Opening a Company in Moldova as a Romanian Investor

Ask a Romanian entrepreneur about Moldova and the answer comes fast: small market. Two and a half million people, so there is nothing to do there.

That is an accurate measurement of the wrong thing. Almost nobody sets up in Moldova to sell to Moldovans. They set up here because the work gets done here and gets sold somewhere else — and that somewhere else is, more often than not, Romania. In 2025, 29.6% of everything Moldova exported went to Romania, more than three times the next destination (National Bureau of Statistics).

So the trade route is not news. What changed in the last year is the plumbing around it.

What changed in the last twelve months

Three things, all since the second half of 2025, all with a direct effect on a Moldovan company that works with Europe.

Euro payments. Moldova has been operational in SEPA since 6 October 2025. Euro transfers settle on the same conditions as inside the union, so a Moldovan account no longer behaves like an account outside it (European Commission).

Goods in transit. Since 1 November 2025 Moldova is a party to the Convention on a common transit procedure and uses NCTS, the same electronic system as the member states, Türkiye, Serbia, the United Kingdom and Ukraine (European Commission).

Accession. Screening was completed in September 2025, the first negotiating cluster — fundamentals — was opened on 15 June 2026, and the external relations cluster on 14 July 2026 (Council of the EU).

Treat the accession calendar as direction rather than promise: timelines slip and there is nothing to build on them. What matters in practice is something else — regulation is converging on the acquis, so what you set up here now is less likely to need rebuilding in a few years.

What a Moldovan company gives you

The substance comes from Moldova setting its own tax and trade policy. That position has concrete consequences.

• The IT Park 7% single tax. Companies working in IT, the creative industries and R&D can settle most of what they owe with one payment calculated on revenue. Profit tax, the income tax on salaries, the social and medical fund contributions that come with payroll, road and real estate tax and an assortment of local charges all disappear into that 7%. VAT is the one thing left outside it and works as normal. To qualify, 70% or more of revenue has to come from the activities set out in Article 8 of Law 77/2016 (Moldova IT Park). Our IT Park guide covers eligibility properly, and the IT Park calculator runs the arithmetic on your own figures.
• Deferred tax on profit you leave in the business. For micro, small and medium enterprises, income tax on profit from the 2023–2026 fiscal periods is deferred for as long as no dividends are distributed, and becomes payable when they are. The deferral does not cover financial and insurance activities, nor trading companies that exceed both 49 employees and MDL 50 million in turnover or assets (Ministry of Finance). It is a deferral, not an exemption — check the end date if you are building a model on it.
• 12% corporate income tax and 6% withholding on dividends paid to non-residents, below the 10% cap in the double tax treaty between the two states (Investor Guide 2026).
• Its own network of trade agreements. Moldova holds a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area with the EU, plus separate agreements with Turkey, the EFTA states in force since April 2025, CEFTA and a set of CIS countries. It negotiates these itself, which is how a single company ends up with duty-free routes into several trade blocs at once (European Commission).
• A low cost base. Salaries, office space and professional services sit at a level that lets a small team run a long runway on modest funding.
• Registration in a matter of days. State registration at the Public Services Agency runs up to 72 hours once the file is complete, and an express fee shortens it further.
• A workforce that moves between Romanian, Russian and English without effort, which is worth a great deal if you service clients on both sides of the region.

What registering actually involves

With a Romanian passport you are a non-resident founder in Moldova — but the non-resident founder with the shortest route. Here is the shape of it.

You do not need a local partner. You can own 100% of the share capital and be the administrator yourself. There is no minimum share capital to fund and no residence permit required simply to own the company.

You do not need to travel, and you do not need an apostille. Documents issued by Romanian authorities are recognised in Moldova without superlegalisation or apostille, under Article 22 of the 1996 treaty between the two states on legal assistance in civil and criminal matters, ratified in Romania by Law 177/1997 (Embassy of Moldova in Romania). A power of attorney drawn up before a Romanian notary is enough for a representative to file the whole thing. We set out how the power of attorney route works in detail.

The file. Your passport, the founding decision and articles of incorporation drafted in Romanian, the registration application, and a beneficial owner declaration under Law 308/2017. If the founder is a Romanian company rather than an individual, add an extract from the Trade Register and the company’s constituent documents.

A legal address in Moldova. Every company needs a registered office. We provide one, so you are not signing a lease before you have a company to sign it with.

An IDNP. Foreign founders often need a Moldovan personal identification number for certain steps. Our corporate services page sets out where it fits and what it costs.

Timing. State registration is days. End to end, from a few days to about a week, depending on how quickly the documents and the power of attorney are drawn up.

The bank account is separate, and slower. Some banks accept a representative signing under power of attorney, others want the administrator present. This is the step worth planning around, and we go through it in the guide to opening a business account as a non-resident.

Before any of it, you can check whether your company name is available with our name checker and find the right activity code with the CAEM classifier. Both are free and neither needs an account.

What a Moldovan company does not solve

Worth saying as plainly as the good part.

A Moldovan entity does not make you a company established in the European Union. A VAT number valid in VIES, EU public tenders and EU funding all stay tied to an entity in a member state — something your Romanian company already does and the Moldovan one does not replace.

Goods leaving Moldova for the EU remain imports. The DCFTA removes the duties on most of them, and transit has been much simplified since 1 November 2025, but the customs border is still there.

And two jurisdictions mean two sets of accounts, two sets of filings and an obligation to keep transactions between related companies at market prices, verifiable by both tax administrations. That cost starts in month one, whatever the new entity produces.

The Romanian company stays exactly where it is. What you do here is an addition.

We wrote about the Romanian side of the picture — what a Romanian company genuinely adds and what an SRL costs in 2026 — here.

Where to start

Tell us what the business does, whether you will employ people here, and whether the work is IT or something else. Those three answers determine almost everything: which tax regime fits, whether IT Park is worth pursuing, and how the file should be built.

You can see everything we handle on the corporate services page. If you would rather just describe the situation and get a straight answer about whether Moldova makes sense for you, write to us. Sometimes the answer is that it does not, and we will tell you that too.