In brief
- The Constitutional Court rejected the challenge and found that the fine of 50,000 to 100,000 lei for works carried out in breach of the building permit, in the wording the law had before 11 January 2020, and the ban on warnings in Article 26(6) of Law no. 50/1991 are constitutional. The man who raised the challenge pointed out that, for what he had done, the minimum fine was 50,000 lei, while someone who puts up an entire house with no permit at all is liable from 1,000 lei, that is from a minimum 50 times lower. The Court replied that two different administrative offences are not compared with each other through the amount of the fine alone.
- Not a single letter of Law no. 50/1991 changes as a result of this decision. The 45-day mechanism in Article 147(1) of the Constitution, by which a text loses its effects if Parliament fails to bring it into line with the fundamental law, works only for provisions found to be unconstitutional. Here the finding was the opposite, so the texts stay exactly as they are, and the decision is generally binding from publication, under Article 147(4).
- It affects two groups of people. The first, those fined for works done outside their building permit before 11 January 2020 whose challenge is still before a court: the old limits of 50,000 to 100,000 lei apply to them, and the decision confirms those limits. The second, far wider, is anyone who receives an offence report under Law no. 50/1991 today: the ban on warnings stays in force, so there is no way out with a mere caution, however small the breach.
Published: Official Gazette of Romania (Monitorul Oficial), Part I, no. 868 of 16 October 2026, pages 2-4
Takes effect: 16 October 2026, the date of publication, because decisions of the Constitutional Court become generally binding from their publication in the Official Gazette of Romania, under art. 147 para. (4) of the Constitution
A man obtained a building permit, paid for the designs, started the work and then went beyond something the permit said. He received an offence report and the minimum fine the law set for that breach: 50,000 lei. In the challenge he brought before the Bucharest Tribunal he raised a simple, common-sense question: how is it that the neighbour who had built the same property without asking for a single document would have been liable from 1,000 lei, while he, who asked for the documents and paid for them, is liable from 50,000?
The question reached the Constitutional Court in June 2020 and was answered on 16 April 2026, through Decision no. 360, published in the Official Gazette of Romania, Part I, no. 868 of 16 October 2026. The answer is a rejection, by unanimous vote: the contested provisions are constitutional in relation to the criticisms put forward.
The reasoning has two parts. First, equality of treatment is not measured by setting two administrative offences against each other. In paragraph 20 of the decision, taken over from Decision no. 376 of 5 July 2022, published in the Official Gazette of Romania, Part I, no. 1.082 of 9 November 2022, the Court holds that every administrative offence has its own specific features and that it is natural for there to be no identity in the setting of penalties. Then, in paragraph 22, the Court shows why the two breaches really are different in fact: building without a permit is visible from a distance and easily established, whereas exceeding the limits of an existing permit is hard to discover, and the legislature may take the difficulty of establishing the breach into account when it fixes the amount of the fine.
The second criticism, the one any offender under the construction regime may encounter, concerned Article 26(6): „Under this Law, the sanction of a warning shall not apply.” The general rule for administrative offences, Article 7(3) of Government Ordinance no. 2/2001, says exactly the opposite, namely that a warning may be applied even where the act establishing the offence does not provide for it. Law no. 50/1991 departs from that and closes the door. The author of the challenge compared the construction field with road traffic, where a warning remains possible. The Court replied, in paragraphs 19 and 17, that Government Emergency Ordinance no. 195/2002 and Law no. 50/1991 do not have the same regulatory subject matter, and that the choice to exclude the warning is justified by the values the law protects, the life and safety of persons.
The part the decision does not state in its title, but which changes the way it reads: the validated text no longer exists. On 11 January 2020, 146 days before the Tribunal sent the file to the Court, Article II point 12 of Law no. 7/2020, published in the Official Gazette of Romania, Part I, no. 8 of 8 January 2020, brought the fourth indent down from a range of 50,000 to 100,000 lei to one of 5,000 to 20,000 lei. The minimum fell tenfold, the maximum fivefold. The Court nevertheless ruled on the old wording, on the basis of Decision no. 766 of 15 June 2011, published in the Official Gazette of Romania, Part I, no. 549 of 3 August 2011, because that wording continues to produce effects in the proceedings in which the challenge was raised.
What it changes in practice
The practical questions of someone with a fine on his hands or a case before a court have, from 16 October 2026, the following answers.
Does anything change in the law? No. A decision by which the Court rejects a challenge confirms the text and brings about no legislative change. The 45-day period and the automatic suspension, provided for in Article 147(1) of the Constitution and repeated in Article 31(3) of Law no. 47/1992, apply exclusively to provisions found to be unconstitutional. There is no such finding here, so there is no period, no suspension and no duty for Parliament to step in.
If I have a case pending for a breach committed before 11 January 2020. The court resumes its examination and applies the old limits of 50,000 to 100,000 lei, which the decision has validated. Referring a question to the Court does not suspend the substantive proceedings, and once the decision is published the court has no further reason to adjourn. The argument that the minimum fine is unconstitutional by comparison with the fine for unauthorised building can no longer be raised successfully before any court, because the decision is generally binding from publication.
If I received the fine after 11 January 2020. The decision does not affect you on the amount, because the text applied to you is already the new one. Today, Article 26(2), fourth indent, provides for 5,000 to 20,000 lei for the breaches in letters (b), (d), (e) and (e1) of paragraph (1), namely: works carried out or demolished in breach of the permit and of the technical design, keeping temporary structures beyond the deadline in the permit, failure to restore the land to its initial state, and failure to comply with the duty to restore leased land to its previous condition. The decision does affect you on paragraph (6), though: the warning remains excluded.
The warning. It cannot be obtained for any administrative offence under Law no. 50/1991, however minor the breach seems to you and however good your previous conduct. That is the only conclusion of the decision with immediate effect on everyone, not just on old cases. The court can, however, bring the fine down towards the statutory minimum, within the limits of the text, and that remains the argument that works.
The deadlines that matter more than the decision. A challenge against the offence report is brought within 15 days of its handover or communication, under Article 35(2) of Law no. 50/1991, and it suspends enforcement of the fine, but it does not suspend the order to stop the works. The right of the control body to establish the offences in Article 26 and to impose the fines is time-barred 3 years from the date the breach was committed, under Article 31 of the same law, not 6 months as under the general regime for administrative offences.
The fine is not the only consequence. Article 28 imposes a duty to regularise, and if the sanctioned person fails to comply, Article 32 sends the file to court, which may order the works to be brought within the terms of the permit or the unlawfully built structures to be demolished. Paying the fine does not close the matter, and the Court’s decision does not touch that part at all.
What has changed compared with the previous situation
In the text, nothing. As a state of affairs, two shifts.
The first is in the law and happened in 2020, not now. Until 10 January 2020 inclusive, anyone carrying out works in breach of the permit was liable from 50,000 to 100,000 lei. From 11 January 2020 the liability is 5,000 to 20,000. The distance from the breach in letter (a), a structure put up with no permit at all, thus narrowed from 50 times to 5 times, because there the minimum stayed at 1,000 lei and the maximum at 100,000. In other words, the substantive objection of the author of the challenge was settled by Parliament in January 2020, five months before his file left for the Court, only not for him: the new law on administrative offences does not apply retroactively to breaches already established, and his case stayed on the old wording.
The other shift is in the case law. The ban on warnings, introduced into Article 26(6) on 14 February 2009 through Government Emergency Ordinance no. 214/2008, had already passed constitutional review through Decision no. 464 of 14 November 2013, published in the Official Gazette of Romania, Part I, no. 12 of 9 January 2014, and through Decision no. 70 of 26 February 2015, published in the Official Gazette of Romania, Part I, no. 282 of 27 April 2015. The author of the challenge did not dispute that, but pointed out that neither of those decisions had examined the proportionality of the amount or the comparison with more serious breaches penalised more leniently. Decision no. 360/2026 now covers that angle as well, and paragraph 21 closes the subject: no new elements have arisen, so the solution and the reasoning of the earlier decisions remain valid.
Advantages and disadvantages
What it improves
- It puts an end to an argument that had been holding cases in abeyance since 2020. Courts that stayed or adjourned proceedings while waiting for the Court can resume with a clear answer, and the parties stop paying lawyers for a line of defence that is now closed.
- It sets out, in paragraph 22, the concrete criteria by which the legislature may differentiate fines: how often the breaches occur, how dangerous they are to society and how hard they are to establish. That is a verifiable benchmark rather than a general formula, and it can be used in other areas of administrative offence law too.
- It confirms that Parliament may reduce a fine once the penalty regime has served its purpose, which supports the reduction made in 2020 and leaves the door open to further corrections on the same reasoning.
- It keeps a rule whose logic is safety, not budget revenue: in construction, a verbal caution does not repair a wall that does not follow the design.
What remains a problem
- The answer came 2,324 days after the referral, in a case begun in 2019. For the man who raised the challenge, the favourable solution has existed in the law since 11 January 2020, but does not apply to him, and the only route by which he could have obtained it, a finding of unconstitutionality, closed six years after he asked for it.
- The Court does not examine the proportionality of the fine, it shifts that entirely to the legislature. Paragraph 18 states expressly that reviewing the appropriateness of such rules exceeds the Court’s competence, while paragraph 22 leaves the assessment of the amount to the legislature, as the only body in a position to make it. In practice, an offender has no constitutional remedy against a disproportionate statutory minimum.
- The ban on warnings remains absolute, with no internal hierarchy. The same rule covers both work carried out outside the technical design and the breach in letter (g), failure to give notice of the date on which works start, penalised with a flat 1,000 lei, that is a mere communication formality.
- The decision validates a wording that is no longer in force, so its usefulness fades as the old cases close. For someone fined today, the only part of all 23 paragraphs that matters is paragraph (6).
Practical advice
- Check the date of the breach in the offence report first, not the date of the fine. If the breach was established before 11 January 2020, the old limits of 50,000 to 100,000 lei apply, as the Court has now confirmed. If it was after, the limits are 5,000 to 20,000, and a fine of 50,000 would be outside the law.
- Keep to the 15-day deadline from the handover or communication of the offence report. It is the only door that closes irretrievably, and losing it matters more than any argument about constitutionality.
- Do not build your defence on asking for a warning. Article 26(6) excludes it, and three decisions of the Court confirm that. Ask instead for the fine to be set towards the statutory minimum, with evidence about the specific circumstances.
- Check how the breach has been classified, not just the amount. The difference between letter (a) and letter (b) of Article 26(1) means different limits today, and a wrong classification in the offence report is a firmer ground for annulment than a proportionality argument.
- Work out the 3-year limitation period from the date the breach was committed, under Article 31 of Law no. 50/1991. It is a special period, longer than the one under the general regime for administrative offences, and it runs from the breach, not from its discovery.
- Deal with regularisation separately from the challenge. The challenge suspends enforcement of the fine but does not suspend the stop-work order, and failure to comply opens the way to the demolition claim in Article 32.
Frequently asked questions
Does the decision lower or raise the fine I received?
If the old text is no longer in force, why did the Court rule on it at all?
Can I ask for a warning instead of the fine?
Now that the challenge has been rejected, can anyone ever contest these texts again?
What does „generally binding” mean for a case currently before a court?
Is the minimum fine really 5,000 lei today, or is it updated?
Was the decision taken by all the judges of the Court?
Errors and inconsistencies in the published text
- The first indent is left without a ruling. Paragraphs 1 and 4 show that the challenge concerned „art. 26 alin. (2) liniuțele întâi și a patra și alin. (6)”, meaning both of the indents named there and the paragraph that bans warnings, so three texts. Paragraph 13 retains as the subject matter only the fourth indent and paragraph (6), and the reasoning it gives concerns exclusively the amendment made to the fourth indent by Law no. 7/2020. About the first indent, the one providing for 1,000 to 100,000 lei for building without a permit, nothing further is said either in the reasoning or in the operative part. The operative part, however, rejects the challenge without any limitation, and then finds only two of the three texts to be constitutional. A reader acting in good faith cannot establish whether the first indent was validated, rejected as inadmissible or simply left unjudged, and the consequence is concrete: it is not known whether Article 29(3) of Law no. 47/1992 and the binding force of the decision cover that text as well.
Editorial analysis
The decision is well built on what it sets out to do. Paragraph 22 is the best part: instead of the usual formula about the legislature’s margin of appreciation, the Court names three verifiable criteria by which a fine may be higher for an apparently smaller breach, among them the difficulty of establishing it. Quietly exceeding an urban planning indicator is discovered late and with difficulty, sometimes after the building has been handed over, whereas a house put up without a permit is visible from the street. A higher entry threshold offsets the lower probability of being caught. That reasoning can be used outside construction as well.
What is not visible when you read the act from beginning to end is that Parliament had already agreed with the author of the challenge before his file reached the Court. The referral order is dated 5 June 2020, while the new fourth indent, 5,000 to 20,000 lei, had been in force since 11 January 2020, 146 days earlier. Through Law no. 7/2020, the legislature lowered the minimum tenfold, for precisely the breach for which the man was paying 50,000, and cut the distance from unauthorised building from 50 times to 5 times. Nowhere does the decision comment on the fact that it is validating a legislative solution the legislature itself had abandoned, although paragraph 22 also contains the key: a high fine is justified until the penalty regime has served its purpose, after which the amount may be reduced. The abandonment is precisely the proof that the moment had come. The result is a file in which everyone is right, in chronological order, and nobody wins anything: the law was put straight, and the man who flagged the problem is still being judged on the crooked wording.
The second observation is about time. From the referral to the ruling, 2,141 days passed, and from the ruling to publication another 183, that is exactly six months in a file with no dissenting opinion, no request for clarification and a unanimous vote. Those 183 days are not neutral: under Article 147(4) of the Constitution, the decision produces no effect before publication, so the courts waiting for the answer waited for nothing for another half a year after the answer existed. The substantive file was registered in 2019 and carries a 15-day deadline for challenging the report. The gap between those two figures says more about effective defence in a construction offence than any of the decision’s reasoning.
What should be changed
- The operative part has to cover everything that was referred. When the Court narrows the subject matter of a challenge, it should say in the reasoning what happens to the text it has left out and should carry it into the operative part, either as a rejection or as an inadmissibility. The practical effect: a court that receives the same criticism on the first indent tomorrow would know whether it can rely on an existing decision or must refer the question to the Court again.
- The deadline for publishing decisions should be fixed in Law no. 47/1992. The law provides for the duty to publish, but no deadline. A deadline of 30 days from the ruling, with the operative part published on the day of the ruling, would have cut the wait here by more than five months, for every case in effect suspended across the country, not only the one before the Bucharest Tribunal.
- The ban on warnings should stop at breaches affecting the safety of the building. Article 26(6) today covers, with the same severity, both work carried out in breach of the technical design and failure to give notice of the date on which works start, under letter (g), penalised with a flat 1,000 lei. The practical effect: for purely administrative omissions, the control body could issue a caution and would obtain compliance faster, instead of sending the file to court over a small sum.
- Government Ordinance no. 2/2001 should lay down a proportionality criterion for special minimum fines. Today the general law fixes only the maxima, in Article 8(2), and leaves special minima without any limit on the ratio. The result: a special law could no longer set a minimum 50 times higher than the one provided for a breach in the same chapter, without a justification written into the very act that sets it.
- The Government Decision on the annual updating of the fines under Article 26(3) should be published with a comparative table. Someone checking today which amount applies to his breach has to read the law and then look for the Government Decision in force on the date of the breach. In practice, a table of the values for each year would make that check possible without a lawyer, in exactly the field where the challenge has to be filed within 15 days.
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. 868 of 16 October 2026, pages 2-4 16 pages PDF, 111 KB the act starts on page 2
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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.