OBJECTIVE: The total cost of secondary stroke has not been well established. The high risk of stroke recurrence, reaching almost 50% in the first five years following primary stroke, can be substantially reduced with effective preventive health-care programs. Thus secondary prevention can produce substantial clinical benefits and economic savings. We evaluated health-care resource use and indirect costs in a sample population of patients after secondary stroke. METHODS: 2nd Neurological Department clinical database was reviewed and 105 secondary stroke patients evaluated. Life expectancy was estimated using the Kaplan-Meier method along with a parametric hazard function estimator. Survivors were surveyed on health-care resource consumption within previous year and indirect costs including care time at home and employment status. Average total cost and 95% bootstrap confidence intervals were calculated. Eventually survey was aimed at evaluating patients’ disability with the Barthel ADL Index. The relationship between ADL score and the total cost of secondary stroke was determined. RESULTS: Life expectancy for a Polish patient experiencing a secondary stroke was found to be 3.9 years (95%CI: 2.25 - 5.71). Average lifetime costs for secondary stroke totaled 52 181 USD (95%CI: 43536 - 61602) (PPP 2000). The direct costs were estimated at 24 099 USD and productivity loss due to morbidity amounted to 34.3% of the total indirect cost, while the remaining 65.7% corresponded to patient home-care costs. It was found that the total cost decreased as ADL increased. CONCLUSION: The costs of secondary stroke are substantial in Poland mainly due to indirect costs. Study of the cost of primary stroke are needed to extract the precisely cost of secondary stroke. Effective secondary prevention can produce economic savings as a result of limiting the burden of secondary stroke.