing.
- Don't treat this as a reason to panic. This isn't a sector liquidity crisis or a sign that rate hikes are coming — it's a regulatory correction meant to protect borrowers from over-indebtedness if the cost of money rises in future. In the short term it means less flexibility when buying, but in the long term it's designed to reduce the risk of repayment trouble down the line.
What you should do
Before you sign any reservation or preliminary agreement, ask your bank for a fresh, written preliminary credit decision — don't rely on an estimate from a few months ago or on a calculator that doesn't reflect the latest version of Recommendation S. If the loan amount you were counting on is no longer available, check offers from several institutions side by side, because differences in how banks are approaching the new requirements are now often bigger than differences in their margins. And if your purchase is still months away, use that time to build a larger down payment — it remains the single most effective way to offset the impact of the tighter rules.