Radek Pietruszka/PAP

Mateusz Morawiecki, the Polish prime minister, has presently a motion for an extension to the mortgage moratorium programme to 2024, which gives borrowers the chance to defer mortgage payments.

In 2022, parliament passed a law allowing borrowers to temporarily suspend mortgage repayments for four months in 2022 and another four months in 2023.

The law was introduced to help borrowers cope with the financial burden caused by interest rates that have increased to 6.75 percent, and an inflation rate that hit a 26-year-high in February 2023 of 18.4 percent.

“We have referred to the Sejm (the lower house of Polish parliament- PAP) of the Republic of Poland a bill on the mortgage moratorium for the year 2024,” Mateusz Morawiecki wrote on social media on Thursday.

He asked Szymon Holownia, the newly-elected speaker of the Sejm, to make sure the legislation proceeds smoothly as “there is no time to lose” because “thousands of Polish families cannot wait.”

“The Sejm should deal with this bill at its next session. We want the suspension of the mortgage repayment in 2024 to be possible to the same extent as in 2023, that is, one month in one quarter,” wrote the prime minister.

“Interest rates are fortunately already falling, however, they are not yet low enough for this form of assistance to be abandoned. The conditions for borrowers are still significantly worse than on the day the loan agreement was signed,” Morawiecki added.

He said that, so far, the programme has covered 1.09 million housing loans, representing 57 percent of all housing loans in Polish zlotys.