Income from voluntary prostitution is subject to taxation on the same terms as other income from self-employment, the Czech Constitutional Court confirmed on Tuesday. The court rejected the complaints of a woman whom the tax authorities had ordered to pay back taxes for 2013 and 2014.
The Constitutional Court’s decision upheld an earlier position of the Supreme Administrative Court, which the woman had challenged. In 2025, that court ruled that income from prostitution is subject to income tax, like any other gainful activity. “Actual income and increases in assets are taxed, not the legal or moral assessment of how they were obtained. Taxation does not mean moral approval or state consent to a given activity,” Constitutional Court Judge Jiří Přibáň said in the ruling’s justification.
The decision definitively ends a years-long legal battle that began with tax offices taking an interest in deposits made to the woman’s bank accounts. The deposited amounts were not backed by her income tax (PIT) returns. The woman explained that the money came from prostitution and argued that income earned this way was not taxable.
In court appearances, she stressed that by collecting taxes on prostitution, the state itself becomes a pimp. She pointed out that although voluntarily providing sexual services for payment is not a crime in the Czech Republic, profiting from another person’s prostitution remains punishable.
The court rejected that argument. It found that the state’s aim is not to enrich itself from other people’s work, but to fairly distribute tax burdens and regulate the market. Among other things, the court held that taxing sexual services may, in the longer term, help strengthen the social standing of the people who provide them.
In the earlier rulings, which the constitutional judges upheld on Tuesday, the Supreme Administrative Court said that neither international conventions on combating human trafficking and the exploitation of prostitution nor criminal provisions on pimping stand in the way of taxing voluntary prostitution.
Different rules apply in Poland. Voluntary prostitution, meaning without coercion, is likewise not a crime there, but income earned from it is not subject to income tax. Under Poland’s PIT act, income from activities that cannot be the subject of a legally effective contract is not taxed.
From Prague, Piotr Górecki (PAP)
