Payroll in Romania: employer costs and obligations explained

If you are a founder hiring your first Romanian employee — or paying yourself a salary as administrator — this guide explains where the money goes, what must happen before and after the hire, and why payroll is the one area where improvisation gets expensive fastest.

Romanian payroll taxation sits mostly on the employee side of the payslip: the contributions are withheld from gross salary, and the employer adds one contribution on top. At the review date the components are:

The practical translation for budgeting: when a candidate asks for a net salary, the real cost to your company is substantially higher. Always negotiate and budget in one agreed currency of discussion — net, gross or total cost — and let your accountant convert precisely at the rates in force. Published plans for ongoing payroll are on our pricing page.

Romanian employment is formal from the first hour. A written employment contract must exist and be registered in REVISAL — the national electronic registry of employees — before the employee starts work. There is no grace window: an unregistered worker on site is undeclared work, which sits among the most severely sanctioned findings a labour inspection can make.

The hiring file is more than the contract itself: job description, identity documents, medical fitness certificate for work, and the REVISAL entry. We prepare these as an add-on to monthly payroll, so the hire is compliant from the start — see the payroll service page for what is included.

Once someone is on the payroll, a fixed monthly cycle runs:

• —Payroll calculation — gross to net for each employee, applying contributions, income tax and any deductions, plus timesheets, leave and sick days.
• —Declaration D112 — the monthly payroll declaration filed with ANAF, covering salaries, contributions and income tax for all employees.
• —Payments — net salaries to employees, withheld taxes and contributions to the state, by their deadlines.
• —Payslips and records — employees receive payslips; the employment records stay current in REVISAL.

This cycle repeats whether you have one employee or fifty, and it slots into the same monthly rhythm as your bookkeeping — see our monthly accounting checklist for how it fits together.

Salary changes, role changes, suspensions and terminations each have their own paperwork and REVISAL updates, with their own deadlines. Termination in particular is procedural: the legal basis, notice and final documents must line up, because a sloppy exit file is a common trigger for disputes and inspections. These are handled as add-on services next to the monthly payroll run — priced per event, so you pay for them when they happen, not as a permanent overhead.

Payroll errors are rarely small, because they repeat. A wrong contribution basis or a missed registration is not one mistake — it is the same mistake every month until someone notices, and the party who notices may be a labour inspector or ANAF. Corrections mean rectifying declarations, back payments and possible penalties, and undeclared or misdeclared work carries some of the harshest sanctions in the system. On top of the money, payroll failures are personal: they hit your employees' salaries, health cover and pension records, which makes them the fastest way to lose a team's trust. This is why payroll is the last function we recommend improvising — if you are unsure your current setup is right, ask us for a review.