Romania's single application for foreign workers and the 2026 quota

Romania admits 90,000 newly arrived non-EU workers in 2026 under Government Decision 1169/2025, adopted on 30 December 2025 and published in the Official Gazette the following day. That is 10,000 fewer than the 2025 quota. Since 8 August 2026 the employment notice and the posting notice no longer exist, replaced by a single application filed on the state platform WorkinRomania.gov.ro.

Anyone working from a guide written before spring 2026 is working from a procedure that has been repealed. Emergency Ordinance 32/2026, published in the Official Gazette of 27 April 2026, rewrote the route end to end: the filing point, the document, the visa categories, the eligibility of the employer and the obligations that follow arrival.

What replaced the aviz de angajare

The old sequence ran in two separate files. The employer obtained an employment notice from the General Inspectorate for Immigration, then the worker applied for a long stay visa at a Romanian consulate on the strength of it. Ordinance 32/2026 collapses that into one application submitted through the platform, which the Ministry of Internal Affairs operates, and sets a 30 day period for processing, with priority given to highly qualified profiles.

The ordinance also splits the long stay employment visa into two categories, and the split decides who may file.

Direct filing on a D/AM2 application is restricted. An employer wanting to file for itself must have averaged at least 50 employees in the preceding year and have at least 24 months of operating history. Below those thresholds the application goes through a placement agency authorised under the ordinance, which is a structural change for the small construction and hospitality firms that made up much of Romania's foreign hiring before 2026.

The platform opened in stages. Until 7 August 2026 it accepted only employer registrations and agency authorisations, together with functional testing. Full operation began on 8 August 2026. A D/AM2 application is also assessed against a shortage occupation list, which the ordinance required to be published by 14 June 2026.

Where the 90,000 is actually going

The quota is set annually by government decision on a proposal from the Ministry of Labour, Family, Youth and Social Solidarity, after consultation with the social partners. The justification filed with the 2026 decision names the occupations carrying the largest reported vacancies: courier services with 26,275 unfilled posts, goods handling with 20,912, and unskilled work in construction and demolition with 20,484.

Those three categories alone account for more than two thirds of the quota. For an employer sourcing from Nepal, India or the Philippines, that is the useful signal: Romanian demand is concentrated in logistics, warehousing and site labour rather than in the trades that dominate Central European recruitment. A shipbuilding or fabrication intake into Romania competes for permits with a courier sector that files in volume from January.

A reduced quota changes the planning rhythm rather than the eligibility. Romania has exhausted its annual allocation before year end in previous cycles, and 90,000 against 100,000 shortens the window. Filing in the first quarter rather than the third is the practical response, which is the same discipline quota systems impose elsewhere, from the Italian click day to the arrangement described in the Greek bilateral quota route.

The cost, the language obligation and the sequence that works

Under Ordinance 32/2026 the long stay employment visa carries an official fee of €300, paid once the single application has been approved. That sits at the upper end of the European range for a first permit and it is the employer's cost in practice, since a recruitment fee charged to the worker would breach both the Romanian rule and the zero cost principle that governs South Asian corridors.

The obligation that catches employers out is not a fee. The ordinance requires the employer to provide Romanian language courses with cultural and social integration content, running for at least six months from the start of the worker's activity in Romania, at a minimum of six hours a week. Failure to provide them is a contravention punishable by fines of up to 40,000 lei.

Six hours a week for six months is 156 hours per worker. For a fifty person intake that is a training programme, not an administrative item, and it has to be costed and contracted before the first arrival rather than after the first inspection. Employers who budget only the visa fee and the flight are budgeting for about a third of what Romania now requires, and the full arithmetic belongs in the placement cost from the outset.

Register the company on the platform first, because registration is separate from any application and cannot be done in parallel with a live file. Establish whether the business meets the 50 employee and 24 month thresholds for direct filing, and if it does not, appoint an authorised placement agency before drafting job offers. Check the role against the shortage occupation list rather than against the general quota. Then file the single application and count 30 days from a complete submission.

Poland runs the closest comparable procedure, with a voivode issuing the permit against a labour market test, described in the Polish type A work permit. Where Romania now sits against the rest of Europe on elapsed time is set out in the corridor by corridor timeline.

An employer entering Romania this year should assume none of the pre 2026 documentation survives, including template offer letters that reference the employment notice. What Werklist rebuilds on that corridor, and what remains with the employer as the contracting party, is on our employers page.