A Company in Romania: When It Makes Sense and What It Costs in 2026

The conversation comes from two directions.

The first: a client with a Moldovan company starts winning European customers, the orders get bigger, and then somebody on the other side asks a question they cannot answer well — do you have an EU entity?

The second comes from people who have not registered anything yet. They have a serious plan, the customers they are aiming at are in Europe, and they ask outright where they should start: Chisinau, Bucharest, or both.

Until now our honest response was that we would ask around and get back to them. That changes today. We have partnered with an incorporation firm in Bucharest, and we can now put clients in front of people who set up Romanian companies for a living.

This article separates the real reasons from the ones that stopped being true, and puts the actual cost of a Romanian SRL in 2026 on the table.

Reasons that no longer hold

Most of what gets said about “access to the European market” describes the situation of a few years ago. Four things you already have without a Romanian company:

Customs duties. Moldova has a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area with the European Union. Most Moldovan goods enter the EU without customs duties (European Commission).

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

Euro payments. Moldova has been operational in SEPA since 6 October 2025. Euro transfers settle on the same conditions as inside the union (European Commission).

EU trademarks. Any person or company can own an EU trade mark, wherever they are based. Applicants without an establishment in the EEA need a professional representative in proceedings before the Office, not an EU company (EUIPO).

If somebody is selling you a Romanian SRL on one of those four grounds, they are selling you something you already have.

What a Romanian company actually adds

What remains comes down to one thing: being established in a member state rather than trading with one. That difference is real.

• An EU VAT number in VIES. Your European business customers reverse-charge and carry on. Their accounting departments stop asking questions, and you stop being the supplier that requires an explanation.
• Status as an EU counterparty. Payment processors, marketplaces, fintech platforms and a fair number of corporate procurement departments require an entity established in the union before they will onboard you. SEPA does not solve this — it is a requirement about legal form, not about payments.
• Public procurement. Many EU and national tenders are limited to entities established in a member state, or weight them heavily.
• EU funding. Structural funds, national programmes financed from the EU budget and research funding need an establishment inside the union.
• Goods moving inside the EU. Between member states there is no import and export: no customs clearance, no origin declaration, no broker. This matters if you actually warehouse or ship from inside the union; if you produce in Moldova and deliver from there, transit stays transit.
• A home market of close to 19 million people, with a deep engineering and IT talent pool.
• Familiarity. Procurement departments, investors and law firms across Europe already know how to contract with a Romanian SRL. Nobody has to be persuaded that it is a normal counterparty.

If you do not have a company yet

You need no existing company to start in Romania, and no local partner. You can be the sole shareholder and the administrator, without EU citizenship and without residency.

The useful question is not which jurisdiction sounds better, but where your customers and your people are.

If you sell services or software to EU companies and the team is small and distributed, the Romanian entity may well be the first one. The EU VAT number removes a conversation you would otherwise have with every single customer.

If the team, the cost base and the delivery are in Moldova, you usually start here and add Romania when a customer actually asks for an EU-established supplier — not before. A Romanian company opened “just in case” costs accounting, filings and one employee every month it produces nothing.

If the business is IT, run the numbers on IT Park first: the 7% regime changes the arithmetic materially, and the calculator will do it with your figures.

What a Romanian SRL involves in 2026

Worth knowing before you decide, rather than after.

Share capital. Law 239/2025, in force since 18 December 2025, requires a minimum of RON 500 at incorporation. A second threshold catches people later: at net turnover above RON 400,000, the capital has to be raised to at least RON 5,000, by the end of the financial year following the one in which the threshold was passed (Portal Legislativ).

Registration. Companies go on the register at the ONRC. The registrar rules on the application within one working day of filing; if the file is incomplete you get a period of up to 15 calendar days to complete it (Law 265/2022). Realistically the whole cycle — name reservation, drafting, supporting documents — runs three to ten working days.

Micro-enterprise tax. From 2026 there is a single rate of 1% of revenue, regardless of activity code. The ceiling has dropped to EUR 100,000, that is RON 509,850 at the 5.0985 rate of 31 December 2025. The company must have at least one full-time employee, and a shareholder holding more than 25% cannot hold several micro-enterprises. Banking, insurance and capital markets, gambling and oil and gas extraction stay outside the regime. The tax is declared and paid quarterly (ANAF).

Above the ceiling. You move to the 16% profit tax from the quarter in which you passed EUR 100,000. It is not a change from the following year, but from that quarter.

Taking money out. Dividends are taxed at 16% for distributions made from 1 January 2026, up from 10% (Law 141/2025). For a shareholder who is a tax resident of Moldova, the treaty between the two states caps the tax at 10% of the gross amount, provided you give the paying company a tax residence certificate (ANAF). The 10% health contribution concerns Romanian tax residents whose dividend and other income reaches six gross minimum salaries, RON 24,300 in 2026.

VAT. The standard rate is 21%, with a reduced 11% rate on a defined list. Registration becomes mandatory above RON 395,000 of turnover.

Reporting. B2B invoices go through RO e-Factura, and the SAF-T informative return (D406) has been mandatory for small taxpayers too since 1 January 2025 (ANAF). In practice you need competent monthly accounting from month one, not from your first customer.

Ownership and residency. You do not need to be an EU citizen or a Romanian resident to hold the shares and be the administrator. But owning a company gives you no right to live or work in Romania — that is a separate immigration track with its own investment and job-creation thresholds.

How the introduction works

We do not register companies in Romania, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What we do is introduce you to a firm in Bucharest that has been doing Romanian incorporations long enough to handle the awkward files as well as the simple ones.

You tell us what you are setting up and roughly what it is for. We put you in front of the right people. They take the registration from there, and we stay available for the Moldovan side of whatever you build.

We are not publishing their name here. That is deliberate. The introduction is a personal one and we would rather make it properly than turn it into a directory listing.

Tell us what you are building

Do you already run a Moldovan company and has Europe started asking where you are established? Or are you at the start and trying to choose where to begin? We have both conversations often.

Write to us with what you sell, who buys it and where, and we will tell you whether a Romanian entity is worth the overhead in your case. Sometimes the answer is that it is not, and we will say so.

For the Moldovan side of the picture, our corporate services page covers what we handle ourselves. And if you are coming the other way — a Romanian investor looking at Moldova — we wrote about that here.