Romania Statutory social-insurance contributions

What this value means

What a payroll engine gets wrong in Romania, in order of how much money it costs: 1. ROMANIA SHIFTED ALMOST EVERYTHING TO THE EMPLOYEE IN 2018, AND THIS IS THE SINGLE BIGGEST TRAP IN THE REGION. Before 1 January 2018 the Romanian employer paid roughly 20,8 % pension, 5,2 % health and a set of smaller contributions, and the employee paid 10,5 % + 5,5 %. OUG nr. 79/2017 abolished the employer's pension and health contributions outright, raised the employee's pension contribution to 25 % and the employee's health contribution to 10 %, merged the six remaining employer contributions into a single 2,25 % contribuția asiguratorie pentru muncă, and expected employers to re-base gross salaries upward so that net pay was unchanged. The operative position today is: EMPLOYEE 35 % OF GROSS, EMPLOYER 2,25 % OF GROSS. Say it plainly, because every model built before 2018, and every model that assumes contributions are shared the way they are in Poland or Czechia, is wrong by roughly twenty percentage points in both directions at once — it overstates Romanian employer cost dramatically and understates the employee deduction by the same. It also distorts every gross-to-net calculation: a Romanian gross salary is not comparable with a Czech or Polish one, because it already contains the money that in those countries sits above the line as employer cost. 2. THERE IS NO CEILING ANYWHERE. Neither CAS, nor CASS, nor CAM has an annual or monthly upper limit on employment income. All three run at full rate on every leu, at every income level, for the whole year. Romania is unusual in the region in this: Czechia, Slovakia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bulgaria and Ukraine all cap something. Do not carry a ceiling across from a neighbouring country's model. 3. THERE IS A FLOOR, AND UNIQUELY THE EMPLOYER PAYS IT. Art. 146 alin. (5^1) requires CAS and CASS to be computed on at least the minimum gross wage for part-time employees and for full-time employees paid below it, and the top-up is borne by the EMPLOYER rather than withheld from the employee. For a part-timer on 1 500 lei a month against a 4 325 lei minimum wage, the employer funds 35 % of the 2 825 lei difference. This is the one place where a Romanian employer carries pension and health cost, and it is routinely missed. Exemptions exist (pupils and students under 26, apprentices under 18, disabled employees working reduced hours, pensioners) and a multi-contract employee whose combined base reaches the minimum wage escapes it — but only on a MONTHLY SELF-DECLARATION filed with each employer by the 5th of the following month. No declaration, no relief. 4. THE MINIMUM WAGE MOVED MID-YEAR IN 2026, WHICH BREAKS ANNUAL MODELS. It was 4 050 lei from 1 January 2026 and became 4 325 lei from 1 July 2026 under HG nr. 146/2026. Any engine that loads a single minimum wage per calendar year computes the wrong part-time floor for half of 2026. The tax-and-contribution-exempt slice available on minimum-wage employment also fell from 300 lei to 200 lei on the same date. 5. THE EMPLOYER PAYS NO PENSION AND NO HEALTH CONTRIBUTION FOR AN ORDINARY EMPLOYEE. The only employer pension contribution in the Cod fiscal is art. 138 lit. b) and c) — 4 % for condiții deosebite and 8 % for condiții speciale de muncă — and it applies only to workplaces classified under Legea nr. 263/2010. There is no employer health contribution at all. 6. CAM CANNOT BE SPLIT BY BRANCH. The 15 % / 20 % / 5 % / 40 % / 20 % figures in art. 220^6 alin. (4) allocate the YIELD of the 2,25 % between the wage guarantee fund, the unemployment budget, the work-accident system, the health fund for sick-leave indemnities, and the state budget. They are not rates and must not be re-expressed as payroll percentages. In particular, Romania has NO risk-rated work-injury premium and no industry dimension to employer cost. 7. THE SECTORAL FACILITIES ARE GONE. Employees in IT, construction, agriculture and the food industry once enjoyed a 10 % income-tax exemption, and construction/agri-food employees a CASS exemption and a reduced pension position. These were withdrawn in stages and are completely eliminated for income from January 2025 onward. Code still applying them under-deducts by up to 20 percentage points for those employees. 8. PILLAR II IS A CARVE-OUT, NOT AN ADD-ON. 4,75 % of the CAS base is redirected out of the employee's 25 % to a privately managed pension fund by the pension record institution. Nothing extra leaves the payslip. An engine that models it as an additional employee contribution over-deducts. 9. CONTRIBUTIONS ARE DEDUCTIBLE BEFORE INCOME TAX — UNLIKE CZECHIA AND HUNGARY. The 10 % flat income tax is charged on gross pay less the mandatory social contributions less the personal deduction. Compute the 35 % first; taxing gross directly overstates the tax by roughly 3,5 percentage points of gross. 10. NATIONALITY IS IRRELEVANT; APPLICABLE-LAW RULES ARE NOT. Liability attaches to employment income realised in Romania, and art. 220^1 expressly reaches employees who are Romanian citizens, citizens of other states or stateless persons. What displaces Romanian liability is EU coordination under Regulation (EC) No 883/2004, evidenced by an A1 certificate, or a bilateral social-security agreement. SUB-NATIONAL VARIATION: none. All rates, the minimum wage and the bases are national. Romania has no county- or municipality-level payroll levy and no regional rate variation. The only differentiation in the system is by WORKING CONDITIONS (the 4 % / 8 % employer pension contribution for classified workplaces under Legea nr. 263/2010), which attaches to the individual workplace, not to a region and not mechanically to an industry code. WHAT WE DO NOT PUT A NUMBER ON: 1. The employer's CAS for arduous and hazardous conditions is served as a branch with null rates rather than as 0 or as 4/8: it is nil for an ordinary employee and is 4 % or 8 % only where the workplace is classified, which cannot be derived from an industry code. The two statutory rates are stated in the instrument field. 2. CAM is NOT decomposed into unemployment, sick-leave, work-injury and wage-guarantee percentages. Those components no longer exist as rates; only the treasury allocation of the yield exists, and it is reported as such. 3. tax_deductible is null for the employer-borne items (CAM, employer CAS for special conditions): the question as framed concerns income-tax relief for an EMPLOYEE contribution, and there is none to attach to. 4. No 2027 values. The minimum wage for 2027 does not yet exist as an instrument. ALREADY LEGISLATED, NOT YET IN FORCE / RE-VERIFY POINTS: 1. MINIMUM WAGE — the 4 325 lei level took effect 1 July 2026 under HG nr. 146/2026. Romania has moved the minimum wage mid-year more than once in recent years, so it must be treated as a date-ranged value rather than an annual constant. RE-VERIFY FROM 2026-11-15 for a 1 January 2027 change and again ahead of any mid-year move. 2. PILLAR II CONTRIBUTION RATE — a bill amending Legea nr. 411/2004 to raise the privately managed pension share from 4,75 % to 5,25 % and then to 6 % passed the Senate by tacit adoption and went to the Chamber of Deputies. It is NOT served here as an enacted rate: 4,75 % remains the figure in operation and the increase is reported only as pending. If enacted it changes the destination of part of the 25 %, not its size. RE-VERIFY at each cycle. 3. Art. 220^6 alin. (4^1) — the construction sector's CAM is directed entirely to the wage guarantee fund for the period 2019–2028; that window closes at the end of 2028. No enacted change to any of the four headline rates (25 / 10 / 2,25 / 4 or 8) is on the statute book. SOURCING CAVEATS: The rates and their statutory homes are taken from the consolidated text of Legea nr. 227/2015 privind Codul fiscal as published on the Noul Cod Fiscal and Wolters Kluwer România consolidations, with the operative words of art. 138 lit. a) ('datorată de către persoanele fizice care au calitatea de angajați'), art. 156 ('Cota de contribuție de asigurări sociale de sănătate este de 10 %'), art. 220^1 ('persoanele fizice și juridice care au calitatea de angajatori') and art. 220^4 ('suma câștigurilor brute realizate din salarii și venituri asimilate salariilor') read directly. The art. 220^6 alin. (4) allocation was read as 15 / 20 / 5 / 40 / 20 and sums to 100; a variant set of figures (12 / 17 / 2 / 21 / 48) circulates and belongs to the transitional regime for 2019 only — do not serve it as current. RESIDUAL LIMITS, STATED PLAINLY: the record was built from consolidated commercial reproductions of the Cod fiscal rather than from a Monitorul Oficial print read end to end, because the official portal's article-level pages could not be retrieved directly; the figures are consistent across two independent consolidations and against the Ministry of Finance's own presentation of the CAM. HG nr. 146/2026 is cited from the Ministry of Labour's own announcement and from reporting of its Monitorul Oficial publication on 13 March 2026; the gazette page itself was not opened. The 4,75 % Pillar II share is stated as the operative figure from Legea nr. 411/2004 and confirmed against multiple 2026 sources, but the statutory subsection was not read verbatim. The catalogue of exemptions from the part-time minimum-base rule in art. 146 alin. (5^7) is summarised, not enumerated in full. Reported branches are those applying to an ordinary private-sector employee on a contract individual de muncă. Not covered: PFA and liberal-profession contribution rules, which use fixed multiples of the minimum wage as their base; day-labourer (zilier) rules; and the special regimes for pensioners and for seafarers. Employee and employer shares are stated separately: the employee figure is what leaves the payslip, the employer figure is cost of employment and is not a deduction.

Get it programmatically

curl https://euroref.dev/v1/ro/social-contributions
# $0.005 per call — x402 on Base (USDC). No key, no signup.
# History:    curl https://euroref.dev/v1/ro/social-contributions/history?from=2020-01-01
# Provenance: curl https://euroref.dev/provenance/ro/social-contributions

Other Romania series: BNR monetary policy rate (rata dobânzii de politică monetară) · TVA standard rate (cota standard de taxă pe valoarea adăugată) · VAT registration threshold · minimum wage · Public holidays (zile de sărbătoare legală în care nu se lucrează) · CPI inflation (year-on-year) · Corporate income tax rate (impozit pe profit) · Withholding tax rates · Personal income tax rate (impozit pe venit — cotă unică) · Statutory legal interest (dobânda legală) · BNR reference exchange rates

The same figure elsewhere: Serbia · Slovakia · Slovenia · Spain · Sweden · all 34