Over 13,000 more people moved from Germany to Poland than in the opposite direction last year, a new report has found. The Polish Economic Institute (PIE), a state-backed economic think tank, said in a report published on Friday that Germany’s net migration balance with Poland fell to -13,600 in 2025, deepening a reversal that began a year earlier. The number means that 13,600 more people moved from Germany to Poland than the other way around, with data showing that migrants from across Central and Eastern Europe are increasingly leaving Germany. Germany’s net migration balance with Poland was the lowest among all 119 countries covered by the data – a stark contrast to just a couple years prior in 2023, when 17,000 more people moved from Poland to Germany than vice versa. “Germany’s negative net migration balance with Poland is primarily the result of a decline in the number of people leaving Poland for Germany,” the Institute said, adding that arrivals from Poland were down 66% from 2013, while the numbers making the reverse journey dropped only 36%. Poland’s economic growth The trend reflects stronger growth and wage gains in Poland alongside Germany’s weaker economic performance. It coincides with a broader reversal in Polish emigration as living standards and job opportunities improve for Poles at home. Statistics Poland, the country’s state-run statistics agency, estimates that about 1.51 million Polish citizens were temporarily living abroad at the end of 2025, 21,000 fewer than in 2024. Data published this month by the EU’s statistics office, Eurostat, ranked Poland as the bloc’s sixth-largest economy in 2025, ahead of countries like Sweden and Belgium and more than twice the size of Romania, the next-largest economy in Central and Eastern Europe. Although Germany remains the EU’s largest economy, the Polish Economic Institute, citing data from Eurostat, said that Germany has recorded lower economic growth than each of the nine Central and Eastern European countries analyzed in the institute’s report over the past three years.
