7 signs your B2B contract is disguised employment
- The law doesn’t count signs: it asks whether three things are present at once: personal performance of work, subordination to the client, and pay for the mere fact of working rather than for a result¹.
- The seven points below are a practical translation of those three legal requirements into concrete details you can check against your contract and invoices in 10 minutes.
- Four or more points out of seven is already grounds to talk to a lawyer before a PIP inspector does it for you.
- One sign alone doesn’t mean much: an inspector or a court always assesses the whole picture, not a single detail².
- Checking your situation costs far less than a ZUS back-payment for several years if reclassification is confirmed after an inspection.
Why four legal criteria aren’t enough to self-check
We already wrote in the series article “Who risks losing B2B status after the PIP 2026 reform” that the law assesses a contract against four criteria from Article 22 § 1 of the Labor Code: the type of work, subordination, place and time, and pay for the fact of working. The problem is that these four criteria are written in the language of the statute, not the language of your calendar.
“Subordination to the client” is a legal term. In practice it breaks down into several concrete, easy-to-check details: do you report daily, do you have a desk at the client’s office, can you turn down a task. We broke the four legal criteria down into seven practical points, each of which you can check against your own contract, invoices, and calendar without a lawyer.
One sign alone proves nothing. Risk is created by the combination: the more of these seven points you recognize in your work, the closer your contract is to employment.
The seven-point checklist
| # | Sign | What to check |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | One client, almost all your income | Whether 80% or more of your payments come from a single client over the year |
| 2 | Client-provided equipment and systems | Whether you work on a laptop, licenses, or accounts provided by the client |
| 3 | A fixed schedule | Whether specific working hours are set, rather than just a deadline for the result |
| 4 | A workplace at the client’s office | Whether you have a permanent desk in the office next to full-time staff |
| 5 | Daily instructions and reporting | Whether you get tasks from the client’s manager day after day, rather than just a project brief |
| 6 | An obligation to do the work personally | Whether you can hand the work off to a colleague or subcontractor without the client’s consent |
| 7 | A fixed amount regardless of output | Whether the invoiced amount is the same every month, regardless of the scope of work done |
Sign 1: one client makes up almost all your income
A single client doesn’t break the law by itself: the law doesn’t forbid having one client. But when 80% or more of annual income comes from one source, that’s the first brick in the picture an inspector will build from all seven points³.
Example. Ihor has been developing software for one company for a year, while also taking on two small freelance projects on the side that together bring in 15% of his income. Does Ihor have sign 1? Formally, no. The main client doesn’t cover 100%, but 85% of income from one source is still a high figure, so an inspector will look at the remaining six signs more closely.
Sign 2: you work on the client’s equipment and systems
Your own laptop, your own tools, your own account for work is a sign of an independent business owner. When the client hands you a corporate laptop, Jira and Slack licenses under its own domain, and an access card to its office or coworking space, the situation looks like a full-time employee’s workstation, just under a different type of contract.
Sign 3: you have a fixed schedule, not just a deadline
The difference here is fundamental. “Deliver the project by Friday” is a condition of the result. “Be there from 9:00 to 17:00, Monday through Friday” is a condition of time, which the law explicitly names as a sign of an employment relationship⁴. A flexible schedule, where you decide for yourself when to work on a task, removes this sign even with a single client.
Sign 4: your workplace is at the client’s office
A permanent desk, a name badge, a spot in the open-plan office next to the department’s full-time staff, this is physical confirmation of subordination. Working from home, from a coworking space, or from anywhere of your choosing removes this sign, even if the client sometimes invites you to the office for meetings.
Sign 5: daily instructions and mandatory reporting
Example. Maria gets daily tasks from a team lead through Jira and reports at a 10:00 daily standup, and without that report the team lead doesn’t know what she’s working on that day. Does Maria have this sign? Yes. This is exactly what “ongoing direction” means in the law: not a one-off brief for the month, but daily control over how tasks are performed⁵.
The opposite case: the client sets a task for two weeks and waits for the result by the deadline, with no daily reports. There’s no sign 5 here, regardless of how often calls happen to align on project details.
Sign 6: you’re required to perform the work personally
The right to hire an assistant, hand off part of the work to a subcontractor, or even to another developer on your team without the client’s consent is a sign of a genuine business owner. If the contract or actual practice requires that you specifically do the work in person, with no possible substitute, that lines up directly with the definition of an employment relationship under Article 22 § 1 of the Labor Code⁶.
Sign 7: the invoiced amount is the same every month, regardless of scope
Example. Dmytro has been invoicing 12,000 zloty every month for two years. The amount doesn’t change in a heavy month or in a month with a two-week vacation. Is this sign 7 present? Yes. Pay “for the mere fact of being present”, rather than for the scope or outcome of work done, is a sign of wages, not of a business owner’s fee for a service⁷.
The opposite example: pay depends on completed project milestones, and in a month with no milestone finished, there’s no invoice at all. That’s a sign of business risk, not of paid employment.
How many signs mean real risk
The law doesn’t set a formula like “three out of seven equals a verdict.” A PIP inspector and a court always assess the situation as a whole, and having one or two signs by itself guarantees nothing⁸. But a practical rule of thumb: one or two signs usually don’t create serious risk on their own. Three or four signs are a signal to check your contract more closely. Five or more signs at once, especially when signs 3, 5, and 6 are among them (schedule, daily control, personal performance), amount to high risk, worth taking to a lawyer rather than waiting for an inspection.
Three or four signs out of seven aren’t a reason to panic, they’re a reason to check your contract before an inspector does.
What to do if you recognized four or more signs
Recognizing the signs is half the job. We cover the other half, exactly which changes to your contract and working practice actually lower the risk and how to make them without conflict with the client, in detail in the series article “How to fix a B2B contract under PIP 2026: a 12-point checklist”. If you own or run HR at a company and see these signs across several contractors at once, the situation is systemic: more on that in the series article “Who risks losing B2B status after the PIP 2026 reform“.
Frequently asked questions
Is one sign enough to have a contract recognized as employment? No. An inspector and a court always assess the combination of signs, not a single detail on its own. One sign, say a fixed schedule, can have a legitimate explanation (for instance, safety requirements at the client’s site) and won’t outweigh the rest of the picture.
Can I remove the risk just by rewording the contract? No. The law expressly forbids replacing an employment contract with a civil-law contract while keeping conditions typical of an employment relationship, regardless of the contract’s name⁹. The fix is a change in actual working practice, not just the contract text.
What if I myself asked the client for a 9-to-5 schedule because it’s more convenient for me? The reason a fixed schedule came about doesn’t matter for the risk assessment. An inspector looks at the actual outcome: whether the schedule exists, not who initiated it.
Does this checklist apply only to IT specialists? No, the criteria are universal across every industry. But IT typically follows the single-client, fixed-schedule, embedded-in-the-team model, which is why these seven signs come up there more often than in other fields.
How long does self-checking against this checklist take? Usually 10 to 15 minutes: you just need your contract, a few recent invoices, and a sense of your typical working week. That’s faster and cheaper than waiting for a PIP inspection.
What to do with the result of the check
The checklist gives you a general sense of direction, but it doesn’t replace a lawyer checking your specific contract. MojaFirma offers two formats depending on your situation.
If you work through your own JDG. The basic format is the online B2B audit: you fill out a questionnaire with your answers to these seven points, and within 48 hours you receive a report with a risk category and three priority recommendations.
If you own or run HR at a company with several B2B contractors. Systemic risk requires a bigger format, the B2B operating model audit, which reviews contracts, invoices, internal communication, and HR processes all at once, rather than a single contract in isolation.
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