Agency labour in Slovak logistics is bought as flexibility: a second shift for the peak, headcount that scales down without severance, a vacancy filled on Monday. Slovak law sells that flexibility on unusual terms. The wage is the same as your own comparable employee’s from the first hour. The assignment runs on a hard clock of 24 months and four renewals, counted against your warehouse rather than against the agency. And when the agency underpays, the difference becomes your debt. In one week of May 2026, inspectors checked 173 of the country’s 441 licensed agencies and reported suspected illegal employment at 71 of them. The framework is not paperwork. It is the shift plan.

What the borrowed worker must be paid

The first assumption to retire is that the agency worker is cheaper. Section 58(9) of the Labour Code is blunt about it. The conditions of an assigned employee, wage included, must be at least as good as those of a comparable employee of the user – the warehouse, not the agency. There is no qualifying period. The comparison runs from the first hour. Section 58(11) spells out what it covers: working time, overtime, night work, holidays, health and safety, even access to the canteen.

Below the comparison sits the statutory floor, and it is higher than the headline minimum wage. Slovak law grades every job into six degrees of work intensity under section 120, each with its own minimum wage claim. For 2026 the National Labour Inspectorate puts level 1 at EUR 915 a month and level 2, where a typical warehouse operative sits, at EUR 1,031; level 3 is EUR 1,147 and level 4 EUR 1,263. The base minimum rose 12.1 % on 2025, the steepest increase in years. An agency rate that undercuts your own payroll for the same picking role is therefore not a discount. It is a warning. The genuine savings sit elsewhere: in recruitment you do not run, vacancies you do not carry, and hours you can hand back – the scarcity problem we mapped in our post on labour availability as a site-selection factor.

The clock that runs against the warehouse

Section 58(6) sets the term: a temporary assignment may be agreed for 24 months at most, and it may be extended or renewed at most four times within those 24 months. The count attaches to the user undertaking, not to the contract. The provision says expressly that the limit applies even where a different employer or a different agency assigns the same employee to the same user. Rotating agencies does not reset the clock. A fresh assignment to the same warehouse within six months of the previous one counts as a renewal, not a new start.

The sanction is the part shift planners underestimate. Under section 58(7), an assignment in breach of those limits flips the contract. The employment with the agency ends by operation of law. In its place, an employment of indefinite duration arises between the worker and the user. Your flexible layer becomes permanent headcount automatically, and you have five working days to issue the written notice recording it. Nothing needs to be signed and nobody needs to agree. The practical consequence: the decision point on every agency worker sits around month 18, not month 24. By then the warehouse offers its own contract, returns the worker, or restructures the role. At month 24 the law decides instead.

The bill for equal pay lands on the user

Equal pay is usually read as the agency’s promise. Section 58(10) turns it into the user’s debt. Where the agency pays the assigned worker less than the comparable employee earns, the user must pay the wage, or the difference, itself. The deadline is 15 days from the agreed pay date, with the statutory payroll deductions run as if the user were the employer. The duty applies equally where the worker is posted into Slovakia from another EU member state. A cheap agency is therefore not a transferred risk. It is a deferred invoice.

The statute also hands the user the tools to see the problem coming. Under section 58(14) the user must give the agency the conditions of the comparable employee, and under section 58a(4) the agency must hand back, on request, the data the user needs to check what was actually paid. The agreement between agency and user has mandatory contents under section 58a(2) – including, in letter (h), the number and date of the agency’s licence – and under section 58a(3) it is void unless made in writing. The practical discipline follows from the mechanics: name the comparator role in the agreement, price the assignment against your own payroll for that role, and treat any quote below it as the top-up you will later fund.

A licence list that is getting shorter

The agency side of the market runs on a permit. Under section 29 of Act 5/2004 on employment services, a temporary work agency is an employer licensed to hire people for the purpose of assigning them to user undertakings, and the central register of those licences is public. Section 29(2) draws one line worth quoting in negotiations: the agency may not charge the worker anything, neither for the assignment nor for taking a permanent job with the user afterwards; its fee comes from the user, in the agreed amount. Section 31 lists the ways a licence dies: no assignments for a year, a missing or false annual activity report, or a fine for illegal employment.

Enforcement has stopped being theoretical. In the week of 18 to 22 May 2026, 114 labour inspectors checked 173 temporary work agencies across the country and, per the ministry’s account, found suspected breaches of the ban on illegal employment at 71 entities, covering 126 people. The register itself tells the same story: 441 licensed agencies remain, down from more than 600 before the enforcement wave, and the ministry is preparing an amendment that would replace the once-a-year activity report with reporting during the year. For an occupier the checklist is short: confirm the licence in the register, confirm its number sits in the section 58a agreement, and remember that if the licence goes mid-assignment, the machinery of section 58 decides who inherits the people.

Where agency labour in Slovak logistics hits its edges

Three boundaries close the map. First, hazard: section 58(1) forbids temporary assignment to work classified in the 4th risk category, so the hardest environments in a plant cannot be staffed through an agency at all. Second, the third-country channel that much of Slovak warehousing quietly runs on: under section 21(4) of Act 5/2004, only an agency that has operated for at least three years may assign a third-country national holding a residence permit for employment, and only into occupations with a documented labour shortage in that region. Under section 21(6) the 45 % ceiling on third-country nationals in a workforce counts assigned workers at the user, not at the agency. A warehouse can hit the cap with people who are not on its payroll.

Third, the disguise. Section 58(2) presumes an assignment wherever a “service provider” has its people working mainly on your premises, mainly with your equipment, under your task-setting and supervision, in an activity your company has registered as its own business – unless the provider proves otherwise. The packing subcontractor in your hall is, on that test, usually an agency without a licence, and every rule above attaches retroactively. The structural alternatives sit outside the employment relationship altogether: hand the operation to a provider under the 3PL decision, or take the headcount out of the building – the direction of travel in warehouse automation and, at its far end, the automated high-bay warehouse.

Conclusion

Agency labour in Slovak logistics is a legitimate tool with a precise shape. Three numbers define it in any shift plan. Twenty-four months and four renewals per user undertaking, counted across agencies, with automatic conversion into your own indefinite hire at the end. One comparator: the assigned worker earns at least what your own comparable employee earns, from day one, with the top-up landing on you within 15 days when the agency falls short. And one licence number, checked against a public register that has shrunk from more than 600 entries to 441. The agency carries the payroll. The warehouse carries the consequences.

Tell us the shift pattern you are trying to cover and we will map which part of it can sit with an agency, where the 24-month clock forces a decision, and what the equal-pay comparison does to the rate you have been quoted.

Plot assembly in Slovakia is rarely a price problem. The land is there, the asking price per square metre is known, and the seller is willing. The obstacle sits in the register. Ten hectares outside a town is almost never one parcel with one owner. On the national averages it is around twenty parcels, and each of them carries close to twelve co-owners. Every one of them has to sign. Each signature can trigger the pre-emption right of the others. That is where the years go, and none of it appears in the asking price.

What the register holds under ten hectares

The scale of the problem is official. When the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development launched its consolidation programme on 27 March 2019, it put the numbers on the record: 8.4 million ownership parcels, 4.4 million registered land owners and 100.7 million co-ownership relations. The average parcel has 11.93 co-owners. The average owner holds shares in 22.74 parcels. The roots are Hungarian inheritance law and then collectivisation, and neither has been undone.

The second figure comes from the Institute for Strategies and Analyses at the Government Office. In its assessment of the programme, updated on 12 September 2023, the average Slovak agricultural parcel measures 0.5 hectares. Put the two averages together and a ten hectare site is about twenty parcels. At 11.93 co-owners each, that is roughly 240 ownership relations before a single square metre changes hands. That is our own arithmetic on the two official averages, not a survey of any particular site. A specific site can be far better or far worse, and the only place to find out is the title sheet. It is also why an asking price per square metre, of the kind we set out for industrial land in 2026, says nothing about how long the site takes.

Why every share is its own negotiation

Slovak co-ownership is not a company. There is no board and no majority that can sell. Section 139(1) of the Civil Code makes all co-owners jointly and severally entitled and obliged from legal acts concerning the common thing. Section 139(2) lets a majority counted by the size of the shares decide on the management of the thing, and sends the matter to court where no majority is reached. Management is not sale. You do not buy the parcel. You buy shares, one at a time, from people who never met each other.

Then comes section 140. Where a co-ownership share is transferred, the other co-owners have a pre-emption right, unless the transfer is to a close person. If they cannot agree on exercising it, they may buy the share in proportion to their own shares. Every purchase in the sequence therefore has to be offered around first. The buyer of the first share becomes a co-owner and gains the same right against everyone else, which is why the first share is worth more than its area suggests. The practical answer is not speed but simultaneity: option contracts with every owner, conditional on each other, so that nothing completes until everything completes. The heads of terms for a site of this kind are a timetable of conditions, not a price. Land is the harder case here. On a standing asset the register is short and the surprises sit in the lease, which is what a buyer inherits on a tenanted warehouse.

The owner nobody can find, and the fund that stands in

A share of those relations belongs to people who cannot be traced. Slovak law does not leave that land ownerless. Under section 13 of Act 180/1995 the Slovak Land Fund administers parcels with an unidentified owner, and section 16(1) puts them alongside state land and land whose ownership is not evidenced in the cadastre. Section 17(1) lets the Fund act in its own name, including before courts and public authorities. Section 16(2) makes it the representative of those owners.

What the Fund may do with the land is deliberately narrow. Section 18(1) forbids it from using the land itself; it leases it for agriculture or forestry. Section 18(3) lets it transfer ownership only in the cases the Act lays down, and section 18(4) sets a floor at the price under the price regulation. The list is in section 19(3). Two entries matter to an industrial project: a purpose for which the land could be expropriated, and a decision on the establishment of an industrial park. Section 19(4) then removes section 140 of the Civil Code from those transfers, so the pre-emption right of the remaining co-owners does not stand in the way. The untraceable owner is not a dead end. The route to that share simply runs through a public decision instead of a purchase contract. What the institution may and may not do with such a share, including the easement route where no transfer reason fits, is set out in our glossary entry on the Slovak Land Fund.

What plot assembly in Slovakia is allowed to divide

The second surprise is friendlier. Slovak law protects farmland from being cut into ribbons, and the rules are strict. Section 23(1) of Act 180/1995, in the version in force from 1 April 2025, forbids a division that would create an agricultural parcel below 3,000 square metres or a forest parcel below 5,000. Section 22(1) puts a levy on the acquirer wherever a division creates a parcel between that floor and 20,000 square metres: 60 per cent of the value of the agricultural land between 3,001 and 5,000 square metres, 30 per cent between 5,001 and 20,000. Section 22(5) doubles it inside the area of a registered consolidation project. Section 24(1) applies the same rules to the creation of co-ownership shares, and section 24(2) lets the prosecutor sue to invalidate a share created against them.

Then section 24(3)(a) steps aside. None of it applies where the parcel is divided for the purposes of construction, or for a purpose for which it could be expropriated, or under a consolidation project. The rule that binds a farmer does not bind a building project. The exemption attaches to the purpose, which means the purpose has to exist on paper before the division, not after it. That is the same sequencing discipline that decides whether a building permit arrives on time.

Why waiting for the state to sort it out is not a plan

Slovakia has a systemic answer to fragmentation, and it is called land consolidation. It works. It is also slow. The Institute for Strategies and Analyses put a figure on the pace: at the current rate consolidation will take 30 years and cost an estimated 1.1 billion euros, covering 4 million hectares in 3,103 cadastral areas. The programme stalled in 2021, then restarted with 120 cadastral areas for 2021 and another 120 for 2022. The 2019 tender covered 168 cadastral areas for 44.6 million euros excluding VAT and was the first state-commissioned consolidation since 2010. No site programme can wait for that.

The practical order is the opposite of the usual one. Read the register before you agree a price, because the number of owners, not the area, sets the timetable. Take options from every private co-owner at once. Establish the public position that opens the Fund route: an industrial park under Act 193/2001 is an area delimited by the spatial plan of the municipality, so the zoning comes first and the park decision follows it. Only then divide, and divide for construction. A brownfield can shorten some of this, which is one of the arguments in our brownfield against greenfield comparison. What it cannot shorten is the register. Programmes are lost on this order of operations, in the same way that a finished hall waits for a document nobody sequenced.

Conclusion

Ten hectares in Slovakia is not one asset. It is a register entry with, on the national averages, about twenty parcels and a few hundred ownership relations behind it. The price per square metre is the smallest variable in the programme. Three provisions decide the rest: section 140 of the Civil Code on every private share, the closed list in section 19(3) of Act 180/1995 for every share the Land Fund holds, and section 24(3)(a) of the same act, under which a division for construction escapes the levy that binds a farmer. All three are settled long before the first excavator arrives, and none of them can be repaired afterwards.

Send us the cadastral numbers of the site you are looking at, and we will tell you how many owners sit behind it, which of the shares the Land Fund holds, and which of the two routes in section 19(3) is open for them before you commit to a programme date.

Automated high-bay warehouses in Slovakia are usually bought as equipment and built as a structure, and the gap between those two sentences is where the money sits. A shuttle store or a stacker-crane store is ordered from a materials handling supplier, arrives on lorries and is bolted to a slab. Whether the result is a machine standing inside a hall or a hall made of racking is not a question of vocabulary. Two Slovak acts answer it with two different tests, and the answers decide the permit route, the handover date, the depreciation period and the annual tax assessment.

Where automated high-bay warehouses in Slovakia stop being equipment

The starting point is section 2(1) of the Building Act, Act 25/2025 Z. z., in force since 1 April 2025. A stavba is a building construction erected by construction works that is firmly connected with the ground or whose placement requires preparation of the substrate. The same subsection then lists what counts as a firm connection, and the second item is the one that matters here: fastening by machine parts or by weld to a firm foundation in the ground or to another structure. Anchoring by piles or by ground screws is the third. Bolting is not a way around the definition, it is inside it.

Section 2(2) closes the other door. Part of a free-standing structure are the related underground spaces, above-ground constructions and the technical, technological and operational equipment without which the structure would not be complete and fit for operation. In a rack-clad store, where the racking carries the roof and the cladding, the second test needs no argument at all: remove the racking and there is no building left to be fit for anything.

That gives two cases with very different answers. Free-standing racking inside a conventional hall is equipment placed in a building. A rack-clad silo store is a building made of racking. The engineering consequences of that choice are the subject of our post on what robotics change about the building spec. The legal consequences start here.

Two acts, two different tests

The trap is assuming that one classification travels across all the desks. It does not. The Building Act asks how the thing is fixed. The Income Tax Act, Act 595/2003 Z. z., says in section 22(3) that fixing is expressly not the test: a production device, an object serving the provision of services, a purpose-built object and other equipment is a separate movable thing if it does not form one functional unit with the building, even where it is firmly connected with it.

Read the two together and the pattern is clean. For the building authority the question is the anchor. For the tax authority the question is the functional unit. Free-standing racking, shuttles and conveyors in a leased hall are firmly bolted down and still form no functional unit with the building, so they stay movable property. In a rack-clad store the same equipment is the load-bearing structure, which is a functional unit by construction, and the tax classification follows the building.

The practical warning is that the choice is made by the designer, months before anyone in finance sees a fixed asset register. Once the envelope hangs off the racking, no accounting policy takes it back off. This is a point for the heads of terms of a built-to-suit project and for the developer briefing, not for the year-end close.

What the classification does to the clock

Section 26(1) of the Income Tax Act sorts tangible property into groups whose periods are 2, 4, 6, 8, 12, 20 and 40 years, and Annex 1 assigns the codes. Three items decide the outcome for an automated store. Item 2-20, code 28.22, covers lifting and handling equipment: a stacker crane or a shuttle sits in group 2 at six years. Item 4-2, code 25.11.10, covers prefabricated metal buildings where they are not separate construction objects connected to utility networks, which is group 4 at twelve years. A building that is a separate construction object falls in group 5 at twenty years. Section 27(1) then gives one sixth, one twelfth and one twentieth a year on a straight line.

Section 22(15) is the sentence that removes the escape route. Out of a building, only those separable components listed in Annex 1 may be carved out for separate depreciation, and that list is closed: air conditioning, passenger and goods lifts, escalators and moving walkways. Racking is not on it, and neither is a shuttle system once it has become part of the structure.

On a EUR 12 million steel and automation package the difference is not academic. At one sixth the annual deduction is EUR 2 million, at one twentieth it is EUR 600,000, and the gap runs for the whole life of the asset. These are worked examples on round numbers. The tenant-side variant of the same question, where the occupier pays for works in someone else’s building, is covered in our post on who writes off the tenant’s installations.

Why the automation cannot be commissioned like a machine

A machine is commissioned, signed off and used. A structure has to be put into permanent use through kolaudacia under section 66(1) of the Building Act, and our post on why a finished hall waits follows that procedure in detail. The complication in an automated store is that section 66(4)(c) and (f) require the inspection to establish that the technical and operational equipment is functional and that the reserved technical equipment runs smoothly and safely, which in a store of this kind cannot be judged from a drawing.

Section 69 is the answer the Act provides. Trial operation is temporary use of the structure to carry out tests and measurements of the functional parameters of the structure and its technical or technological equipment, where fitness for use can only be verified by operating it. The authority sets the conditions and the duration and decides within 30 days. It may be permitted for at most 24 months and, with repeated extensions, never beyond four years. The protocol on its course and evaluation is the basis for kolaudacia under section 69(5), and it is a mandatory annex to the application under section 66(2)(f). The instrument itself, including the extension rules and the delimitation against early use, is set out in our glossary entry on trial operation.

Section 70 is the other instrument and it is not interchangeable. Early use of a structure that is not finished at all runs for at most 12 months and, with extensions, five years. Trial operation assumes a finished building whose function is unproven; early use assumes an unfinished building whose usable part is safe. Fire safety runs on its own track alongside both, and that is the subject of a separate post, along with the sprinkler question that height creates.

What the municipal tax desk does with height

Here the direction reverses. Under section 11 of Act 582/2004 Z. z. the base of the tax on buildings is the built-up area in square metres, measured as the footprint at the level of the largest above-ground part, with the roof overhang excluded. Section 12(1) sets the annual rate at EUR 0.033 per square metre, which the municipality may raise or lower, capped at ten times the lowest rate it sets itself. Height is not in the formula.

The surcharge is where a tall building would normally be caught. Section 12(3) lets the municipality set up to EUR 0.33 for each further floor of a multi-storey building, and section 12a(2) excludes the first above-ground floor from the count. Section 12(4) then defines a floor as the part of the interior space bounded by a floor structure and a ceiling structure, and where the building has no ceiling structure, as the part bounded by the floor and the roof structure. Rack levels are not ceilings. A 40 metre automated store with no intermediate slabs therefore has one above-ground floor.

On a 6,000 square metre footprint at the statutory base rate that is EUR 198 a year, and the fourteen extra levels of storage add nothing to it, while a mezzanine with a proper deck would add a floor to the count. Municipal rates differ from the statutory base and the assessment turns on the position on 1 January, both of which we set out in the post on real estate tax on industrial property. The design decision that costs fourteen extra years of depreciation costs nothing at all at the municipal desk.

Conclusion

An automated store is one asset with two legal identities. Under Act 25/2025 the anchor decides: bolted or welded to a foundation is a firm connection with the ground, and equipment without which the building is not fit for operation is part of it. Under Act 595/2003 the functional unit decides, and firm attachment is expressly not enough. Where the two answers converge, as they do in a rack-clad store, the whole package runs twenty years instead of six, cannot be carved out under the closed list in section 22(15), and reaches permanent use only through a trial operation that the Act caps at 24 months. Where they diverge, the difference is worth more than the racking. Both outcomes are decided on the structural drawing, and neither can be repaired later by an accounting policy.

Send us the layout and the structural principle of the store you are planning, and we will tell you which parts the building authority will treat as the structure, which parts can still be a machine on a six-year clock, and what the trial operation is going to do to your handover date.

Fit-out depreciation in Slovakia is the item that gets settled last in a lease negotiation and paid for longest afterwards. Racking, a mezzanine floor, an office block inside the hall, upgraded power, a sprinkler change: the occupier signs the contractor’s invoice and books it as the cost of moving in. The Income Tax Act sees something else. Above a threshold of EUR 1,700 in a tax period the works stop being an expense and become an asset, the asset runs on the building’s clock rather than the lease’s, and on the last day of the term the part nobody managed to write off reappears on the other party’s tax return.

What fit-out depreciation in Slovakia actually attaches to

The starting point is section 29(1) of the Income Tax Act, Act 595/2003 Z. z.. Technical improvement is expenditure on completed superstructures, extensions, built-in works, building modifications, reconstructions and modernisations exceeding EUR 1,700 in aggregate per tax period for the individual asset. Section 29(4) defines reconstruction as an intervention that changes the purpose of use, the qualitative performance or the technical parameters, and adds that swapping a material for one with comparable properties is not a change of parameters. Section 29(5) defines modernisation as adding equipment or usability the original asset did not contain.

That wording is where most fit-out packages split in two. Replacing a worn dock leveller with an equivalent unit is a repair and goes through the profit and loss account in the year it happens. Cutting a new dock into the wall, adding a mezzanine, converting part of the hall into offices or upgrading the sprinkler system to a different hazard class changes the parameters, and the invoice becomes capital.

The threshold is per tax period and per asset, so a package delivered in stages can fall on either side of it. Section 29(2) lets a taxpayer treat expenditure below EUR 1,700 as technical improvement anyway if it prefers to. Section 22(6)(d) then makes technical improvement of leased property above EUR 1,700 that is carried out and depreciated by the tenant a category of property in its own right, which is what allows a tenant to depreciate something it does not own.

Who is allowed to write it off

Section 24(1) sets the default: the taxpayer that holds the ownership right depreciates the asset. Section 24(2) opens the exception that matters in every lease of industrial space. Technical improvement of leased tangible property paid for by the tenant may be depreciated by the tenant on the basis of a written agreement with the owner, provided the owner has not increased the input price of the building by those expenses.

Two conditions, one document, and both conditions are easy to lose. A lease that is silent on the works leaves the tenant with a capital sum it cannot depreciate at all, because a written agreement is the statutory gateway rather than a formality. An owner that quietly capitalises the same works into its own input price closes the gate from the other side, and the two parties then discover the conflict in the year the tax returns are prepared rather than in the year the works were done.

The money flow decides less than the paperwork does. Where the landlord funds part of the works through a fit-out contribution, the part it paid for is its expenditure and not the tenant’s. Our post on what occupiers actually sign puts those contributions at EUR 20 to 50 per square metre in the current market, which on a 10,000 square metre unit is enough to decide who is capitalising what. The point belongs in the heads of terms, not in the final drafting round.

The clock belongs to the building, not to the lease

Section 24(2) also fixes the period, and it does so without looking at the lease. The tenant places the technical improvement in the depreciation group in which the leased asset sits. Section 26(1) sets those groups: group 5 runs 20 years and group 6 runs 40. Under Annex 1 to the Act, group 5 item 5-1 covers buildings other than the codes listed in group 6, and group 6 lists residential buildings, hotels, buildings for administration under code 1220 of the building classification, buildings for culture, education and health, and other non-residential buildings under code 127. A warehouse sits under code 125 and therefore in group 5. Section 27(1) then allows one twentieth a year on a straight line, and section 27(2) gives the first year only the months from the month the works were put into use.

Set that against the term. For speculative grade A space five years remains the institutional standard in Slovakia. Five full years of a twentieth is a quarter of the fit-out, which means three quarters of it is still sitting on the tenant’s balance sheet on the day the keys go back.

The last sentence of section 24(2) is the part occupiers rarely see coming. Where the building serves several purposes under section 26(2), the tenant classifies its technical improvement by the purpose for which the tenant uses the leased property. An office block fitted out inside a warehouse is administration, code 1220, group 6. The same EUR 400,000 then runs at one fortieth a year instead of one twentieth.

What happens on the last day of the term

Section 17(20) is the provision that turns a construction decision into a tax event for the party that did not make it. The lessor’s tax base includes non-monetary income at the level of the expenditure the tenant made on technical improvement of the thing, with the lessor’s prior written consent, beyond the obligations agreed in the lease and not reimbursed by the lessor. The timing has two branches: the tax period in which the improvement was put into use, where the owner increased its input or residual price by that value, or the tax period in which the lease ended, in which case the amount is the residual value the improvement would have under straight-line depreciation.

Take the warehouse case. A EUR 400,000 fit-out in group 5 is written down at EUR 20,000 a year. A lease that ends after five full years leaves a residual value of EUR 300,000, and that figure is the landlord’s non-monetary income in the year of expiry. At the 21 per cent corporate rate in section 15(b) that is EUR 63,000 of tax, and at the 24 per cent rate that applies above EUR 5 million of revenue it is EUR 72,000. In the office variant, at one fortieth a year, the residual value after the same five years is EUR 350,000. These are worked examples on round numbers, not a calculation of any particular case.

Section 17(21) extends the same treatment to repairs the tenant expensed beyond its obligations under the lease. This is why a reinstatement clause is a tax clause as much as a building one, and why the schedule of condition and the handover protocol earn their place in the file. Our post on what happens at lease expiry follows the same day from the contractual side.

What belongs in the lease before the first invoice

Four points, and all four are cheaper to agree at heads of terms than to argue after the works. First, the written agreement under section 24(2), naming which party depreciates the technical improvement and confirming that the owner will not increase its own input price by the same expenditure. Second, the treatment at the end: whether the improvement is removed, left and compensated, or left and not compensated, because only the third of those produces the non-monetary income under section 17(20)(b). Where the answer is removal, the obligation to strip out and hand back is a non-monetary one, and the only route to it without a full court action is a notarial deed in which the tenant has consented to enforceability in advance.

Third, a split of the works into repair and technical improvement before the contractor invoices, with the EUR 1,700 test applied per asset and per tax period. A single invoice covering a repaired roof light and a new mezzanine is a problem for both parties. Fourth, the interaction with everything else in the lease that moves on a different clock: the break option that can bring the end forward, an assignment that moves the improvement to another occupier, and the option to tax the rent, which is a separate decision on a separate section of a separate act.

None of this changes what the works cost to build. It changes who carries them, over how long, and who is holding the residual value when the term ends. On a triple net structure that question is not answered by the heading on the term sheet either, because the nets describe who pays the running costs and not who owns the improvements.

Conclusion

The Slovak treatment of a fit-out is consistent and unforgiving in equal measure. Above EUR 1,700 in a tax period the works are an asset. The tenant may depreciate them only under a written agreement with the owner, and only where the owner has kept them out of its own input price. The period comes from the building’s depreciation group, which is 20 years for warehouse use and 40 where the tenant’s own use is office, so a five-year term will never come close to writing the works off. What is left on the last day is not written off at all, it is transferred: section 17(20)(b) makes it the landlord’s taxable non-monetary income at the straight-line residual value. Two sentences in the lease and one classification decision are what stand between that outcome and a settled position.

Send us the specification of the works you are planning and the clause in the lease that deals with them, and we will tell you which parts are repair, which parts start a twenty-year clock, and which of the two parties is going to be holding a tax bill on the day the lease ends.

Buying a tenanted warehouse in Slovakia is not the purchase of a building with a lease attached to it. The building is the smaller half of the transaction. What carries the price is the income, and the income sits in a contract the buyer did not write, cannot see in any public register, and cannot get out of. The Civil Code settles the transfer in a single sentence, hands the buyer every obligation the seller had, and gives one new right to the tenant. Everything that follows in a due diligence exercise is an attempt to find out what that sentence actually bought.

What buying a tenanted warehouse in Slovakia actually transfers

Section 680(2) of the Civil Code, Act 40/1964 Zb., is the whole mechanism: where ownership of a leased thing changes, the acquirer enters the legal position of the landlord. There is no assignment to negotiate, no tenant consent to collect, no novation to draft. The lease continues on its own terms with a different name at the top.

The same sentence contains the one administrative step that matters on completion day. The tenant is entitled to discharge its obligations towards the previous owner until the change has been notified to it or proven by the acquirer. Rent paid to the seller before that moment is validly paid. On a quarterly rent cycle that is a full quarter of income sitting in the wrong account, recoverable from the seller under the sale agreement rather than from the tenant.

What passes is the position, not the paperwork. Everything the seller agreed sits in the buyer’s hands the same morning: the repair obligations, the indexation clause with its floor and its cap, the service charge mechanism with whatever cap the seller conceded, the outstanding fit-out contribution, and any rent free still to run. A triple net heading on the term sheet does not change any of that, because the nets are a matter of what the lease says, not of what the market calls the structure.

The only termination right belongs to the tenant

Section 680(3) is the part that surprises buyers, and it is worth quoting in effect rather than in summary. Where ownership of immovable property changes, only the tenant may terminate the lease on that ground, and it may do so even where the lease was concluded for a fixed term. The notice must be given in the next notice period where one is set by statute or by agreement. For movable property the acquirer may terminate as well. For a warehouse it cannot.

Read that against the way the asset was priced. A weighted average lease term of six years is the reason the yield was accepted, and on the day of completion those six years become an option in the hands of the party that did not pay for them. The building is bought at a cap rate on stabilised net operating income, and the statute has just made the stabilised part conditional on a decision somebody else gets to take.

This is why the confirmation letter from the tenant is not a formality in a Slovak transaction. It is where the buyer asks the occupier to state the term, the rent, the security held, the arrears position and any side agreements, and where the parties deal with the statutory notice right. Whether and how far that right can be waived in advance is a question for Slovak counsel on the specific lease, not a point to assume from a term sheet. What is certain is that the question has to be asked before the price is fixed, not after.

The cadastre does not show you a warehouse lease

A buyer used to registers that publish occupational interests will look in the wrong place. Section 1(1) of Act 162/1995 Z. z. on the cadastre lists what the cadastre records: ownership, pledges, easements, pre-emption rights where they are meant to have in rem effect, the administration of state and municipal assets, and lease rights to land where they last or are intended to last at least five years.

Land, and five years. A lease of a hall, of a unit inside it, or of any class A building is not in that list at any length of term. Where a land lease does appear, section 34(1) enters it by zaznam, the recording route used for rights that arise outside the register, which means the entry follows the right rather than creating it. The register is a mirror here, and a partial one.

The practical consequence is that the rent roll is a disclosure exercise and never a search. Four documents carry the weight, and each of them exists in exactly one copy until somebody hands it over: the lease with every amendment and side letter, the handover protocol that fixes the condition the unit was taken in, the service charge reconciliations for the last three years, and the correspondence file where the concessions live. A missing side letter is not a gap in the data room, it is a term of the contract the buyer is about to be bound by.

The security does not travel with the title

The landlord position transfers by law. The instruments that secure it do not necessarily follow, because they are separate contracts with their own parties. A bank guarantee is issued by a bank in favour of a named beneficiary, and the named beneficiary is the seller. Unless the instrument is drafted to be transferable or the tenant procures a replacement in favour of the buyer, the buyer completes on Monday holding a lease and no guarantee behind it. One piece of security does travel, and it is the one nobody negotiated: the landlord’s lien under section 672 of the Civil Code secures the rent under the letting rather than a claim personal to the seller, so it passes with the landlord position. It is also worth no more than the movables in the unit that the tenant actually owns.

A cash deposit raises the mirror problem. The money is in the seller’s account, the obligation to repay it at the end of the term is part of the landlord position the buyer has just inherited, and the two only meet if the deposit is transferred or credited in the completion statement. A parent company guarantee sits in the same category as the bank instrument, and a corporate guarantor that consented to secure one landlord has not consented to secure another.

None of this is exotic drafting, but it is the item most often left to the last week. Our post on what survives an insolvency sets out how thin the difference between these instruments becomes when the tenant fails. A buyer who discovers the gap after completion is negotiating with a tenant that has no reason to help and a bank that has no relationship with it.

Two tax clocks start on completion

The first is annual and simple. Under section 18(1) of Act 582/2004 Z. z. liability for real estate tax arises on 1 January of the year following the one in which the taxpayer became owner, and section 99a(1) puts the return in by 31 January of that year, assessed on the position at 1 January. A deal that completes in December moves the whole of the following year to the buyer, and a deal that completes in January leaves it with the seller. On the rates set out in our post on real estate tax, that timing is worth up to five euro per square metre a year in the wrong direction.

The second runs for two decades. Under section 52a(2)(b) of the VAT Act 222/2004 Z. z. the period for adjusting deducted VAT on buildings, building land, flats and non-residential premises is 20 calendar years, including the year of first use. Where a building is sold as an enterprise or part of one under section 10(1), so outside VAT, the clock does not restart: section 54b(2) requires the seller to hand over the figures for the tax deducted and the adjustments already made, and the buyer continues them.

Section 54b(3) supplies the sanction, and it is the reason the VAT history belongs in the first disclosure request rather than the last. Where the buyer of the enterprise does not have those figures, the law presumes that the tax was deducted in the year of acquisition at 100 per cent of a base equal to the fair value of the asset. A missing schedule therefore does not produce an unknown, it produces the worst assumption the statute allows, and it interacts directly with the option to tax the rent that the seller may or may not have exercised.

Conclusion

The Slovak position is unusually clean to state and unusually easy to underestimate. The lease transfers automatically, the buyer has no exit and the tenant acquires one, the public register is silent on everything that matters, the security has to be re-papered, and two tax clocks are set running by the completion date rather than by anything in the building. Three requests cover most of it, and all three belong in the first week rather than the last: the complete lease file including side letters, the tenant’s written confirmation of the term and the security, and the seller’s VAT deduction and adjustment schedule for the asset. A building can be inspected in an afternoon. The thing being bought cannot.

Send us the title deed reference and the rent roll for the unit you are looking at, and we will tell you what the cadastre can confirm, what only the seller can, and which of the two tax clocks is already running against the price you agreed.

The statute puts the annual rate at 0.033 euro per square metre, and no occupier in Slovakia has ever paid that. Real estate tax on industrial property is a local tax, set by the town in its own ordinance, and the only ceiling the law imposes is measured against the town’s own lowest rate rather than against any absolute figure. Two identical halls, one in a district town on the western corridor and one in a village in the east, are therefore taxed five to six times apart. Worse for budgeting, the rate that applies to a given hall depends on who is inside it rather than on how it was built.

Why real estate tax on industrial property differs between two towns

Section 12(1) of Act 582/2004 Z. z., in the version in force from 1 January 2026, sets the annual rate on buildings at 0.033 euro for every square metre of built-up area, started square metres included. Section 12(2) then hands the number to the municipality, which may reduce it or raise it by ordinance with effect from 1 January of the tax year, and may set different rates for each of the categories in section 10(1).

The ceiling in that same subsection is the part worth reading twice. The rate a municipality sets must not exceed ten times the lowest annual rate on buildings that the same municipality has set in its own ordinance. It is a relative limit, not an absolute one. A town that keeps its residential rate high has room to charge more on industry, and nothing in the statute caps the result against the 0.033 it starts from.

The spread that produces is not theoretical. For 2026 the town of Senec charges 5.00 euro per square metre on industrial buildings under its ordinance 12/2025. Ruzomberok charges 3.50 under ordinance 10/2025, and the village of Drienovec charges 0.75 under ordinance 2/2025. Senec is therefore at roughly 151 times the figure in the statute, and at about six and a half times Drienovec, for a building that could be the same class A shed in both places.

The category depends on who is inside, not on the building

Section 10(1) splits buildings into nine categories, and two of them cover almost every industrial unit. Letter (g) covers industrial buildings, buildings serving energy and construction, and buildings used for storing the taxpayer’s own production. Letter (h) covers buildings for other business and gainful activity, storage, and the administration that goes with it.

The dividing line is whose goods are on the racking. A manufacturer storing what it made sits in (g). A logistics provider storing goods for third parties sits in (h). The building does not change, the pallet positions do not change, and the yard does not change. Only the occupier does.

Municipalities price that difference. Ruzomberok charges 3.50 under (g) and 4.00 under (h), Drienovec 0.75 and 0.90. Senec happens to charge 5.00 for both, which is why the point is easy to miss if you only ever look at one town. For a built to suit unit that changes hands from a producer to a third party logistics operator, the tax line moves by around 14 to 20 per cent in those two towns without a brick being touched, which is a question to settle in the heads of terms rather than after the assignment.

The land is taxed on a value the market never sets

Land runs on a separate track. Section 8(1) sets the annual rate on land at 0.25 per cent, and section 7 makes the base the area multiplied by a value per square metre taken from the annexes to the act. Annex 2 does not ask what the plot is worth. It asks how many inhabitants the municipality had on 1 January: 13.27 euro per square metre of building land in a village under a thousand people, 33.19 above twenty five thousand, 46.47 in a district seat, 53.11 in a regional seat and 59.74 in Bratislava. A municipality may replace those with its own figures by ordinance, and the taxpayer may displace either with an expert valuation.

The classification of the plot moves once during a project, and it moves the wrong way for a developer. Under section 6(4) a plot named in a final building intent decision counts as building land until the occupancy certificate is issued. In Senec that means 46.47 euro per square metre at the 2.50 per cent building land rate during construction, against the 4.64 euro at 2.00 per cent that applies to built-up areas and yards afterwards, so roughly 1.16 euro per square metre a year against 0.09.

That is a factor of about twelve, and it runs for exactly as long as the occupancy permit takes. On a project where the building permit stage has already slipped, the land tax on a forty thousand square metre plot is quietly costing about 46,000 euro a year instead of 3,700. That is our own arithmetic on the published rates, not a quoted assessment.

What it looks like next to the rent

Put a 20,000 square metre unit on the numbers above. In Senec the building tax alone is 20,000 times 5.00, or 100,000 euro a year, which is 0.42 euro per square metre per month. In Drienovec the same unit under letter (h) is 18,000 euro a year, or 0.075 per square metre per month. At the statutory rate it would be 660 euro a year.

Set that against the rent. The Senec area band in the second quarter of 2026 runs from 3.80 to 4.70 euro per square metre per month, so the building tax is somewhere between roughly 9 and 11 per cent of the headline rent. It is not a rounding error, and unlike energy it does not fall when the hall runs quietly. All of these are our own calculations on the published rates and rent bands rather than quoted transactions.

Two further multipliers sit in the same section and are easy to forget. Section 12(3) lets a municipality add a surcharge for every storey above the first, capped at 0.33 euro, which is 0.20 in Senec and turns a mezzanine into a permanent line item. Section 12(7) lets a municipality apply a coefficient of more than one and up to ten to a neglected building, which is a real consideration on a brownfield holding that is not yet in use.

Who pays it, and what to check before signing

Section 9(1) makes the owner of the building the taxpayer, so the assessment arrives at the landlord. In a triple net structure it does not stay there: taxes are one of the three nets, and the amount reaches the occupier through the service charge or as a separate recharge. What the lease should say is which of the two, and whether an increase in the municipal ordinance passes through in full.

Two dates decide the year. Under section 18(1) liability arises on 1 January of the year following the one in which the taxpayer became owner, and ends on 31 December of the year in which ownership ends. Under section 99a(1) the return is due by 31 January of the tax year, assessed on the position at 1 January. A hall completed in October therefore produces no building tax at all for that year, and a sale and leaseback closed in December moves the whole of the following year to the buyer.

One line settles an argument that comes up at every handback. Section 10(2) says that the fact a building has ceased to be used has no effect on the tax liability. Empty space is taxed exactly like occupied space, which is worth knowing when a landlord underwriting a cap rate on stabilised net operating income models a void period, and worth knowing before lease expiry when the tax keeps running whatever the racking looks like.

Conclusion

Real estate tax is the one occupancy cost in Slovakia that is decided entirely outside the lease and outside the market. The statute contributes a number nobody pays, the municipality sets the one that matters, and the category depends on the use rather than the structure. Two checks cover most of the exposure: read the town ordinance for the year rather than assuming last year’s figure, and confirm which of letters (g) and (h) your intended use falls into before the rent is agreed. Both take an afternoon, and both are cheaper before signature than after.

Send us the cadastral parcel numbers and the intended use of the unit, and we will tell you which category the building falls into, what the municipality charges for it this year, and whether the figure in your service charge budget is the one the town actually assessed.

Every rent quote for a Slovak warehouse arrives with a tax line, and almost nobody asks where it comes from. VAT on industrial leases is not a rate that applies automatically. The letting of a building is exempt by default, and the 23 per cent on your invoice is there because the landlord decided it should be. Since 2019 that decision is only available where the tenant is a taxable person, and behind it sits a twenty year clock on the landlord’s own deduction. This is why the question about your tax status often arrives before the question about your covenant, and why two tenants can be quoted differently for the same unit.

Why VAT on industrial leases is a decision, not a rate

The starting point is in the Slovak VAT Act. Under section 38(3) of Act 222/2004 Z. z., in the consolidated version in force for 2026, the letting of immovable property is exempt from tax. Four things are carved out of that exemption and stay taxable in every case: accommodation services, the letting of spaces and places for parking vehicles, the letting of permanently installed equipment and machinery, and the letting of safe deposit boxes.

Section 38(5) then gives the landlord a choice. A taxable person letting a property to another taxable person may decide that the letting will not be exempt, which puts the standard rate of 23 per cent under section 27(1) on the rent. The wording matters twice over. The choice belongs to the landlord, not to the tenant. And it exists only where the tenant is a taxable person, so a body that is outside the scope of VAT cannot be charged tax on the rent at all.

Older buildings can behave differently for a reason that has nothing to do with the building. Under the transitional rule in section 85kg(5), the 2019 version of section 38(5) applies to leases concluded after 31 December 2018 where the property was handed over after that date. A lease signed before that sits under the older regime, which is worth knowing before you assume an assignment simply carries the same treatment across.

The parts of the rent that were never exempt

The four exceptions in section 38(3) are not academic in an industrial park. Letting spaces and places for parking vehicles is taxable, and a hall usually comes with a yard. Where the lease prices the truck court, the trailer bays or the car park as a separate item, that item carries tax on its own footing, whatever the landlord decided about the hall.

The same applies to permanently installed equipment and machinery. A class A unit is rarely an empty box: dock levellers, racking supplied by the landlord, a sprinkler system contributed as part of a fit-out contribution, a compressor plant. Where those are let rather than owned by the tenant, they belong to the taxable side of the invoice.

Section 38(6) extends the whole regime to subleases. A tenant who sublets surplus space, the situation behind most grey space, is making the same decision as a landlord and is bound by the same condition about the subtenant. That is a point worth settling in the assignment and subletting clause rather than discovering it when the first sublease invoice goes out.

The twenty year clock behind the landlord’s answer

The reason a landlord cares so much about the tenant’s tax status sits two sections further on. A building is investment property under section 54(2)(b), and the period for adjusting deducted tax on it is 20 calendar years under section 52(2)(b), including the year of first use. Letting the space exempt is a change of the purpose of use within the meaning of section 54(3)(a), because the property is then used for supplies without the right to deduct.

The consequence is an annual assessment. For each calendar year in which the purpose has changed, the landlord adjusts the tax deducted on the building, and the adjustment is calculated per year against the remaining part of the period. On a building where one million euro of input tax was deducted, one year of exempt letting therefore moves roughly one twentieth, or about 50,000 euro, in the wrong direction. That figure is our own arithmetic on a round number, not a quoted case, and the statute rounds and thresholds it in ways an adviser has to run properly.

Seen from that side, the screening question is rational rather than rude. A landlord underwriting a cap rate on stabilised net operating income is not going to accept an unpriced twenty year exposure for one tenant, which is also why the answer rarely changes after the heads of terms are signed.

The tenant who cannot deduct

Most industrial occupiers never feel any of this, because they deduct the tax and it washes through. The exceptions are the tenants whose own output is exempt or outside the scope: financial and insurance businesses, healthcare and education providers, public bodies acting as authorities, and foreign entities that are not registered in Slovakia. For them the tax on the rent is not a cash flow item, it is a cost.

The size of it is easy to state. At the prime rent of EUR 5.30 per square metre per month reported in the second quarter of 2026, a 10,000 square metre unit costs EUR 636,000 a year, and 23 per cent of that is EUR 146,280 a year that never comes back. In the cheaper submarkets the same calculation runs from about EUR 104,880 at EUR 3.80 to EUR 179,400 at the top of the Bratislava city band. That is our own arithmetic on the published rent bands, not a quoted transaction. It is also worth remembering that a logistics quotation prices the same space in a different unit, the pallet position, with the building cost already inside the price, so the tax question attaches to the rent and not to that comparison.

What follows is a negotiation, not a complaint. A tenant in that position should price the rent gross from the first offer, treat it the way an effective rent calculation treats incentives, and take it into the term discussion: the longer the term, the more a difference of a few cents in headline rent is dwarfed by the tax question.

Service charges and utilities are a separate question

The next line on the invoice follows different rules. In Case C-42/14 Wojskowa Agencja Mieszkaniowa, decided on 16 April 2015, the Court of Justice held that the letting of immovable property and the water, electricity, heating and refuse collection that accompany it must in principle be regarded as several distinct and independent supplies. They are treated as one supply only where the elements are so closely linked that splitting them would be artificial.

The criteria are practical ones. Where the tenant can decide on consumption, where meters record it individually and the invoice itemises it, the supply is separate. Where the tenant has no choice of supplier and no influence on consumption, it tends to follow the letting. In a Slovak industrial park that puts metered electricity and gas on one side and the pooled costs of the estate, the ones a service charge collects, on the other.

For a tenant who deducts, this is administration. For a tenant who does not, it decides real money, and it is worth agreeing in writing which items are billed as metered supplies and which are recharged as part of the letting, before the first annual reconciliation rather than during it.

Conclusion

None of this is exotic tax planning. It is one decision by the landlord under section 38(5), a handful of items that were never exempt under section 38(3), and a twenty year adjustment period that explains why the decision is taken so seriously. An occupier who deducts can note it and move on. An occupier who cannot deduct should raise it at the heads of terms stage, because by the time the lease is engrossed the landlord’s position is usually fixed and the only remaining variable is the rent itself.

Send us the rent quote and the draft lease, and we will tell you whether the tax on it is a decision somebody made, what it does to your budget if you cannot deduct it, and which lines of the invoice were never exempt in the first place.

Every Slovak industrial lease asks the tenant to put something behind the rent: cash on deposit, a guarantee from the parent company, a bank guarantee, sometimes a notarial deed on top. The negotiation usually circles around how many months, as if the number were the substance. It is not. Slovak law regulates commercial lease security nowhere at all, which means the wording of your instrument is the only rule that applies to it, and the only honest test of that wording is the day the tenant stops paying for good. Under that test the usual instruments do not merely differ in cost. Two of them get stronger, one gets weaker, and the landlord’s favourite shortcut stops working altogether.

Slovak law says nothing about the deposit

Start with the gap. The lease of non-residential premises is governed by Act 116/1990 Zb., and that act contains no provision on security of any kind. There is no cap, no rule on where the money must be held, no interest rule, no deadline for its return. We searched the full text for kaucia, zabezpeka, depozit and istina and found none of them, which is our own check rather than a cited authority, but it is easy to repeat. The three-months and six-months ceilings that circulate in conversation are real enough, they simply belong to state-supported rental housing and have nothing to do with a warehouse.

One security does arise automatically. Section 672(1) of the Civil Code, Act 40/1964 Zb. gives the landlord a lien over the tenant’s movable property on the premises for unpaid rent. It is the only protection nobody has to negotiate, and its practical value depends entirely on whether the racking, the machines and the stock are owned by the tenant or leased and financed by somebody else, which in logistics they usually are. Everything beyond that lien is a matter of drafting, so the quality of the drafting is the whole subject. That is why the customary level of around three months of rent plus the service charge, which we described in what occupiers sign in 2026, is our own market observation and not a published benchmark. We looked for an independent one for Slovak industrial property and there is none.

Three instruments, three different legal machines

The cash rent deposit is the simplest and the least defined. The landlord holds the money, and unless the lease agreement says otherwise there is no segregated account, no interest and no fixed return date. A parent company guarantee is a surety under sections 303 to 312 of the Commercial Code, Act 513/1991 Zb. Section 303 defines it: whoever declares in writing to the creditor that he will satisfy him if the debtor fails to perform a particular obligation becomes the debtor’s surety. The decisive feature sits in section 306(2): the surety may raise all the defences the debtor could raise. A surety is accessory, so it carries the underlying dispute with it. Argue about a service charge reconciliation and you will be arguing with the parent about the same reconciliation.

A bank guarantee under sections 313 to 322 of the same code is built the opposite way. Section 317 is explicit: unless the guarantee instrument provides otherwise, the bank may not raise the objections which the debtor would be entitled to raise against the creditor, and the bank must perform when the creditor asks it to do so in writing. That is a first-demand instrument, abstract and detached from the lease. Section 322(1) then applies the surety rules only subsidiarily. Fourth on the list is not a security at all but an enforcement shortcut: a notarial deed in which the tenant consents to enforceability is an enforcement title under section 45(2)(c) of the Enforcement Code, Act 233/1995 Zb., which as Noerr sets out lets a landlord collect and evict without first litigating the claim. Section 53(3)(h) is its limit: formal defects or a conflict with good morals get the enforcement refused.

The test is insolvency, not the missed invoice

A missed invoice is not what security is for; two months of arrears get sorted out with a phone call. Security exists for the day a bankruptcy is declared over the tenant, and Slovak insolvency law, Act 7/2005 Z. z., rearranges every instrument on that day. Section 45(4) sets the scene: the administrator may terminate the lease on two months’ notice, and the provision says expressly that this applies even to a lease agreed for a fixed term. Only residential premises are carved out. The weighted average lease term in a landlord’s portfolio is, for any tenant in difficulty, a number with an asterisk.

Now the instruments. The cash deposit is money the landlord already holds, so using it becomes a set-off question, and section 54 restricts set-off in bankruptcy: it is barred against claims that arose in favour of the estate after the declaration, a claim that was not filed cannot be set off at all, and other set-offs remain admissible. Reading those limits onto a rent deposit is our own analysis rather than a decided point, and it is the reason the deposit is the instrument with the most homework attached. The parent guarantee moves the other way. Section 306(1) normally requires the creditor to demand performance from the debtor first, but that requirement falls away, in the words of the provision, particularly on the declaration of bankruptcy. The accessory instrument becomes immediately callable at exactly the moment you need it. The bank guarantee never depended on the tenant at all: it sits outside the estate, the bank pays on demand, and the bank’s recourse under section 321(2) is the bank’s problem. And the notarial deed, the fastest route of all up to that day, goes blunt: section 48 stops individual enforcement from the declaration of bankruptcy.

What each option actually costs

Bank guarantees are usually described as expensive and deposits as free. Both halves of that sentence are wrong. The published Slovak tariffs put the issuing commission for a bank guarantee at a minimum of 1.80 per cent per annum with a floor of EUR 400 at Tatra banka, valid from 31 May 2024, plus a handling fee from EUR 100 and, if the guarantee is ever called, 0.25 per cent of the amount with a floor of EUR 200 and a ceiling of EUR 800. Prima banka’s tariff sits between 1.20 and 4.00 per cent per annum with a floor of EUR 120. The realistic band is therefore 1.2 to 4 per cent, not the 0.5 to 2 per cent quoted in general European material.

Put that against a hall. Ten thousand square metres at the Q2 2026 prime rent of EUR 5.30 per square metre per month is EUR 53,000 of rent a month, so three months of security is EUR 159,000. A guarantee over that amount at 1.80 per cent costs about EUR 2,862 a year plus fees, which is our own arithmetic. The deposit costs nothing in fees and EUR 159,000 in working capital that stops working for the whole term. The honest qualification is that the bank will normally want the guarantee collateralised or counted against the credit line, so the cash is not always released, and the choice between the two is a treasury decision rather than a legal one. What it is not is a rounding error, and it belongs in the same conversation as the effective rent rather than in the small print after it.

Negotiating lease security in a market that split in two

Which instrument you can actually negotiate depends on where the hall stands, because Slovakia no longer has one bargaining climate. As we set out in the Q2 2026 market split in two, Senec sits above 11 per cent vacancy with nothing under construction while the Kosice area runs at 1.4 per cent. In the west the security package is the lever that moves most easily, because conceding it costs the landlord nothing on the rent line that his own investors read. In the east it will not move at all, and the sensible trade is to accept the instrument and buy back flexibility elsewhere, in the break option or in the indexation floor.

Four things belong in the heads of terms rather than in the lease draft, because by the draft stage they cost goodwill. First, the trigger: what the landlord must show before calling, and how long the tenant has to cure. Second, a reduction ladder, so the security steps down after a defined run of clean payments rather than sitting at its opening level for ten years. Third, the return mechanism, with a deadline and a rule for the interest, since the act supplies neither. Fourth, the expiry date of a bank guarantee, which must outlast the lease and the handback period, because the dilapidations argument arrives after the keys do, as anyone who has been through a Slovak final account knows. Record the agreed structure where it survives the drafting, in the heads of terms or a side letter, and take the schedule of condition at the start, because the security is only ever as good as the evidence of what you were handed.

Conclusion

Lease security in Slovakia is a drafting subject rather than a legal one, because there is no statute to fall back on. That cuts both ways. A landlord who relies on a cash deposit and a notarial deed holds the two instruments that weaken most on the day they are needed, while a tenant who concedes a first-demand bank guarantee has handed over a payment that no dispute about the service charge can slow down. Neither side should be arguing about the number of months before it has agreed what the instrument does, when it can be called, how it steps down and when it comes back. Those four sentences are worth more than the difference between three months and six.

Send us the security clause you have been asked to sign and we will tell you what it is worth on the day it matters – and what the same protection would cost in another form.

The second quarter of 2026 looks, on the headline row, like the quietest quarter the Slovak industrial market has had in two years. Prime rent held at EUR 5.30 per square metre per month, no submarket moved its band, and gross leasing fell by 28 per cent against a strong first quarter. Read one level deeper and the quarter changed two things that will outlast it: the map split into a tight, building east and an empty, static west, and the market’s own statistics changed shape, because finished halls without fit-out are now counted as a category of their own. Both changes decide how every number below should be read.

The quarter in numbers, and the contradiction inside them

The raw figures first. Gross take-up reached 93,400 sq m across 18 transactions in Q2 2026, down 28 per cent quarter on quarter, according to the Cushman & Wakefield Slovakia Industrial MarketBeat published on 4 August. Net take-up, which strips out renegotiations, went the other way: 66,600 sq m, up 17 per cent on the first quarter. Those two arrows pointing in opposite directions are the story. The first quarter was carried by renegotiations, which made up 54 per cent of all demand; the second quarter was carried by commitments to space that does not exist yet. Pre-leases accounted for 50 per cent of everything signed.

New completions were thin: 25,800 sq m across two buildings, Mountpark Bratislava Triblavina at 21,300 sq m and CTPark Trnava North at 4,500 sq m, both fully let on delivery, per the Industrial Research Forum figures. The pipeline moved up to 265,800 sq m under construction, 37 per cent of it already pre-leased. Total stock stands at 4.89 million sq m. None of these numbers is dramatic on its own. The drama is in where they sit on the map, and that is the next section.

A five-year vacancy high that the prime rent ignores

The national vacancy rate ticked up to 7.8 per cent, which Cushman & Wakefield calls the highest in the last five years. In the same report, prime rent is unchanged at EUR 5.30. In the first quarter the same source still recorded rental decreases across most submarkets; in the second, “rental levels remained stable”. The decline of early 2026 stopped at EUR 5.30 even as more space stood empty, and both facts are true because they describe different buildings.

Prime rent is measured on the best space in the strongest locations, and the empty square metres are mostly somewhere else: older stock and the south-western logistics belt. The submarket bands tell it plainly. Bratislava City lets at EUR 5.30 to 6.50, while Senec, twenty minutes east and the largest submarket in the country, lets at EUR 3.80 to 4.70 with 11.1 per cent vacancy. Trnava sits at EUR 3.80 to 4.40 with 10.8 per cent empty. For an occupier the practical number was never the headline anyway: it is the effective rent after incentives, and incentives are exactly what a landlord with a double-digit vacancy rate trades with. How wide that gap already ran in 2026 is documented in what occupiers actually pay.

The map split in two

Here is the quarter’s real event. The Kosice area holds 255,800 sq m of stock, 5.2 per cent of the national total, and its vacancy rate is 1.4 per cent – effectively nothing is available. Yet 42,000 sq m of the quarter’s 93,400 sq m of gross take-up landed there, 45 per cent of the national figure, and 101,200 sq m is under construction, 38 per cent of the entire Slovak pipeline. All three shares are our own arithmetic from the MarketBeat table. The two largest deals of the quarter were both pre-leases at Logis One Park Kosice, one automotive in the 20,000 to 35,000 sq m bracket, one 3PL behind it. The Industrial Research Forum names the cause directly: suppliers gathering around Volvo’s plant, the ripple we mapped when the plant was announced.

Now the other half. Senec and Trnava together hold 201,000 sq m of available space, 53 per cent of the national total, and their under-construction column reads zero. The west has the empty halls and no cranes; the east has the cranes and no empty halls. The divide we once described as the D1 corridor against the south has rotated ninety degrees: in 2026 it runs west against east.

Shell and core enters the statistics

The quarter also changed the ruler. The Industrial Research Forum adopted an updated methodology and now reports shell and core space – buildings structurally complete but handed over without fit-out – as a category of its own. There is currently 76,400 sq m of it, and counting it lifts total stock to 4.97 million sq m. Until this quarter that space was statistically invisible: not in the stock, not in the vacancy rate, a finished hall that existed only in the developer’s accounts.

The category matters because it is the developer’s answer to a market that will not commit. Finishing a building to shell and leaving the fit-out open keeps the capital expenditure low and the specification flexible, and shortens the wait for a tenant who needs space in months rather than years. Czechia showed the pattern first: Colliers counted roughly 360,000 sq m of shell and core space there already at the end of Q1 2024. For occupiers reading Slovak reports, the practical consequence is a new question to ask about any availability figure: does it include the shell and core layer or not? A building in that state is real supply, but it is not space you can occupy next month – the fit-out and its approvals still sit between you and the racking, as anyone who has read why a finished Slovak hall waits will recognise.

What the split Slovak industrial market means for H2

The split market gives the two halves opposite playbooks. In the west, time is on your side. With Senec above 11 per cent vacancy, zero speculative development underway and landlords competing against each other’s standing space, the negotiation belongs to the tenant: push on the rent-free period and the fit-out contribution rather than the headline figure, and get the result written into the heads of terms early. Sublease stock – the grey space layer – adds further quiet competition on the landlord’s side of the table.

In the east the same tactics fail, because 1.4 per cent vacancy is not a negotiation, it is a queue. There the realistic route is the pre-lease with its long lead time, or paying the premium for the little that stands. Watch the second half for two things: whether the several pending deals the Industrial Research Forum expects to close actually land, and whether weakening industry – production fell 2.0 per cent year on year in May – starts feeding the renegotiation wave that already dominates Slovak leasing. Investors, for their part, kept buying: the investment market saw EUR 224 million trade in H1, all of it Slovak and Czech capital, at a prime yield of 6.00 per cent quoted for class A stock only. The tenant’s market we described in January is still here – but as of this quarter, only west of Zilina.

Tell us which side of this market you are on – a hall to fill in the west or space to secure in the east – and we will map your options against what Q2 actually priced.

Fire safety compliance is the part of a Slovak industrial lease that gets read once, at handover, and then filed. That is unfortunate, because the statutory starting point is the opposite of what most occupiers assume: the law puts the duties on the owner who lets the building, and it is the lease that moves them. The second surprise is the clock. A storage or production floor is not on an annual inspection cycle in Slovakia, it is on a quarterly one. Here is what the two instruments actually say, what the intervals are, what the fines look like and what belongs in the contract.

Who the law makes responsible

Two provisions of Act 314/2001 on fire protection point in different directions, and the gap between them is where most disputes start. Sections 4 and 5 address the legal person and the entrepreneur, listing what has to happen in the premises they use: preventive inspections and the removal of the defects found, staff training, fire protection documentation kept in line with the actual state of the building, fire equipment in working order, escape and access routes kept permanently clear.

Section 6 then adds the sentence that changes the picture for a leased building. In the original: “Vlastnik (spravca) nehnutelnosti, ktory prenajima nehnutelnost, je povinny zabezpecit ulohy ochrany pred poziarmi podla ustanoveni tohto zakona, ak sa v najomnej zmluve nedohodne s najomcom o zabezpeceni tychto uloh inak.” The owner or administrator who lets a property has to ensure the fire protection tasks under the Act, unless the lease agrees otherwise with the tenant.

Read together, the default sits with the landlord and the lease is the instrument that moves it. Section 6(1) adds a second addressee inside the company that ends up carrying the duty: responsibility for performance rests with the statutory body, so it is a director who answers for it, not the facilities manager. A lease that says nothing about fire protection has not left the question open. It has answered it, in the landlord’s disfavour, because the contract itself is what section 6(2) points at. That matters most in a converted building, where the fire solution on file is often older than the use the space now serves.

The three-month clock nobody budgets for

The interval comes from the implementing decree, not the Act. Section 14(1) of decree 121/2002 on fire prevention sets three periods for the preventive fire inspection. Every twelve months in residential buildings and in premises with only occasional workplaces, where nobody is regularly stationed and someone appears at intervals of several days for checks, maintenance or repair. Every six months in premises used only for administrative work. And every three months in all other premises of a legal person, unless its statutory body sets a shorter period.

A warehouse floor is neither an office nor an occasional workplace, so it falls into the residual third category. That is the quarterly cycle, and it is the single most commonly missed obligation in the sector, because the annual visit that most occupiers budget for is the interval for the space they are not in.

The practical consequence is that one building can run three clocks at once. On our own reading of that provision, a typical unit with a storage and production floor, an office block and an unstaffed technical room generates four documented inspections a year for the floor and two for the offices, so six visits and six records rather than one. None of that is discretionary and none of it is expensive; it only becomes expensive when three years of it are missing at once.

What else runs on its own clock

Fire equipment has a separate cycle. Section 5(a) of the Act requires the occupier of the duty to keep it in working order and have it checked and maintained by a qualified person, and section 13(1) of the decree fixes the floor at one check every twelve months, with the result written into the fire book. Where the manufacturer specifies more, the manufacturer wins. A sprinkler installation, a smoke extraction system and a set of hydrants each carry their own regime under that rule, which is why the suppression system is worth naming individually in the lease rather than covering it with the word equipment.

Technical and technological equipment is a third category again. Section 13a(1)(b) of the decree requires a fire-safety check by designated persons at the manufacturer’s intervals and at least once every twelve months, with written documentation. In a modern hall that catches the charging room, the conveyors and the racking-mounted electrics, which is exactly the equipment an automation project adds after the lease was signed. It happens without any automation too: a rooftop installation, the electric plant that arrives with the new-build standard and the plant room of a cold store all land on the same register.

Two more obligations are easy to forget because they involve people rather than plant. Section 5(e) requires an evacuation drill at least once every twelve months in premises where evacuation conditions are not simple, and section 9(2) requires that the inspections, the training, the documentation and the drills are carried out through a qualified fire protection technician. That is a named external appointment with a cost attached, and the lease should say who makes it.

Where fire safety compliance gets expensive

The sanctions sit in section 59. A regional or district directorate can impose a fine of up to EUR 8,298 for breaches that include failing to carry out the regular preventive fire inspection, and up to EUR 16,596 for breaches that include failing to ensure the regular check of fire equipment and of technical and technological equipment. A repeat of a breach already fined in the previous three years can be fined up to double, so the ceiling for a second offence is EUR 33,192.

Two features matter more than the headline numbers. Section 59(7) states that the fine leaves liability for the damage caused untouched. The penalty is therefore the smaller half of the exposure. Section 60 then gives the authority one year from learning of the breach, and three years from the breach itself. A gap in the fire book survives well past the quarter it happened in. It usually comes to light after an incident, or during a state fire inspection.

The national picture is not reassuring. The fire and rescue corps recorded 8,956 fires in Slovakia in 2025, 1,262 more than in 2024 and an increase of 16.4 per cent, with direct damage of EUR 57,426,265 and 55 people killed. The corps does not publish an accessible breakdown by type of building, so nobody should quote a warehouse share from it, including us. What the figure does establish is that the trend is going the wrong way while the inspection duties stay where they are.

What to write into the lease

Because section 6(2) makes the split contractual, the drafting is the whole game. Five points are worth the argument. First, name the duties individually rather than allocating “fire safety” as a block: preventive inspections, equipment checks, documentation, training, drills and the technician appointment are six separate cost lines with three different intervals. Second, put the technician appointment in writing, including who pays and who receives the reports.

Third, deal with the defects the inspection finds. An inspection produces a list, and the argument that follows is whether an item is a repair the landlord owes on the structure or an operating item that lands in the service charge. Deciding that in advance is cheaper than deciding it in front of a deadline. It belongs in the same folder as the energy bill: a running cost with a document trail. Fourth, secure the folder at both ends. A complete set is handed over at the start, recorded like a schedule of condition, and a complete set goes back at the end of the term. A tenant planning an early exit meets that problem sooner. And anything agreed outside the lease, in a separate agreement, has to survive a change of owner.

Fifth, keep the fit-out in the loop. Racking, a mezzanine floor, a charging room or a fire-rated partition all change the fire solution of the building, and the party that installs them is not always the party the register lists as responsible; a fit-out contribution that funds the work does not move the duty by itself, and the reinstatement obligation decides who takes it all out again. With the prime rent at EUR 5.30 per square metre per month and vacancy at 7.72 per cent in the first quarter of 2026, a tenant negotiating today has the room to ask for all five, and the cost of asking is a paragraph rather than anything on the rent line.

Conclusion

Fire protection in Slovakia is not a single duty with a single annual appointment. It is a set of obligations on three clocks, resting by default on the owner who lets the building and moved only by the words of the lease. The occupier who assumes the landlord has it covered and the landlord who assumes the occupier has it covered are describing the same building, and one of them is wrong. Read section 6(2) against your own contract, count the intervals your spaces actually attract, and settle the defect question before an inspector settles it for you.

Send us the lease and the fire documentation folder for the hall you occupy, and we will tell you which duties the contract has actually moved to you, which ones it left with the owner and what that is worth at the next renewal.