Companies selling petrol and diesel have five days to declare their commercial markup

Anyone who sells petrol or diesel in Romania has, as of 12 August 2026, five days to tell the state how much they earned on every litre sold in 2025. This is not a statistic, it is the basis for calculating a price cap that is already in force. Order of the Minister of Finance no. 1.019/2026 was published in Official Gazette of Romania no. 669 of 12 August 2026 and approves the model, the content and the completion instructions for form 183, „Declaration on the annual average value of the commercial markup”.

The order does not come alone. It implements Article 2 of Law no. 162/2026, the act that declared the state of crisis on the crude oil and petroleum products market, capped the commercial markup on motor fuels, temporarily cut the excise duty on diesel and introduced the solidarity contribution for the large extractors and refiners. The law entered into force on 7 August 2026, and the form is the instrument that turns the cap into something calculable.

The logic is simple. The cap is set against a reference level, and that level is the average commercial markup applied by each operator in 2025. For the benchmark to exist, the state needs the figures of every operator, declared on their own responsibility, subject to the penalties for false statements.

The form is completed separately for each type of product. A distributor that sells both petrol and diesel does not file a single average figure, but one table for each product, because the markup is capped at the level of each of them.

The same law also lies behind the compensation for hauliers: 43 bani a litre instead of 85, for as long as the excise duty stays cut by 25%.

What it changes in practice

The deadline is 5 days from publication, so 17 August 2026. It is stated explicitly in point 4 of the completion instructions, annex no. 2. For an act that asks for accounting data aggregated over the whole of 2025, this is a tight deadline.

The calculation follows a fixed, verifiable formula. Row 4 of the declaration is the ratio between the revenue from the sale of the products minus the expenses corresponding to the acquisition or production cost, divided by the total quantity sold. The result is expressed in lei per litre or lei per tonne and reads directly as the average unit markup.

The figures must match the 2025 accounts. The instructions repeat three times the phrase „as recorded in the accounts in 2025”. What is declared is not an estimate or a market average, but amounts that can be checked against the trial balance.

Refining and the first sale are exempt. The obligation to declare does not cover refining and the first sale of the products resulting from crude oil processing, nor the import followed by the first sale of imported petroleum products, the situations set out in Article 2 paragraph (11) of Law no. 162/2026. The obligation is focused on the wholesale and retail distribution segment.

Filing is exclusively electronic. The form is completed with the assistance software and submitted through remote electronic means, on e-guvernare.ro. There is no paper version, and the document circulates in electronic format and is archived in the tax file.

Corrections are made through a complete amending declaration. If the operator gets something wrong, it files the same form with an „X” ticked in the box provided for that purpose, but completed in full, including the data that does not differ from the initial declaration. It is not possible to send only the corrections.

The declaration may also be filed through an authorised representative. Section C of the form is completed where the declaration is filed by an authorised representative, under the conditions of Article 18 of the Fiscal Procedure Code. The external accountant or the tax consultant may sign, provided the mandate is registered.

What has changed compared with the previous situation

Until now, the commercial markup on motor fuels was a piece of business information, not a tax one. Operators calculated it internally, reported it to shareholders where relevant, but declared it to no one. Form 183 turns it into a tax declaration, with a regime of its own and criminal liability in the event of false statements.

The second change concerns the mechanics of the cap. Law no. 162/2026 established that the commercial markup is limited, but the limit could not work without a common starting point. The order creates exactly that starting point: the 2025 average, declared by each operator, for each type of product.

Third, the obligation applies along the entire length of the distribution chain, not only to filling stations. Importers, producers of petrol and diesel, wholesale distributors and retailers all fall under the same declaration, with the express exception of refining and of the first sale.

Finally, a new form appears in the nomenclature of tax declarations, with its own characteristics of editing, distribution, use and retention, approved by annex no. 3. It is not an adaptation of an existing form, but a document created specifically for the crisis period.

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