Romania VAT Calculator (TVA) — 21% and 11%, Post-Reform

Romania made the largest single VAT change in the EU in 2025 — a two-point rise in the standard rate and the abolition of two reduced bands on the same day. If you are working from a rate table that has not been updated since July 2025, every Romanian figure it gives you is wrong.

The 1 August 2025 overhaul

Law no. 141/2025 on fiscal-budgetary measures was published in the Monitorul Oficial on 25 July 2025 and amended article 291 of the Fiscal Code (Law 227/2015) with effect from 1 August 2025. Two things happened simultaneously:

The methodological norms were updated by Government Decision 602/2025, which is where the operative detail — the customs codes that define the 11% food list — actually lives. The result is the simplest Romanian rate structure in years: two positive rates instead of four.

Repricing after the increase

A rate rise forces a commercial decision that a calculator can make visible: hold the net and let the shelf price rise, or hold the shelf price and absorb the difference in margin.

Holding a 1 190 lei shelf price through the change costs 16.53 lei of net revenue on every unit — a 1.65% haircut on margin that compounds quickly across a catalogue.

What the 11% band covers

Article 291(2) of the Fiscal Code, as ANAF sets it out, applies the 11% reduced rate to:

• Medicines for human use
• Food and drink for human and animal consumption, and live domestic animals and birds — subject to four exclusions set out below
• Water supply and sewerage services, and water for agricultural irrigation
• Fertilisers and pesticides of the kind normally used in agriculture, seeds and other products for sowing or planting, and agricultural services
• School textbooks, books, newspapers and magazines in physical or electronic form — excluding publications that are wholly or predominantly video or audio-music content, and those intended exclusively or mainly for advertising
• Admission to castles, museums, memorial houses, historic monuments, architectural and archaeological monuments, zoos and botanical gardens
• Firewood — logs, billets, branches, sawdust, pellets and briquettes — supplied to individuals, and to legal entities including schools, hospitals, dispensaries and social-assistance units as final users on a self-declaration
• Thermal energy in the cold season for households, public and private hospitals, public and private schools, NGOs and religious units, and accredited social-service providers
• Social-policy housing, including the land it stands on — old people's and pensioners' homes, children's homes, and recovery and rehabilitation centres for minors with disabilities
• Hotel accommodation and similar sectors, including the rental of land laid out for camping
• Restaurant and catering services, excluding alcoholic drinks and CN 2202 non-alcoholic drinks

Crucially, the 11% food rate applies along the whole economic chain — producer, wholesaler and retailer all charge 11% on the same goods regardless of what the buyer eventually does with them. ANAF illustrates this with apricots: a grower selling to a trader charges 11%, and the trader charges 11% on resale whether the fruit ends up as food, as jam stock or as raw material for alcohol.

The four exclusions that catch people out

The exclusions are drawn by customs code rather than by intuition, and each one pushes a supply back to 21%:

• Alcoholic drinks — always standard-rated, including when served with an 11% meal
• Non-alcoholic beverages under CN code 2202 — soft drinks, and less obviously plant-based milks. ANAF's own worked example confirms that vegetable drinks classified at CN 2202 carry 21%, and notes they never qualified for the old 9% either, having been excluded by Government Ordinance 16/2022 from 1 January 2023
• Foods with added sugar whose total sugar content is at least 10 g per 100 g of product — with powdered milk for newborns, infants and young children carved back in
• Food supplements as defined by Law 56/2021, whatever their customs code

The practical test is therefore not “is this food?” but “does its CN code appear in point 37 of the methodological norms as amended by Government Decision 602/2025?” Food colourings and flavourings whose codes are not listed there are standard-rated even though they end up in food.

The 9% housing window — and why it has closed

When the standard rate rose, Romania protected buyers who were already mid-purchase. Article III of Law 141/2025 let an individual, alone or jointly with others, acquire one dwelling at 9% between 1 August 2025 and 31 July 2026 if four conditions were met cumulatively:

• Usable area of no more than 120 m² excluding outbuildings, and a value including the land of no more than RON 600,000 excluding VAT
• The dwelling habitable at delivery, and delivery no later than 31 July 2026
• No previous reduced-rate home purchase since 1 January 2023, checked against the Registrul achizițiilor de locuințe cu cota redusă de TVA
• An inter vivos deed for an advance payment concluded before 1 August 2025 — and for deeds signed between 3 and 31 July 2025, a 20% advance paid in full by 31 July 2025

Notaries were obliged to consult the register before authenticating, to record the transaction in it, and to state on the deed which rate had been applied. A separate 9% rate applied until 1 August 2026 to buildings sold to municipalities for allocation as subsidised rental housing, again only where the advance-payment deed predated 1 August 2025.

Both windows have now expired. From August 2026 a Romanian residential delivery falls at 21%, or at 11% where it genuinely qualifies as social-policy housing under article 291(2). Any source still quoting a live 9% Romanian housing rate is describing a regime that no longer exists.

RO e-Factura: the invoice is the XML

Romania runs one of the strictest clearance models in the EU. An invoice acquires fiscal value only once it has been transmitted to the ANAF platform and sealed by the Ministry of Finance — the PDF you email a customer is a courtesy copy with no legal standing. Transmission is due within five working days of issue, a deadline that replaced the earlier five calendar days.

• 1 July 2022: B2G e-invoicing mandatory
• 1 January 2024: B2B reporting obligation begins
• 1 July 2024: full B2B e-invoicing mandatory for resident businesses; the 15%-of-invoice-value penalty takes effect
• 1 January 2025: B2C brought into scope
• 29 May 2026: Law 88/2026 (Monitorul Oficial 459) makes e-Factura optional for supplies to individuals identified only by a personal numeric code, to special-regime farmers and to foreign cultural institutes, with a thirteen-zero code used in place of a fiscal identifier
• 1 July 2026: the penalty deferral for small and micro-enterprises with turnover under €500,000 expires — everyone is now fully exposed

Penalties. Late transmission is fined per infringement on a sliding scale: RON 5,000–10,000 for large taxpayers, RON 2,500–5,000 for medium taxpayers, and RON 1,000–2,500 for everyone else. Separately, issuing or receiving a B2B invoice outside the platform attracts a penalty of 15% of the invoice value — charged to both the seller and the buyer, which makes your counterparty's compliance your problem too.

Registration, returns, SAF-T and RO e-TVA

The registration threshold is RON 395,000 of annual turnover, raised from RON 300,000 with effect from 1 September 2025 by Government Ordinance 22/2025, which aligned the Fiscal Code with the EU small-enterprise directive. A Romanian business can also apply the small-enterprise exemption in other member states provided its EU-wide turnover stays under €100,000, after filing a prior notification with ANAF and reporting quarterly.

Reporting itself is layered. The D300 VAT return is filed monthly — or quarterly for smaller taxpayers with no intra-Community acquisitions — by the 25th of the following month, alongside the D394 domestic transaction listing and the D390 recapitulative statement for intra-EU supplies. On top sits SAF-T: the D406 file, mandatory for large taxpayers since January 2022, medium since January 2023, and small and non-resident VAT-registered companies since January 2025, due by the last calendar day of the month following the reporting period, with fines of RON 1,000 to RON 5,000 for failure to submit.

ANAF then feeds e-Factura, RO e-Transport and SAF-T data into RO e-TVA, a pre-filled VAT return introduced on 1 August 2024 and compared automatically against the D300. From 2026 the obligation to answer a discrepancy notice, and the fines attached to it, were removed — the notices are informational. They still drive audit selection, which is why periodic reconciliation across the three data streams is the single most valuable control a Romanian finance team can run.

Romanian VAT calculation formulas

The calculator applies these equations. Substitute 1.11 for 1.21 to work at the reduced band.

Add 21% TVA (net to gross)

Remove 21% TVA (gross to net)

Romanian VAT: the dates that matter

Comparing Romania with its neighbours? Our European VAT rates by country table carries every current standard and reduced band, and the reverse charge guide explains what to put on a cross-border invoice into Romania.