APIA penalties rewritten for 2026: 37 annexes, one for each type of support

Farmers filing a single payment application with APIA from 2026 come under a new set of penalties. This is not a blanket increase in the sanctions, but a complete rewrite of the scale, across 37 annexes, one for each type of support. The order of the interim minister of agriculture and rural development, No 224/2026, was published in Official Gazette of Romania No 664 of 11 August 2026, and the annexes alone run to 165 pages in the 664 bis edition of the same day. It comes less than six months after the release of 155 million lei for diesel used in agriculture, a sign that the state is continuing to fine-tune the machinery through which money reaches farmers.

The system covers the whole of direct payments and transitional national aid under the CAP Strategic Plan 2023-2027. In practice, every intervention has its own annex with its own scale: basic income support (PD-01), redistributive support (PD-02), support for young farmers (PD-03), environmentally beneficial practices on arable land (PD-04), environmentally friendly farming on small holdings (PD-05), grassing of the inter-row space in plantations (PD-06), the livestock eco-schemes for dairy cows and young cattle for fattening (PD-07 and PD-08), then the entire series of coupled income support, from soya and alfalfa through to hops, rice, sugar beet, field and greenhouse vegetables, fruit and silkworms.

To these are added annexes 29 to 37, covering transitional national aid, from the payment for arable crops (ANT 1) to the coupled payment for female sheep and goats (ANT 9). The order was signed on 5 August 2026 by the interim minister of agriculture and rural development, Tanczos Barna, on the basis of the approval report drawn up by the Agency for Payments and Intervention in Agriculture on 29 July 2026.

The European framework of reference has not changed. The order rests on Regulations (EU) No 2115/2021 and No 2116/2021, on delegated Regulations No 126/2022 and No 127/2022 and on Implementing Regulation No 1173/2022, which lays down the rules for the integrated administration and control system. What changes is the national scale through which those rules are translated into concrete percentage reductions of the payment.

What it changes in practice

The conditionality penalty system was rewritten by a later ministerial order: exemption up to 30 hectares, double tolerance on grassland and a new scale for crop rotation.

The penalties apply to every farmer subject to a check, whatever the size of the holding. The text covers all beneficiaries of direct payments from the European Agricultural Guarantee Fund and all recipients of the transitional national aid granted by APIA, from claim year 2026 onwards, where checks reveal irregularities.

Over-declaration remains the only direction that is penalised. If the area determined during the check is larger than the area declared in the support application, no penalty applies and the payment is calculated on the declared area. In other words, the farmer is not sanctioned for having claimed less than was due, but neither is any extra amount paid.

Refusing a check cancels the payment for that year in full. Where a beneficiary selected for an on-the-spot check does not allow the holding to be inspected, no payment is granted for that claim year. This is the harshest consequence in the whole order and it does not depend on the seriousness of any irregularity.

Force majeure removes the penalty, but requires documents. The farmer is neither refused payment nor sanctioned in cases of force majeure and exceptional circumstances, provided that supporting documents have been submitted in accordance with the legislation in force.

The year 2025 stays under the old rules. The system approved by MADR Order No 268/2025 continues to apply to payment applications for claim year 2025, so a check concerning the previous campaign is judged against the earlier scale.

What has changed compared with the previous situation

The formal change is the repeal of MADR Order No 268/2025, published in Official Gazette of Romania No 742 and 742 bis of 8 August 2025, which covered applications for 2025. The regulatory pattern repeats itself almost identically from one year to the next: a new order at the beginning of August, with a series of annexes published in a separate bis edition.

The list of force majeure cases remains built around eight expressly recognised situations: the death of the beneficiary, long-term professional incapacity, a serious natural disaster or a severe weather event that gravely affects the holding, the accidental destruction of buildings used for livestock, an epizootic disease or an outbreak of plant disease, expropriation of all or a large part of the holding, destruction of crops and animals by game species, and an international epidemiological situation declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization.

The case relating to game species is worth remembering, because it carries a condition of its own: damage caused by specimens of the species listed in annexes No 1 and No 2 to Hunting and Game Fund Protection Law No 407/2006 is recognised as force majeure only if it is notified to APIA and the beneficiary files the supporting documents. Without notification, the damage does not trigger the exemption from penalty.

The order also dovetails with the other two systems of administrative penalties already in force, the one for conditionality, approved by MADR Order No 393/2023, and the one for social conditionality, approved by MADR Order No 140/2026. A farmer may therefore be assessed on several levels for the same campaign.

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