REGES-ONLINE and foreign workers: the day the contract must already be in the register

The individual employment contract must be submitted to REGES-ONLINE by the day before work starts, whether or not that day is a working day, under Government Decision 295/2025. Late submission carries a fine of 3,000 to 5,000 lei per unregistered person, applied by the Labour Inspection. For a foreign worker, the same error also stops the residence permit.

The deadline: the day before, not the first day of work

The general register of employees, REGES-ONLINE, is governed by Government Decision 295/2025, published on legislatie.just.ro, and is run by the Labour Inspection through its territorial labour inspectorates. The deadline rule is the one employers hiring outside the EU most often get wrong: the contract has to be in the register by the day before work begins.

The decision closes the calendar loophole explicitly. The term runs whether the preceding day is a working day or a non working day. A worker starting on Monday needs a contract submitted on Sunday or earlier, and an HR office that is closed on Sunday does not move the deadline. In practice the only safe procedure is to submit on the day the contract is signed, not on the eve of the start date.

Penalties are counted per person, not per file. The Labour Inspection applies a fine of 3,000 to 5,000 lei for each person whose contract was not submitted in time. Completing the register with incorrect data, with entries that do not match reality, carries a fine of 5,000 to 10,000 lei. A batch of ten arrivals submitted one day late does not produce one fine, it produces ten.

Why the register decides the immigration file

For a Romanian employee, an error in REGES-ONLINE is a compliance matter with the Labour Inspection. For a foreign worker it is also a residence matter. When the right of residence for work is extended, the General Inspectorate for Immigration asks for proof of a full time individual employment contract registered in the register. If the registration is missing, if the job title in the register does not match the title on the employment permit, or if the recorded salary is below the one on the permit, the extension file stops at the counter and the worker is left with an active contract and no valid permit.

A second link was created by Emergency Ordinance 32/2026, which ties the 6 month prohibition on changing employer directly to the REGES-ONLINE registration date. The register is now the official source of a date with legal effect on the worker's mobility, not merely an administrative record. An employer that submits the contract late also pushes back the point at which the worker becomes free to move, a mechanism set out in change of employer for foreign workers.

The correct order of steps, and the failure mode

The sequence that produces no fines has five steps and none of them can be swapped: the employment permit from IGI, the long stay visa for employment, signature of the individual employment contract, submission to REGES-ONLINE, then the first day of work. Between the last two there has to be at least one calendar night.

The classic failure mode shows up on group arrivals. The flight lands on Thursday evening, the medical check and the health and safety induction are booked for Friday morning, and the employer treats Friday as the first day of work because the people are already on site. Contracts go into the register at midday on Friday, after the induction. At a later inspection the inspector compares the submission timestamp with the attendance sheet and the induction records, and the result is a fine of 3,000 to 5,000 lei for each arriving worker. A health and safety induction is work, not preparation for work.

The second failure mode is slower and more expensive: incorrect data. A job title entered generically in the register, differently from the employment permit, goes unnoticed for months and surfaces only when the permit is extended and IGI finds the mismatch. Correcting it requires an addendum and, if the role genuinely changed, a fresh permit. What would have cost five minutes at submission then costs six to eight weeks of procedure.

Reconcile the register against the issued permits monthly, across the whole foreign workforce. What an inspector looks for during a visit is described in labour inspection of foreign workers, and the full list of employer duties is in employer obligations towards foreign workers. For corridor and case support, see the employers page.