Romania's authorised employer status and the 1,000 euro guarantee

Authorised employer status requires, under article 12 of OUG 32/2026, 24 months of uninterrupted trading and an average of at least 50 employees in the previous year. A financial guarantee of 1,000 euro per foreign worker sits on top. Without the status, the D/AM2 route runs through a licensed placement agency.

Simple registration and authorisation are two different thresholds

OUG 32/2026 sets two eligibility tests rather than one, and confusing them is the most common planning error. Simple employer registration is the entry threshold. It requires at least 1 year of actual trading in the field of the hire, no arrears to the consolidated state budget, and no undeclared work sanctions in the previous 12 months. That is all.

Authorised employer status is the upper threshold and opens the D/AM2 route without an intermediary. The conditions roughly double. Required trading history rises from 12 to 24 uninterrupted months. A size condition appears: an average of at least 50 employees in the previous year, measured on filed payroll returns rather than on a declared org chart. The clean period for occupational safety and undeclared work sanctions extends to 24 months, and final convictions for labour offences block the file for 12 months.

The probity test does not stop at the company. It is run on legal representatives, administrators and shareholders. A clean company with one shareholder carrying a final conviction for a labour offence does not obtain the status, whatever its turnover.

The 1,000 euro guarantee and how the cost is built

The financial guarantee is 1,000 euro for each foreign worker, lodged either with the State Treasury or through a bank guarantee letter. It is not a fee but a locked sum, and for treasury planning the timing matters more than the form: the money must be in place before the application is filed, not after the workers land.

The arithmetic becomes visible at volume. An employer bringing 40 workers locks up 40,000 euro. At 120 workers that is 120,000 euro, comparable to a production machine. A bank guarantee letter eases the liquidity pressure but carries a recurring bank cost and usually assumes a facility already approved. Firms that discover the condition two weeks before mobilisation are forced into the more expensive option. The surrounding costs of a third country hire are set out in the cost of hiring a non-EU worker.

The 20 percent threshold that withdraws the status

The condition most often missed is not one of entry but one of maintenance. No more than 20 percent of previously employed foreign nationals may sit in negative situations, meaning cancelled visas or non-compliant departures. Above that share, authorised employer status is lost.

For a firm with 50 foreign workers brought in over recent years, the threshold is 10 cases. It sounds generous until the counting is done properly: a worker who leaves the job early and does not enter a new procedure counts in the numerator even when the employer did nothing wrong. That is why job abandonment, elsewhere only an operational loss, becomes a status risk here.

The practical failure mode runs like this. A food processing firm brings 30 workers, 7 leave in the first months without regularising their stay, and on the second recruitment round the ratio passes 20 percent. The status is lost, the firm returns to the placement agency route with an intermediation cost on every file, and the production plan was built on the opposite assumption. The counter is operational rather than legal: inspected accommodation, wages paid on time, and one person tracking every exit until the residence position is settled. The duties that support that discipline are in employer obligations, and what inspectors check on site in labour inspection and fines.

Authorised employer status is in substance a certificate of administrative discipline granted in advance. Firms that already meet the trading history and headcount conditions should prepare the file before the recruitment season, because shareholder probity checks and the guarantee cannot be arranged in a few days. For an eligibility read against your own figures, see the employers page.