Business Trip Insurance for Poland: Short Visits and Longer Postings

A Short Trip Uses the Same Schengen Visa (Type C) Insurance as a Tourist

If your trip is under 90 days, and most business trips are, you need exactly what a tourist needs for a Schengen visa (type C): a policy with a minimum sum insured of EUR 30,000, covering urgent medical treatment, emergency hospitalization, repatriation, and death. That comes from Article 15 of the EU Visa Code (Regulation (EC) No 810/2009), and it applies the same way regardless of why you're traveling. Being sent by an employer changes what the consulate wants alongside the policy, usually an invitation letter from the host company or partner, but it doesn't change the insurance product itself. Any of the insurers we work with, Universalna, PZU Ukraina, Kniazha, or ETS, issues a policy that satisfies this and is accepted with your application.

Two things are worth checking before you buy, since a plain tourist policy doesn't always include them. First, cover for canceling the trip for work reasons: a standard tourist policy typically excludes cancellations tied to your job, and that's exactly the kind of cancellation business travelers most often need covered. Second, cover for a laptop, phone, or other equipment you're carrying for work. Neither one is required for the visa itself, and neither shows up on a consular checklist, but both matter once you're traveling for a company rather than for yourself. Your employer isn't legally required to arrange any of this either: plenty of companies do it as a matter of policy, but if yours doesn't, buying a compliant EUR 30,000 policy yourself takes a few minutes.

A Longer Posting Needs a National Visa (Type D) and a Type C Work Permit

If your employer is sending you to work at a Polish branch or partner company for months rather than weeks, you're generally looking at a national visa (type D) combined with a Type C work permit, a posting-category permit that's entirely separate from the Type C label used for the Schengen visa; the two categories just happen to share a letter. The insurance minimum doesn't move for that longer stay: it's still EUR 30,000. What changes is only the legal basis behind the number, since a national D visa falls outside the Schengen-harmonized system and runs instead on Poland's own Act on Foreigners (Ustawa o cudzoziemcach) rather than the EU Visa Code. The policy still needs 24/7 assistance and has to stay valid for the whole visa period, up to a year.

One point worth raising with whoever is organizing the posting on the employer's side: Poland and Ukraine have their own bilateral social security agreement from 2012. That's separate from the A1 certificate mechanism EU and EFTA countries (Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Switzerland, plus the EU itself) use for postings among themselves, which doesn't apply to Ukraine. Exactly how the bilateral agreement affects your contributions and coverage during a posting is specific enough to your situation that it's worth confirming directly with your employer or an accountant familiar with it, rather than assuming it works like the standard EU posting rules.