In brief
- The Government is adding 51.75 thousand lei, that is 51,750 lei, to the money approved in 2023 for the expropriations on section III of the Târgu Mureș-Târgu Neamț Motorway, between Leghin and Târgu-Neamț. The sum comes from the State budget, through the budget of the Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure, under chapter 84.01 „Transporturi”, transport, title 56, which belongs to the 2021-2027 Cohesion Fund. Against the 14,721,000 lei approved in December 2023, the increase is 0.35%.
- The annex to the decision rewrites 126 entries, all of them in the commune of Timișești, Neamț County: 38 are updated and 88 are new entries, which appeared after the cadastral subdivision of the old ones. For them the State takes 113,224 square metres in all and offers 512,225.41 lei, that is 4.524 lei per square metre, the same price on every payment row. In 2023 the same land meant 140,674 square metres and 460,480.86 lei, that is 3.27 lei per square metre on average, because prices were mixed at the time: 36 of the 38 entries stood at 3.10 lei, what arable land outside the built-up area was worth at Timișești, and two of them, then listed under Urecheni, at 20.69 and at 2.48 lei. The State takes less land, but pays 38% more per square metre than the 2023 average.
- Those concerned are the owners of the 126 entries at Timișești, and the decision takes effect from publication, 28 September 2026. Nobody has to do anything on that date: the owner’s time limits run from the posting of the list at the town hall and from the notification of the decision fixing the compensation, not from the publication of the Government decision.
Published: Official Gazette of Romania, Part I, no. 822 of 28 September 2026, pages 8-15
In force from: from publication, 28 September 2026, because Article 12(3) of Law no. 24/2000 on legislative drafting rules provides that normative acts, with the exception of laws and ordinances, take effect on the date of publication in the Official Gazette of Romania (Monitorul Oficial) unless they themselves lay down a later date, and the decision lays down no such date
Government Decision no. 771/2026, adopted on 24 September 2026 and published four days later, does something that looks small and is not: it corrects the list of owners and of sums for a piece of the corridor of the Târgu Mureș-Târgu Neamț Motorway and adds 51,750 lei to the budget. The procedure is the one in Law no. 255/2010 on expropriation for a cause of public utility, the same one under which the additional expropriations on the Caransebeș-Timișoara-Arad railway were carried out. What sets it apart is the ratio between the figures: the money goes up and the surface taken goes down.
The starting point is Government Decision no. 1.179/2023, adopted on 23 November 2023 and published on 4 December 2023 in Official Gazette of Romania, Part I, no. 1087 and no. 1087 bis. By it, the State started the expropriations on section III of the motorway, between kilometre 181+195 and kilometre 211+107, that is over 29.912 kilometres, and approved 14,721,000 lei for compensation. Annex no. 2 to that decision holds 1,528 entries, and the individual sums in it add up to 14,720,948.38 lei, the figure the act rounds to 14,721,000 lei.
What changes now, entry by entry. Article II point 1 updates 38 entries in that annex, numbered 1185, 1186, 1407 to 1436, 1455 and 1457 to 1461. The update covers alike the identification data of the property, the holders of real rights and the individual sums. Article II point 2 introduces 88 new entries, resulting from the cadastral subdivision of the same land: five after entry 1186, one each after 1407 and 1408, seventeen after 1418, six after 1419, eighteen after 1421, four after 1423, three after 1426, one after 1429, two after 1431, one after 1459 and twenty-nine after 1461. The 38 plus the 88 give exactly the 126 rows of the annex, checked one by one: no entry announced in the operative part is missing from the table, and no row in the table appears without having been announced.
The 126 entries lie, without exception, within the commune of Timișești, Neamț County. There is no longer any „proprietar neidentificat”, unidentified owner, the formula which in the 2023 annex covered 353 of the 1,528 entries, almost a quarter of the list. Of the 38 entries rewritten now, 19 had no known owner in 2023, and they concentrated 82% of the value of the group. The cadastral documentation and the subdivision have put a name on every piece of land, from heirs with five or eight co-owners to the commune of Timișești, which appears nine times with land from its private domain.
Where the 51,750 lei come from. The individual sums in the new annex add up to 512,225.41 lei. The 38 updated entries were worth 460,480.86 lei together in 2023. The difference is 51,744.55 lei, and Article I rounds it up, to 51.75 thousand lei. The act therefore allocates 5.45 lei more than its own annex requires, a difference without consequences, but one that explains why the figure in the operative part looks rounder than the reality in the table.
The price of the land, not the surface, swells the bill. The 126 entries add up to 113,224 square metres to be expropriated, 27,450 fewer than the 140,674 square metres the same land showed in 2023, that is a fall of 19.5%. In exchange, each square metre is now valued at 4.524 lei, against 3.10 lei in 2023, the price paid for arable land outside the built-up area at Timișești. The increase is 45.9%, and the two effects partly offset each other: at the old price, the new surface would have cost 350,994.40 lei, so the reduction in land lowers the bill by 109,486.46 lei, while the revaluation adds 161,231.01 lei. What is left are the 51,744.55 lei with which the account closes.
The money does not come from the same place as in 2023. The 2023 decision took the sum from title 61, „Proiecte cu finanțare din sumele aferente componentei de împrumut a PNRR”, projects financed from the loan component of the national recovery plan. The 2026 decision takes it from title 56, „Proiecte cu finanțare din fonduri externe nerambursabile (FEN) postaderare”, projects financed from post-accession non-repayable external funds, article 56.50, „Programe finanțate din Fondul de coeziune (FC), aferente cadrului financiar 2021-2027”, programmes financed from the Cohesion Fund under that financial framework. The budget chapter stays the same, 84.01 „Transporturi”, transport, subchapter 03 „Transport rutier”, road transport, and the basis for the expenditure is the State budget law for 2026 no. 43/2026.
On the same day and in the previous issue of the Official Gazette of Romania, the Government also adopted Decision no. 775/2026, which concerns section II of the same motorway, between Miercurea Nirajului and Leghin, and splits the expropriation procedures between the National Company for Road Infrastructure Administration (CNAIR) and the National Road Investment Company (CNIR). On section III nothing changes in that respect: Article IV leaves the whole responsibility with the Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure, through CNAIR.
What it changes in practice
The first effect is budgetary and small: 51,750 lei are added to the 14,721,000 lei approved in 2023, an increase of 0.35%. Article III(1) says that the sum is used for the compensation of the properties in Article II points 1 and 2, that is for all 126 entries, even though their total value in the annex is ten times greater. The remaining 460,475 lei had already been allocated in 2023 for the same land, under the old entry numbers.
The second effect is the one that shows in the pocket. For 31 of the 38 families of entries the total sum offered rises, and for 7 it falls, because there the cadastral documentation has greatly reduced the surface to be taken. The largest fall in percentage terms is at entry 1185, where the offer goes from 30,455.68 lei to 6,804.10 lei, 77.7% less, even though the surface to be expropriated rises from 1,472 to 1,504 square metres. The explanation can be read in the table: in 2023 the land was listed in the commune of Urecheni and entered as being inside the built-up area, hence valued at 20.69 lei per square metre, and now it is listed at Timișești and outside the built-up area, at 4.524 lei. It is the only entry in the whole annex where the State takes more land and offers less money.
The third effect has to do with the circuit of the money. Article III(2) requires the Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure to transfer the sums into a treasury account opened in the name of CNAIR, within at most 30 days of the approval of the request for the opening of credits. That time limit does not run from publication, but from a moment the decision does not date, so the owner cannot work out from the act when the money reaches the expropriator.
The fourth effect is procedural and works in favour of those who have already been to court. Article 32(4) of Law no. 255/2010 requires the expropriator, once the annex has been corrected, also to correct the expropriation decision and to re-deposit the sums in accordance with the corrected Government decision. The owner does not have to ask for this: it is CNAIR’s obligation.
What has changed compared with the previous situation
Until 28 September 2026, Annex no. 2 to Government Decision no. 1.179/2023 had 1,528 entries. From now on it has 1,616, because the 88 new entries are inserted with indices among the old ones, from 11861 to 146129. The original numbering stays untouched, which means that an entry from 2023 can still be followed today under the same number, even if the land behind it has been split into thirty pieces, as happened at entry 1461.
The degree of precision of the list has changed as well. In 2023, entry 1461 covered 58,541 square metres in a single row, with an unidentified owner, and had 181,477.10 lei allocated to it. Now the same parcel appears under 30 entries and 34 payment rows, with named owners, 38,645 square metres and 174,829.98 lei. The 19,896 square metres that no longer appear have left the list of private property, and the decision does not say why.
The third thing that has changed is the reference price. A square metre of arable land outside the built-up area at Timișești was valued at 3.10 lei in December 2023 and is valued at 4.524 lei in September 2026. Between the two publications 1,029 days have passed, and the increase of 45.9% means a pace of roughly 14% a year. The smallest offer in the new annex is 4.52 lei, for a single square metre taken from a company at entry 1460; the largest is 21,620.20 lei, for 4,779 square metres. Payment is made on 134 rows, not on 126, because seven entries have two or three distinct surfaces to be expropriated. Half of these rows stand below 2,646.54 lei, and 30 of them below 1,000 lei.
Advantages and disadvantages
What it improves
- The category „proprietar neidentificat”, unidentified owner, disappears from all 126 entries. The money is no longer deposited on account of an unknown succession, but can be claimed by people with a name, an address and a title deed.
- The price per square metre reaches 4.524 lei across the whole list, uniformly. Nobody receives a poorer valuation than the neighbouring plot, which closes one of the most frequent sources of litigation.
- The operative part and the annex match exactly. All 126 entries announced in Article II are found in the table and no row appears in addition, a check an owner can carry out alone.
- The update is made by a published decision, not by an internal note of the expropriator. Anyone who wishes to challenge it has a dated, public text to start from.
- The surface taken falls by 27,450 square metres. For some owners that means land they thought lost is returned to their use.
What remains a problem
- Not a single entry comes with an explanation. An owner whose offer falls by three quarters, as happens at entry 1185, learns the new figure from the table, but does not learn from the act why his land has moved from inside the built-up area to outside it and from Urecheni to Timișești.
- The decision does not say what happens to the 267,034.61 lei left unused at the 38 entries that have shrunk. The sum was allocated by name in 2023 for land that is now being taken over a smaller surface.
- The act sets no time limit for the expropriator. That period of 30 days runs from the approval of the request for the opening of credits, a moment the decision does not tie to any calendar date.
- From the text it cannot be found out whether any of the 126 entries is in litigation, nor what happens to the sums already deposited in the owners’ names under the old values.
- The update comes 1,029 days after the basic decision. For anyone who received a lower offer in the meantime and did not challenge it in time, the new figure in the annex does not put the clock back to zero.
Practical advice
- Look for your entry in the annex by the 2023 number, not by name. The second column of the table carries the numbering from Government Decision no. 1.179/2023, and the new entries can be recognised by the small index: 14217 means the seventh piece detached from the old entry 1421.
- Check the figure yourself: the surface to be expropriated multiplied by 4.524 lei must give exactly the sum in the last column. If it does not, you have a concrete ground for a complaint to the National Company for Road Infrastructure Administration, not a general grievance.
- Lodge the claim for payment within the 10 days provided by Article 19(2) of Law no. 255/2010, which run from the posting of the list at the seat of the Timișești local council, not from the publication of the decision. If you do not lodge it, Article 19(5) says that the money is deposited in an account in your name and waits for you, but that it does not reach you by itself.
- If the offer seems small to you, the time limit for challenging it is the general limitation period, that is 3 years under Article 2.517 of the Civil Code, and it runs from the notification of the decision fixing the amount of the compensation, not from the publication of this Government decision. The action is exempt from court stamp duty, under Article 23(1) of Law no. 255/2010.
- Remember a rule that works in your favour: Article 22(7) of the same law provides that the court may not award less than the expropriator offered. An offer revised upwards becomes, in practice, the floor of the case.
- If your land has been subdivided, ask for the land book extract for the new cadastral number in the table. The old number may no longer exist, and payment is made on the identification in the annex in force.
Frequently asked questions
Do I receive the difference in money automatically?
How long does payment take?
I have already gone to court over the initial sum. What happens to my case?
Can I challenge the fact that my land is being taken?
Why has my offer fallen, if the State has given more money?
Why do entries with indices appear, of the type 146112?
Where does the decision apply?
Editorial analysis
The decision does exactly what the law asks of it and does it cleanly. The basis is Article 32(2) of Law no. 255/2010, introduced by Law no. 233/2018, which requires the annex to be corrected when discrepancies appear between the cadastral documentation and the initial identification of the properties and of the persons. Here the discrepancies were large: 19 of the 38 entries had an unidentified owner, one parcel was listed in the wrong commune, and another was classified as being inside the built-up area although it lies outside it. The point-by-point check found no empty reference: all 126 entries announced in the operative part exist in the table, and the table contains no undeclared row.
The observation that cannot be seen by reading the act is that the supplement of 51,750 lei measures nothing of what it appears to measure. It is the result of two movements in opposite directions, both much larger than it: the surface to be expropriated falls by 27,450 square metres, which makes the list cheaper by 109,486.46 lei at the 2023 price, while the revaluation from 3.10 to 4.524 lei per square metre makes it dearer by 161,231.01 lei. The exact difference is 51,744.55 lei, which Article I rounds up to 51.75 thousand lei. Anyone who reads only the operative part believes the act costs as much as a roof repair; in reality it rewrites the valuation of 11.3 hectares.
The second observation comes from the comparison with the basic act and concerns a single household. At entry 1185, the same family gives up 32 square metres more in 2026 than in 2023 and receives 23,651.58 lei less, that is an offer cut by 77.7%. It is the only entry in the whole annex where the surface rises and the sum falls, and the cause is a reclassification, from inside the built-up area to outside it, which cuts the unit price from 20.69 to 4.524 lei per square metre. The reclassification may be perfectly correct, since the land was also listed in the wrong commune. The problem is that the act writes not a word about it, although for that family it produces an effect of almost half the entire supplement the decision approves.
The third observation concerns time limits. The act imposes on the owner, through the law to which it refers, 10 days in which to lodge the claim for payment and sends him to a limitation period of 3 years for a challenge, but imposes none on itself. The 30 days in Article III(2) run from the approval of the request for the opening of credits, an internal moment of the administration, undated and not communicated to the owner, while the 90 days in Article 21 of the law run from the issue of the decision fixing the compensation, an act the expropriator itself issues when it sees fit. Between the basic decision and this update 1,029 days have passed. The asymmetry is visible in the budget as well: the State keeps on paper 267,034.61 lei allocated in 2023 to entries that are now worth less, without saying what it does with them.
What should be changed
- A reason column in the annex. One word per row, „dezmembrare”, subdivision, „reîncadrare”, reclassification, „remăsurare”, remeasurement, „corectare a unității administrativ-teritoriale”, correction of the administrative-territorial unit, would spare the owner at entry 1185 a trip to the town hall and the expropriator a challenge born of a misunderstanding.
- The sum in the operative part, written to the leu. 51,744.55 lei instead of 51.75 thousand lei. The rounding costs only 5.45 lei, but it hides the fact that the figure is a calculated difference, not a round allocation, and it makes verification on first reading impossible.
- A line about the released difference. The decision should say expressly that the 267,034.61 lei left over from the reduced entries return to the ceiling of the works, are not lost and are not reallocated elsewhere. At present this is inferred, not read.
- A time limit tied to publication for the transfer of the money. The 30 days should run from the entry into force of the decision, not from an internal act of the ministry. That way the owner would know, from the text, by when the money reaches the expropriator.
- The obligation to notify the new sum individually. The law requires the list to be posted at the town hall, which in 2026 means that a person who has left the village learns nothing. A written notification to the address in the title deed, mandatory at every correction of an annex, would close the gap between publishing and announcing.
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. 822 of 28 September 2026, pages 8-15 16 pages PDF, 131 KB the act starts on page 8
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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.