The paper discusses ‘phraseological chain’ (phraseological families) in modern business language. The analysis aims to illustrate its occurrence in German and Polish press texts. The study is based on samples from the following newspapers: “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”, “Handelsblatt”, “Wirtschaftswoche”, “Gazeta Wyborcza”, “Dziennik Gazeta Prawna” and “Rzeczpospolita”. The argumentation provided in the article is supposed to seek evidence to the claim that it is the given context that determines the idiomatic character of respective expressions. A deep analysis of various phraseological units allows to notice the parallel occurrence of idiomaticity. The adopted method of defining the semantic structure of a particular idiom or idiomatic expression enables to determine the scope of equivalence. The study also explores the question of how these phraseological units are cohesive to their context. The materials collected for the purpose of this paper might be implemented in further contrastive analysis of fixed expressions and idioms in German and Polish business language.