In brief
- Three orders published on the same day update the same table of veterinary tariffs, and not one of them applies to the profession as a whole. Article 2 of each says that the order takes effect „exclusively” for the claimants in the case that produced it, and there are three such cases: one brought before the Timișoara Court of Appeal, one before the Galați Court of Appeal and one before the Cluj Court of Appeal. The beneficiaries are 44 veterinary practices and companies, named one by one: 28 in the first order, 5 in the second, 11 in the third.
- Recalculated against the tariffs of January 2014, the amounts rise by 75.6% in two of the orders and by 64.2% in the third. The inspection of a household holding goes from 26 lei to 45.66 lei under Orders no. 924/2026 and no. 926/2026, and to 42.69 lei under Order no. 925/2026, for the same month of work. The difference of 2.97 lei comes from one thing only: the first two cases asked for a recalculation covering 2020 as well, the third started from 2021.
- Since 19 December 2020 the law has required the tariffs to be updated every year, by order of the president of the authority, for everybody. No such general order exists even now. The three acts stop on 20 November 2024, so not even the 44 winning practices have an updated tariff for the 669 days that have passed since. The orders enter into force on 21 September 2026.
Published: Official Gazette of Romania (Monitorul Oficial) no. 797 of 21 September 2026
In force from: the date of publication, 21 September 2026
On 21 September 2026 the Official Gazette of Romania published, one after the other, across eleven pages, three versions of the same table of veterinary tariffs. This is the fourth time in ten weeks that it has happened, after the orders of 14 July, 28 August and 10 September 2026, when the same inspection already had two official prices. What is new is where the litigation comes from. Until now every case started at the Iași Court of Appeal; these come from Timișoara, Galați and Cluj, and the number of claimants has gone up from a single one to 44.
The tariffs at issue are not practice prices. They are the sums the county sanitary veterinary directorate pays the authorised private veterinarian for public activities carried out in people’s households: inspecting the holding, the clinical examination, taking blood samples, tuberculin testing, vaccinations, disinfections, fitting ear tags. Article 15(16) of Government Ordinance no. 42/2004 says plainly who pays: the holder of the concession contract is entitled „to the payment of a single tariff by the contracting authority for each activity, set by Government decision”. One of the eleven items is an exception, and it carries an asterisk and a note in the table: the inspection of live animals for the purpose of certifying their state of health is borne by the keeper of the animals. There, and only there, the figures reach the breeder’s pocket directly.
Government Decision no. 1.156/2013 set these amounts in Annex no. 3, published in the Official Gazette of Romania no. 8 of 7 January 2014. That was 12 years and 8 months ago. A simple calculation shows that the amounts stayed there: across all 49 items, the ratio between the last column of Orders no. 924/2026 and no. 926/2026 and the 2014 tariff sits between 1.754 and 1.769, with a median of 1.756. A single index in practice, applied to an entire table, means the starting point was exactly the figure printed in 2014, and the deviations at the margins come from rounding small amounts to the nearest two bani.
What it changes in practice
The orders enter into force on the date of publication, 21 September 2026. Article 3 of each provides only that the act is published in the Official Gazette of Romania, with no later date, and Article 12(3) of Law no. 24/2000, republished in the Official Gazette of Romania no. 260 of 21 April 2010, provides that normative acts subject to publication in Part I, with the exception of laws and ordinances, enter into force on the date of publication unless a later date is laid down in their text.
The first effect is the one that decides everything, and it is read in Article 2, not in the table. Each order applies „exclusively to the public sanitary veterinary activities carried out” by the claimants in the case indicated, and then names them by their trade register name or by the name of the veterinarian in charge. Order no. 924/2026, which enforces Civil Judgment no. 608 of 11 December 2025 of the Timișoara Court of Appeal, lists 28 practices and companies. On Civil Judgment no. 319 of 4 December 2025 of the Galați Court of Appeal, Order no. 925/2026 lists 5. On Civil Judgment no. 353 of 16 October 2024 of the Cluj Court of Appeal, Order no. 926/2026 lists 11. In total 44 addressees, each identified by name. A practice that carried out the same sampling, in the same months, in the next village, but was not a party to any of the three cases, stays outside all three tables.
The second effect lies in the amounts. In Orders no. 924/2026 and no. 926/2026 the table has seven columns, from 2020 to the July 2024 period, while in Order no. 925/2026 it has six, because it starts from 2021. Recalculated against the 2014 annex, the representative items look like this: the inspection of a non-professional holding, from 26 lei to 45.66 lei and 42.69 lei respectively; the clinical examination of a bovine animal, from 2.60 lei to 4.56 lei and 4.27 lei; taking one blood sample from large animals, from 9.10 lei to 15.99 lei and 14.93 lei; taking samples for transmissible spongiform encephalopathies in large animals, the group of diseases that includes mad cow disease, from 130 lei to 228.26 lei and 213.45 lei. The lowest tariff in the table is still oculoconjunctival immunoprophylaxis in poultry, 46 bani per head, and the highest is the inspection of a lot of more than one hundred sheep or goats, 456.59 lei.
The third effect is the shape of the increase. It is divided into seven uneven steps, the same on all 49 rows. Against the 2014 tariff, the column for 2020 stands 6.9% above it. Then come 3.3% for 2021, 11.1% for 2022, 17.2% for the first nine months of 2023, 9.4% for the last quarter of the same year, 0.3% for the first half of 2024 and 11.4% for the period ending on 20 November 2024. The 0.3% step is worth 13 bani on the inspection tariff and is the only one that does not correspond to a rise in the minimum wage.
The fourth effect shows up only if you put the three orders side by side. Order no. 924/2026 and Order no. 926/2026 contain exactly the same figures. Checked item by item, all 49 rows coincide, units of measurement included. Two different courts, seized more than a year apart, produced an identical table through separate judgments, and the authority printed it twice in the same issue, once on pages 6-9 and again on pages 13-16.
The fifth effect is the difference between those two and Order no. 925/2026. For an inspection carried out in August 2024, two of the orders give a right to 45.66 lei, the third to 42.69 lei. The difference of 2.97 lei, that is 7.0% on this item and 6.9% as a median across the whole table, is precisely the first step, the one for 2020, which the Galați case did not cover. It then carries through into every following column. The result is that the same county directorate can pay, for the same blood sampling carried out in the same week, 15.99 lei to one provider and 14.93 lei to another, and both sums have their basis in a normative act published in the same issue of the Official Gazette of Romania.
The sixth effect is what the orders do not say. They establish what should have been paid, but they lay down no recalculation procedure, no deadline for paying the differences and no date from which interest runs, even though they concern exclusively work carried out between 2020 and 2024. Nor do they contain any provision for the future: the tariffs due for activities carried out after 20 November 2024 remain untouched, including for the 44 practices that won their cases.
What has changed compared with the previous situation
Compared with Annex no. 3 as published on 7 January 2014, only the figures change, not the list of activities. An item-by-item comparison shows, however, that the list itself moved in the intervening years, without the orders saying by which act. In 2014, item 2 was called „Clinical examination of animals on suspicion of major diseases, ordered in accordance with specific legislation”, and in the 2026 tables the reference to major diseases no longer appears. Also in 2014, item 5 had four subitems, the fourth being „d) wild boar”, charged at 65 lei per head; in the three orders, item 5 has only three subitems, and wild boar have disappeared. The 2014 annex therefore counted 50 tariff lines, the updated tables count 49. The only line that vanished concerned the taking of samples from wild boar, and it leaves the table at a moment when the whole of Romania is held in restricted zone III for African swine fever.
Compared with the other three orders in the series, the change is one of scale and of source. Order no. 745/2026, published on 14 July 2026, Order no. 835/2026, published on 28 August 2026, and Order no. 858/2026, published on 10 September 2026, each enforced a judgment of the Iași Court of Appeal and each had a single beneficiary. The three of 21 September 2026 come from three different courts of appeal and together have 44. In 69 days, the Official Gazette of Romania has published six orders with the same subject matter.
The tables, on the other hand, bring nothing new. The values in Orders no. 924/2026 and no. 926/2026 are the ones already published on 10 September 2026, while those in Order no. 925/2026 repeat the table that appeared on 14 July and on 28 August. In ten weeks, then, two distinct tables have appeared in the Official Gazette of Romania, each printed three times, to cover six groups of claimants. A single detail separates them: in Order no. 745/2026 the last column closes on 13 November 2024, and in the other five on 20 November 2024, without any of them explaining either date.
Advantages and disadvantages
What it improves
- The court judgments are enforced through a published act, not through an internal memo, so the outcome of the cases can be read and checked by anyone.
- Each order reproduces the whole table, with all 49 items, not only the rows the claimants were interested in, which makes comparison with the 2014 annex and with the other orders in the series possible.
- The acts name the case, the first-instance court and the decision of the High Court of Cassation and Justice, so a practice that wants to bring its own action has the exact references it needs in order to ask for the file.
- For fieldwork carried out between 2020 and 2024, the 44 practices receive sums 64.2% or 75.6% higher than those in the annex, a difference of 19.66 lei on every household inspection, that is 19,660 lei over a thousand inspections.
- The wording of Article 2 is unequivocal, and a practice that does not appear on the list knows from the first sentence that the order does not concern it and wastes no time on a recalculation request to the county directorate.
What remains a problem
- Three normative acts published in Part I take effect for 44 named companies, out of a profession that works on the same legal basis in sanitary veterinary districts across the whole country.
- For the same activity, carried out in the same month of 2024, two official tariffs coexist, 45.66 lei and 42.69 lei, published in the same issue of the Official Gazette of Romania.
- The period covered closes on 20 November 2024, even though Article 2 of each order speaks of activities carried out in the course of 2024, with no limitation inside the year.
- None of the three orders provides how and within what time the differences are paid, although all of them concern exclusively sums owed for work already done.
- The legal obligation to update annually, in force since 19 December 2020, remains unfulfilled for every other provider, and for the 669 days that have passed since 21 November 2024 there is no updated tariff for anyone.
- The orders do not show how the index of 1.756 was arrived at, so neither the addressee nor the directorate making the payment can reconstruct the calculation from the text of the act.
Practical advice
- First check whether your practice is named in Article 2 of any of the three orders. If it is not, the tariffs in the table do not apply to you, however similar your situation may be.
- If you are on the list, use the column that corresponds to the period in which you provided the service, not the last column. The table has seven distinct periods in Orders no. 924/2026 and no. 926/2026 and six in Order no. 925/2026, and the difference between the first and the last column is 64.3% in the first case and 59.0% in the second.
- Recalculate the difference as a ratio to the tariff you were paid, not as a sum in lei. Across all 49 items the ratio is practically the same: the median is 1.756 against the tariff in the annex published in 2014 for two of the orders and 1.642 for the third.
- If you are considering an action of your own, ask the court for the exact references of the three cases: no. 257/59/2025 at the Timișoara Court of Appeal, no. 124/44/2025 at the Galați Court of Appeal and no. 370/33/2024 at the Cluj Court of Appeal, each decided finally by the High Court of Cassation and Justice. Six orders have already been issued on this pattern, so there are six files to consult.
- For activities carried out between 21 November and 31 December 2024 there is no column in any of the three orders, even though Article 2 includes the whole of 2024. If you have such activities to settle, ask the county directorate in writing to state the applicable tariff, so that you have an answer on file.
- If you are an animal breeder, the only item that concerns you directly is the eleventh, the inspection of live animals for the purpose of certifying their state of health, marked with an asterisk. For it, the tariffs in the table run from 22.83 lei for a lot of up to ten pigs to 456.59 lei for a lot of more than one hundred sheep or goats, but only in dealings with the 44 named practices.
Frequently asked questions
Do the updated tariffs apply to every veterinary practice or only to those that won their cases?
Does anything change for animal breeders?
Why are there two different tariffs for the same activity?
Who was supposed to update the tariffs, and why was it not done?
What happens to activities carried out after 20 November 2024?
How do we know the tariffs in the annex were still the 2014 ones?
Errors and inconsistencies in the published text
- Article 2 read against the last column of the table, in all three orders. Article 2 provides that the order applies to activities carried out „in the course of 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024” in Orders no. 924/2026 and no. 926/2026, and „in the course of 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024” in Order no. 925/2026, with no limitation inside the last year. The table in Article 1, however, stops at the column headed „Updated tariff for the period July-20.11.2024”. For an activity carried out by a claimant between 21 November and 31 December 2024, that is over 41 calendar days, the order declares itself applicable but provides no tariff at all. Nowhere does the text explain the date of 20 November 2024 or refer to any act that would justify it, and the first order in the same series, no. 745/2026, closed the period on 13 November 2024, equally without explanation, so that a reader acting in good faith cannot establish what sum is owed: the tariff in Annex no. 3 no longer fits, because the order declares it updated for the whole year, and the last column cannot be extended, because its heading contains a closing date.
Editorial analysis
Taken one by one, the three orders are sound acts. They enforce final judgments, they reproduce the whole table instead of giving only the items in dispute, they name the case and both courts, and they do not hide who the beneficiaries are. The problem is none of them individually; the problem is that they exist. Article 152 of Government Ordinance no. 42/2004, introduced by Law no. 291/2020, has required since 19 December 2020 that the tariffs be updated „every year” by order of the president of the authority, and the text makes the update conditional on no request and restricts it to nobody. The obligation is general by construction. The six orders issued in ten weeks are the shape a general obligation takes when it is discharged piece by piece, in the enforcement of court judgments, instead of being discharged once for everyone.
The second observation comes out of comparing the figures in the three acts, not from reading them in turn. Order no. 924/2026 enforces a judgment of the Timișoara Court of Appeal, Order no. 926/2026 one of the Cluj Court of Appeal, and their tables are identical: all 49 items, all seven columns, all units of measurement. The outcome was predictable, because both cases asked for the same arithmetic on the same annex, starting from the same year. That two different courts had to order the same authority separately to perform a calculation that yields the same result says more about the procedure followed than any comment could: what is being litigated in these cases is not a dispute about arithmetic, but a refusal to apply an article of the law.
The third observation concerns time, and here the three cases were not treated alike. The judgment of the Cluj Court of Appeal is dated 16 October 2024 and became final through the decision of the High Court of Cassation and Justice of 10 December 2025, after 420 days. From the day it became final to the signing of the order, on 15 September 2026, another 279 days passed. For the Timișoara judgment the same operation took 81 days, and for the Galați one 117. Three cases identical in subject matter, at the same authority, with internal timescales that differ by more than threefold. In the Cluj case, 705 days passed between the first-instance judgment and the publication of the order.
The fourth observation ought to concern those who have no litigation at all. Annex no. 3 has not stayed unchanged in substance: in its January 2014 form it had 50 tariff lines, and item 5 contained a subitem „d) wild boar”, at 65 lei per head, which appears in none of the three tables. So the annex was amended in the intervening years, and the orders do not say by which act. The amounts, by contrast, stayed at their 2014 level throughout the recalculated period, which is confirmed by the practically single index, with a median of 1.756. The text of the annex moved, the figures did not. In a system where disease surveillance work is paid at a fixed tariff, that means the real value of the work fell continuously, and the only ones who have recovered anything are those who had the resources to go to court.
What should be changed
- An order of general application, updating Annex no. 3 for all providers, over the same periods. The figures already exist, printed six times in ten weeks, and the index is practically uniform across the whole table. Such an order would stop the series of cases on the same legal basis, would remove the situation in which two providers are paid different sums for the same work, and would spare the public budget the next round of first-instance cases and appeals.
- A column for the period 21 November-31 December 2024 or, if the tariff changed from that date, a note saying by which act. Without one or the other, those 41 days are left with no applicable tariff even though Article 2 includes them, and the differences for them cannot be calculated either by the provider or by the directorate that pays.
- Publication of how the index was composed, at least as the weighting between the part indexed to the minimum wage and the part indexed to inflation. The order announces an update „by reference to” two quantities, but does not show how they are combined. A provider who wants to check the sum received cannot reconstruct the calculation from the act, and a practice considering litigation cannot estimate what it would obtain.
- A recalculation procedure and a payment deadline, written into the order. All three acts concern exclusively work provided between 2020 and 2024, so obligations that fell due long ago. Without a deadline, the moment of payment is left to the county directorate, and interest starts to run from a date that nobody sets in the text.
- The annual update should be put on a public calendar, with a fixed date each year. The law ties the index to the average annual inflation rate known on 1 January, so the necessary data are available at the start of every year. An order issued by, say, 31 March would make any court action on this basis pointless.
- Correction, should the table ever be republished, of the value in Order no. 925/2026, item 3(b), column for 2022, printed as „9.70” with a full stop where the Romanian text uses the decimal comma. The amount can be deduced beyond doubt from the neighbouring columns, 8.73 and 11.37, and from the 11.1% step applied to the whole table, so it changes nothing of what is owed, but in a table where all the other 293 values use the decimal comma, a single departure invites misunderstanding when the figures are copied.
Original text of the legal act
The text below is reproduced in Romanian, the official form of publication.
The full text, as published in the Official Gazette of Romania
Official Gazette of Romania no. 797 of 21 September 2026 16 pages PDF, 123 KB the act starts on page 6
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This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. For specific situations, consult a licensed attorney or tax advisor.