Private clinics and practices owed no building tax: the ÎCCJ has given the binding interpretation

A dental practice in a village in Neamț county was issued a tax assessment for the building it worked in, even though the law exempted the buildings of private healthcare facilities from tax. Courts around the country had split into two camps, and the High Court has just put an end to the dispute. Decision No 67 of 4 May 2026 of the Panel for the Resolution of Points of Law, published in Official Gazette of Romania no. 580 of 15 July 2026, states that medical activity is not the „economic activity” for which the law nevertheless demanded that the tax be paid. The stakes are concrete for any owner of medical premises who has already paid, and the way the tax authority calculates building tax becomes, in this case, a matter of interpretation rather than of arithmetic.

The wording that produced the conflict is Article 456(1)(h) of the Tax Code. It exempted from tax „the buildings of public and private healthcare facilities, with the exception of the rooms used for economic activities”. The difficulty lies in the second half of the sentence: a private clinic lives on money collected for medical services, so, read literally, every room it has is used for an economic activity. The result would have been an exemption that never applies to anyone.

The exemption for private healthcare facilities has not always existed. Until 2020 the law covered only the buildings of public healthcare facilities. Government Emergency Ordinance No 168/2022, published in Official Gazette of Romania no. 1186 of 9 December 2022, added the private sector as well, and it was from that moment that the confusion the High Court is now resolving began.

What it changes in practice

The first effect is that the interpretation becomes binding on the courts. Under Article 521(3) of the Code of Civil Procedure, the resolution given to a point of law is imposed on all judges from the date of its publication in the Official Gazette of Romania. A pending case in which a town hall argues that a clinic owes tax on its consultation rooms can no longer be decided against that interpretation.

The second effect concerns what is actually taxed inside a medical building. The High Court drew a clear line: the exemption falls away only for the rooms in which economic activities „of a different nature” are carried on, and the examples given in the decision are food service, retail and the supply of services. The pharmacy in the clinic’s lobby, the coffee shop, the optical shop or space let to a third party remain taxable. The treatment room, the consulting room, the laboratory and the ward do not.

The third effect is that the way the activity is financed no longer matters. The court of first instance had dismissed the practice’s claim precisely because the activity „generates profit” and is paid for by patients or by the health insurance fund. The High Court held that this reasoning renders the rule ineffective, since no private healthcare facility could ever benefit from the exemption. The argument relied on is the principle that a rule is to be interpreted in the sense in which it produces effects, not in the sense in which it remains a dead letter.

The fourth effect shows up in cases already lost or still open. Tax assessments issued for the tax years during which the form given by Government Emergency Ordinance No 168/2022 was in force can be challenged in pending litigation, and the court is bound by the new interpretation. For those who paid without challenging, the route remains the one set out in the Code of Fiscal Procedure, with its own time limits, not an automatic refund from the town hall.

The fifth effect is one of equal treatment. The decision confirms the reason why Parliament extended the exemption in 2022: a public hospital and a private one do the same thing, and a difference in building tax could not be justified by the form of ownership. The argument appears expressly in the case law cited by the High Court.

What has changed compared with the previous situation

Until this decision, the same provision was being read in two different ways by different courts of appeal. The courts of appeal of Brașov, Bucharest, Constanța, Iași, Pitești, Ploiești and Timișoara sent the High Court judgments from which two opposing views emerged. Under one, private clinics enjoyed the exemption and the exception covered only pharmacies and canteens. Under the other, any medical service provided for a fee was an economic activity, so the exemption practically never applied. A practice in Iași could win, an identical one in Ploiești could lose.

The second thing that has changed is the legal framework itself, though not through this decision. Law No 239/2025, published in Official Gazette of Romania no. 1160 of 15 December 2025 and in force from 1 January 2026, rewrote Article 456. The automatic exemption was kept only for buildings used by public healthcare facilities and for family medicine practices, and that provision was renumbered as point (f).

Private healthcare facilities were moved to paragraph (2) point (n), that is, into the category of reliefs that local councils may grant rather than must. The new wording excludes from the exemption „the rooms that are used for economic activities generating income other than income from the health sector”, which is exactly the distinction the High Court has just imposed for the past. In 2025 the legislature wrote down what the supreme court had to deduce for the period before.

In practice, a private clinic today enjoys the exemption only if the town hall in its locality has adopted a local council decision to that effect, in compliance with the State aid rules. Two identical practices in two neighbouring towns can end up with different outcomes, but this time because of the will of the local council rather than the judge’s reading of the law.

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