Employer obligations in Romania when hiring workers from outside the EU

Emergency Ordinance 32/2026 on foreign nationals' access to the labour market, published in Official Gazette 335 of 27 April 2026, moved employer obligations well past the moment of hiring. From 8 August 2026 a company registers and authorises itself on the WorkinRomania.gov.ro platform, posts a guarantee of 1,000 euro for each worker, and stays accountable for the whole employment relationship.

Before this ordinance, the employer's relationship with the state was largely spent inside the authorisation file. The new model resembles the sponsorship regimes of other member states, where authorisation is a status that is maintained, audited and capable of being lost, rather than a one-time approval.

Authorisation and the financial guarantee

Authorisation is granted only to employers meeting a cumulative set of conditions. They filter companies before any discussion of the worker profile begins.

The company must carry no arrears to the consolidated general budget and no entries in the fiscal record over the previous 24 months. It must have actually traded for at least 24 months in a field compatible with the occupation it recruits for, and have averaged at least 50 employees in the previous year. At most 20 percent of the foreign nationals it previously hired may have lost their legal right of residence. Sanctions for undeclared work or for breaches of health and safety rules in the previous 24 months block authorisation.

The guarantee is posted before the authorisation is issued, as a State Treasury deposit or a bank guarantee letter from a Romanian credit institution. It covers the cost of returning the worker to the country of origin and is not a fee: it is returned if it is not called.

What happens after the first working day

The firm job offer becomes a standard document that travels through to the contract. It states the post, the salary, the contract term, working conditions and, where applicable, accommodation, food and transport. The individual employment contract has to mirror the elements of the firm offer, and a divergence between the two is not an administrative slip but the basis of a penalty.

Transport from entry into Romania to the workplace or the accommodation is arranged by the employer. Health and safety induction is delivered in a language the worker understands, which rules out signing a record drafted only in Romanian.

Notifications carry short and separate deadlines. Unjustified absence of more than three consecutive working days is reported within five working days. Contract termination and any indication of labour exploitation are reported within the same five working days. Loss of the authorisation's validity is reported within three working days at most, and a missing worker is reported to the General Inspectorate for Immigration immediately.

The worker cannot initiate a change of employer during the first six months of activity. After that, a change runs only through an authorised placement agency. If a contract ends, the agency has 90 days to put at least two alternative offers to the worker. An employer that paid for the language course, the integration programme, the accommodation and the transport can recover those sums if the six month restriction is breached.

Where the chain breaks

The characteristic failure mode in this regime is not a refused application, it is a lost status. A company authorised in August that picks up an undeclared work fine in February falls into the condition blocking authorisation for the next 24 months. Files already lodged for workers still outside the country are left without an authorised employer, and the guarantees posted for them do not solve the problem.

The second fragile point is the 20 percent threshold. An employer that brought in 100 workers and lost track of 25 of them, because they moved on to another member state without notice, breaches the threshold regardless of how sound its internal procedures are. The five working day notification is not paperwork, it is the only mechanism by which the company documents that it lost contact with a worker rather than concealed one.

The stages preceding these obligations, from authorisation to the single permit, are set out in the employment authorisation procedure. The penalties attached to each obligation are detailed in labour inspection and fines, and the European logic of sponsor liability is described in the employer compliance chain.

The platform testing period closed on 7 August 2026, and applications filed before the ordinance took effect are decided under the previous rules. The working framework for employers is set out on the employers page.