Study in Poland from Bangladesh: costs, English tests and visa

Warsaw University of Technology charges a non-EU student €6,510 a semester for its master’s in Data Science, which is €13,020 for the year. The University of Tartu, one country north, charges €7,200 a year for a master’s in computer science. Poland arrives in most Dhaka conversations as the cheap European option, and for that subject it is the expensive one.

On the national average it is cheap: NAWA’s official study portal puts a bachelor’s, master’s or long-cycle degree at around €2,000 a year. But an average describes a country, not a programme — on the same Warsaw campus that bills €7,090 a semester for architecture, aerospace engineering costs €2,490.

The money, at least, is knowable. Two harder things sit behind it: a language rule with no discretion in it, and a consulate that is not in this country.

It is also the argument for comparing fees by the year. €6,510 a semester reads smaller on a brochure than €13,020 a year, and it is the same money: ৳18,61,860 of tuition alone, converting the euro at ৳143, an August 2026 approximation and not a quote. Your bank sells euros at its own rate and charges for the transfer, so read that as a floor.

Poland has no visa-issuing embassy in Dhaka

The consular district covering Bangladesh belongs to the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in New Delhi, which also handles Bhutan, the Maldives, Nepal and Sri Lanka. Your long-stay student visa is a national D visa, issued for up to one year. You register in e-konsulat, then submit documents at a VFS Global centre. Study-visa slots are released strictly in order of registration — New Delhi opens them Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday at 10:00, Mumbai on Wednesday at 10:30, once every two weeks.

Whether a Polish national visa can be lodged in Dhaka at all is the question every applicant asks and no official Polish page answers; the gov.pl pages for this region name only the Indian centres. Plan on travelling, budget the ticket and the days out of term, and confirm with New Delhi before you book. Once the file is in, a visa is issued or refused within 15 days, extendable to 30. That part is fast. Reaching the counter is not.

The money you must show, and one figure nobody agrees on

Two separate tests, at two separate stages, and students prepare for only the first.

At the visa and entry stage, the Ministry of the Interior and Administration requires students, researchers and trainees to hold at least PLN 1,270 for the first two months of the planned stay, or the equivalent in another currency — about ৳43,000 at ৳34 to the złoty. Return-travel funds sit on top unless you hold a return ticket: PLN 200 for a neighbouring country, PLN 500 within the EU or EFTA, PLN 2,500 for everywhere else, the line Bangladesh falls under.

Proof can be a bank statement or certificate of funds issued within one month of the border crossing, traveller’s cheques, a credit-card limit certificate, a scholarship document, or the ticket itself. A statement printed in June will not carry you across the border in September. Our document checklist for Bangladeshi students sets out what the bank paperwork has to look like at the New Delhi counter.

At the residence-permit stage the test changes shape. Your monthly funds, after housing costs, must exceed the social-assistance income threshold, plus return-travel costs, plus tuition if you study on a fee-paying basis.

This is where the official pages fall out of step. Student-facing pages still print PLN 776 for a single person and PLN 600 for a person in a family; the social-assistance thresholds they track rose at the start of 2025 and not every page has caught up. Budget above the published figure, and settle the operative number with your voivodeship office while you are still choosing a flat.

Poland charges tuition, and the range is wide

Non-EU students pay at Polish public universities. This surprises applicants who have heard Poland described as free, which describes the EU rate, not yours.

NAWA’s portal gives €2,000 a year for bachelor’s, master’s and long-cycle programmes, €3,000 for postgraduate and specialist courses, and €2,000 for a preparatory Polish-language course. The stated range is €2,000 to €6,000 a year, with MBA programmes at €8,000 to €12,000. Institutions set their own fees, which by law cannot fall below the cost of running the programme.

Four groups pay nothing: Polish citizens, EU and EEA citizens, Karta Polaka holders, and full-time doctoral candidates, who also receive a scholarship. For a Bangladeshi applicant that last one is the only realistic door to a fully funded place.

Price the programme, never the country. Set the total against what a first year abroad costs, then compare Poland with the UK.

The B2 rule, and the closed list

The legal basis is article 70(5f) of the Law on Higher Education and Science, inserted by the Act of 4 April 2025 on eliminating irregularities in the Polish visa system (Dz.U. 2025 poz. 622), in force since 1 July 2025. A non-EU applicant must prove B2 or higher in the language of instruction, Polish or foreign.

The certificates that satisfy it were fixed by regulation on 30 July 2025 (Dz.U. 2025 poz. 1045), whose Annex 2 sets the English list and the minimum scores. Duolingo does not appear on it, and neither does a letter from your college confirming that English was your medium of instruction, unless the diploma or its supplement says so in the terms the regulation accepts.

The annex also accepts evidence that is not a test: a diploma, supplement or certificate naming English as the language of instruction; a philology or applied-linguistics degree covering at least 500 hours of the language; an IB Diploma for its primary language; a European Baccalaureate at L1 or L2; a sworn translator’s certificate; and a preparatory course of at least nine months under article 60(4) of the Act on Foreigners.

Your TOEFL certificate and the regulation are now on different scales

ETS moved TOEFL to a 1–6 scale on 21 January 2026, in half-band steps, with the total reported as the average of the four sections rather than their sum. A Bangladeshi who sits the test this month gets a band. The Polish regulation still asks for “co najmniej 72 pkt”, carries no 1–6 figure anywhere, and has not been amended since it came into force on 1 August 2025.

The gap is bridged for now, and by ETS rather than by Poland. ETS prints a comparable 0–120 total on score reports for two years from the change, so the statutory 72 stays usable until roughly January 2028. Its alignment puts CEFR B2 at bands 4.5 and 4.0, and band 4.0’s range opens at exactly 72 — which makes 4.0 the statutory floor, on ETS’s reading of its own scale. The legal test underneath both numbers is B2, and that has not moved.

Polish institutions are split on saying so. Warsaw University of Technology publishes both, “TOEFL iBT – minimum 87 points (previous scale) / 4.5 points (new scale)”, and both figures sit above the regulation’s floor, as does its IELTS requirement of 6.0. The University of Warsaw’s 2026/27 page, the Jagiellonian, AGH and Wrocław University of Science and Technology still print 72 alone. No Polish university and no ministry has published a 1–6 equivalent for the statutory threshold, or said what it will accept once ETS stops printing comparable totals. Where a programme page prints one scale only, make admissions name the band it treats as B2 for your intake, and keep the reply.

One more warning: the Minister’s communiqué of 13 August 2025 states plainly that a consulate may verify your language competence independently during the visa procedure, whatever your university accepted. Check your score against the statutory list, not a marketing page, then book the sitting — the guide to IELTS, PTE and TOEFL centres in Bangladesh covers where.

After you land: the residence permit

The D visa gets you in. Staying means applying to the voivode of your province for a temporary residence permit for the purpose of studies, which comes with a residence card, the karta pobytu.

• First permit: 15 months, or, where the studies justify a shorter stay, the academic year plus three months
• Subsequent permits: the period of studies plus three months, up to a maximum of three years
• Decision time: a complete application should be handled within 60 days

Poland also runs a separate temporary residence permit for graduates; read the Office for Foreigners’ conditions rather than what an agent tells you a degree entitles you to.

Work during study: no hour cap, and one condition that decides everything

Poland sets no limit on how many hours a student works. No weekly cap appears in the Act, none in the regulation granting the exemption, and the government’s study portal says it outright: “There are no restrictions on that, not like in the other countries.” The EU Immigration Portal lists Poland’s allowed working hours as “Not specified”. What decides your case is which document you hold and where you are enrolled.

A temporary residence permit for studies carries free access to the labour market by statute. The Act of 20 March 2025 on entrusting work to foreigners (Dz.U. 2025 poz. 621) lists the article 144 study permit among the titles giving swobodny dostęp do rynku pracy, and the residence card issued with it carries the annotation dostęp do rynku pracy beside student. No work permit, no employer declaration, nothing to count.

A national D visa is not on that statutory list, and this is where the past year’s real change sits. Visa holders depend on a ministerial regulation, and it was replaced on 1 December 2025. The new text (Dz.U. 2025 poz. 1620) gives the exemption to a student of studia stacjonarne — full-time study — at an institution the Minister of the Interior has approved for admitting foreign students, or one exempt from that approval and not banned from admitting them. Two transitional windows softened the switch; both closed in 2026, on 31 May and 30 June.

That condition sorts Polish institutions into two groups. Public academic universities, military and state-service academies, church-run universities covered by an international agreement or a statute, research institutes and Polish Academy of Sciences institutes need no approval — Warsaw, the Jagiellonian, AGH and Wrocław sit inside it. Private universities and public vocational universities sit outside. They need a live approval decision, and the interior ministry publishes the list of approved institutions. Part-time and evening study, studia niestacjonarne, is outside the exemption anywhere: the labour ministry’s Zielona Linia answers that with a flat refusal.

One consequence sits between two provisions and is stated by neither. The approval that gates the work exemption also gates the study residence permit under article 144. Read side by side, the two texts leave a student at an unapproved private university with neither route open — no permit, and no lawful work on the visa. No official Polish page says that in those words. Check your named university against the ministry’s list at offer stage, and treat an agent’s assurance as unverified.

Two footnotes. A placement forming part of your degree programme is exempt whatever else applies. And Poland’s study portal still describes the exemption as covering any full-time student with a visa or a permit, with no mention of the institution condition; it has not been updated since the regulation changed. For the caps elsewhere, see the part-time work rules guide.

What a Polish visa does not give you

Families read “EU” and picture free movement, and someone always raises weekend work in Berlin. A Polish national visa does not let you reside in other Schengen states beyond the standard 90 days in any 180, and a Polish temporary residence permit does not let you work in other Schengen territories. The permit is Polish. So is the job market attached to it. What the label EU does and does not buy elsewhere is set out in the Europe-wide guide for Bangladeshi students.

Common mistakes

• Booking a Duolingo test, or any certificate absent from the statutory Annex 2 list
• Sitting IELTS for a 5.0 when the statutory floor is 5.5, and the university’s own floor may be 6.0
• Reading a TOEFL requirement without checking which of the two scales the page was written in
• Taking a job on a D visa while enrolled at a private university the interior ministry has not approved
• Assuming the visa can be applied for in Dhaka, and losing weeks discovering otherwise
• Budgeting the PLN 1,270 living requirement and forgetting the PLN 2,500 return-travel line

Polish institutions recruit in Bangladesh through agents more often than in person, so verify anyone offering to file for you. How to verify a consultancy in Bangladesh sets out the checks — and any agent still calling Duolingo acceptable for Poland has told you what you need to know.

Frequently asked questions