In brief
- The Constitutional Court found that the citizens’ legislative initiative on the education laws meets the conditions in the Constitution, so it can be debated in Parliament. Of the 19 articles and points in the draft, 8 pass and 11 fall because they lay down rules of a fiscal nature.
- The measures that call for no extra money pass: smaller classes (at most 22 pupils in primary education, 26 in lower and upper secondary, 28 in post-secondary), the eighth grade run separately, the return to an 18-hour teaching load from 1 September 2026, a university teaching load of at most 16 conventional hours and two hours fewer, on request, for teachers with more than 25 years in education and teaching grade I.
- Every measure involving money falls: the hourly rate for paid-by-the-hour teaching, the installation allowance of 3 salaries, the scholarships attached to the teaching bachelor’s and master’s degrees, the olympiad excellence scholarship, the year-round scholarships for Romanians abroad, the two salaries on retirement for academic staff, holiday vouchers and payment in a single instalment of sums won in court.
Published: Official Gazette of Romania (Monitorul Oficial) no. 769 of 10 September 2026
In force from: 10 September 2026, the date of publication
The draft law by which 153,532 citizens are asking for smaller classes and the 18-hour teaching load back can be debated in Parliament, but without any of the provisions that would have meant extra money. On 15 July 2026 the Constitutional Court ruled, unanimously, that the citizens’ legislative initiative on the education laws meets the conditions laid down in Article 74 of the Constitution, apart from eleven points that lay down rules of a fiscal nature. The ruling was published only on 10 September 2026, 57 days after delivery, and between those two dates Parliament itself legislated on one of the initiative’s own subjects, the teaching load relief ceiling for school heads.
This act is not an ordinary decision on constitutionality, and the difference counts. The Court gives decisions when it reviews whether a law or an ordinance complies with the Constitution. It gives rulings in a small number of verification powers, among them the validation of the election of the President, the finding of the circumstances that justify an interim presidency and, under Article 146(j) of the Constitution, the verification that the conditions for the exercise of the legislative initiative by citizens are met. Here the Court does not judge whether the draft is good or bad. It judges whether the citizens have the right to table it.
What it verifies is exactly three things, on the basis of Article 48 of Law No 47/1992 and Article 7 of Law No 189/1999. First: whether the proposal was published as the law requires and whether the signature lists were certified by mayors or by the officials they empowered. Second: whether at least 100,000 signatures were gathered from citizens with the right to vote and whether they come from at least a quarter of the counties of the country, with a minimum of 5,000 signatures in each county and in the municipality of Bucharest. Third: whether the subject of the proposal does not fall within the fields barred by Article 74(2) of the Constitution, that is fiscal matters, matters of an international character, amnesty and pardon. The Court said expressly, in paragraph 11, that the merits of the initiative are none of its business: those remain for Parliament.
Who launched the exercise can be seen from the act: an initiative committee of eleven people, formed by authenticated declaration on 19 November 2025, in which the leaders of the education trade union federations appear. The declared target in the explanatory memorandum is Law No 141/2025 on certain fiscal and budgetary measures, in force since 28 July 2025, which increased the teaching load by two hours, raised class sizes, cut the hourly rate for paid-by-the-hour teaching and narrowed student scholarships. In essence the initiative asks for those provisions to be restored to the form they had before that law.
The arithmetic of the signatures shows how severely an exercise of this kind is filtered. The lists as filed held 185,568 signatures. Public authorities certified 162,195, so 23,373 carried no certification at all, that is 12.6% of the total. Of those certified, the Court found 153,532 lawfully certified, so it removed a further 8,663, that is 5.3% of the ones confirmed by town halls. All in all, 32,036 signatures, 17.3% of those gathered, were left out of account. What remained exceeds the constitutional threshold of 100,000 by 53,532 signatures, that is by 53.5%.
The grounds for rejection are listed in paragraph 14 and they are defects on the part of town halls rather than of the signatories: certifications made in rural areas by someone other than the mayor, in the counties of Dambovita, Dolj, Gorj and Neamt; certifications made in urban areas by a person other than the mayor, without any mention of the instrument of empowerment, in Dambovita and Vrancea; a missing stamp, in twelve counties given as examples, from Arges and Bacau to Valcea and Vrancea; lists sent as copies rather than as originals, in Arges, Caras-Severin, Constanta, Vaslui and Vrancea. Conversely, the Court did not treat as a defect the absence of a certification date, which affected 3,856 supporters, nor the absence of an express certification formula, as long as the list carried the signature and the stamp of the authority.
The territorial spread condition was met by a hair. The initiators filed documents showing that 15 counties each had at least 5,000 certified signatures. After the lawfulness of the certifications was checked, 12 were left: the municipality of Bucharest, Bihor, Cluj, Harghita, Hunedoara, Iasi, Ilfov, Mures, Satu Mare, Salaj, Sibiu and Teleorman. Three fell away. Covasna dropped from 5,317 declared signatures to 4,587 lawfully certified, 413 short of the threshold. Maramures dropped from 5,113 to 4,992, so it missed the threshold by 8 signatures. Dolj lost the most: of 6,386 certified signatures, 2,822 remained lawfully certified, so 55.8% of them were gone.
What it changes in practice
The ruling is final and generally binding and takes effect from 10 September 2026, the date of publication. Article 11(3) of Law No 47/1992 states that the Court’s rulings are published in the Official Gazette of Romania and are generally binding, with effect only for the future. There is no appeal.
The first effect is procedural. Article 7(5) of Law No 189/1999 ties the start of the parliamentary procedure to the date on which the Chamber receives the ruling, not to the date of its publication. The Chamber of Deputies, where the proposal was registered on 25 June 2026 and which referred the matter to the Court, can therefore open the debate. Only the validated part of the draft goes into debate: the eleven points declared unconstitutional cannot be adopted by this route and cannot be reintroduced through amendments to this proposal either.
The second effect goes to content and is worth reading point by point, because the headlines do not cover it. Eight units of the draft go through to Parliament. Article I points 1, 2 and 3 rewrite class sizes and the rules for forming study groups. Article I point 7 removes from the job description the current two-hour reduction in activities outside teaching. Article I point 8 introduces, on request, a two-hour reduction in the teaching load for teachers with more than 25 years in education and teaching grade I, with no cut in salary. Article II point 1 rewrites the content of doctoral grants. Article II point 6 lowers the maximum university teaching load from 18 to 16 conventional hours a week. Article III brings to an end, from 1 September 2026, the derogation by which the teaching load in pre-university education was increased.
Eleven units fall. Article I points 4 and 5 changed the way the hourly rate for paid-by-the-hour teaching is calculated and added a 10% increase for those who also do class management. Article I point 6 raised the installation allowance for tenured teachers assigned to disadvantaged or isolated areas from one national gross minimum wage to 3 basic salaries of the teacher concerned. Article II points 2, 3, 4 and 5 concerned scholarships: the level of the scholarships attached to the dual-specialisation teaching bachelor’s degree and the teaching master’s degree, set against the net salary of a newly qualified teacher instead of the net minimum wage, the reinstatement of the international olympiad excellence scholarship, abolished in July 2025, and the award of scholarships to Romanians abroad throughout the calendar year, including the summer holiday. Article II point 7 would have brought in, from the 2026-2027 academic year, the two salaries due on retirement to teaching and research staff of State universities. Article IV called for three provisions of Law No 141/2025 to be repealed and a fourth to be amended. Article V changed the basis for calculating holiday vouchers for education staff. Article VI called for salary-related sums awarded by court judgments to be paid in a single instalment, by 30 June 2026.
The third effect does not appear in the ruling, but it appears once the ruling is set beside the laws the initiative wants to amend. Article 10(2) of Law No 198/2023 provides that any amendment or supplement to that law enters into force on the first day of the school year following the one in which it was adopted by law. Article 260(16) of Law No 199/2023 says the same for the academic year. If Parliament adopts the validated part of Article I during the 2026-2027 school year, smaller classes cannot apply before the first day of the 2027-2028 school year, and the university load of 16 conventional hours cannot apply before the first day of the 2027-2028 academic year. The rule can be got round, and Law No 141/2025 and Government Emergency Ordinance No 1/2026 did derogate from it, but the derogation has to be written into the adopting law. If it is not written in, the postponement applies.
The fourth effect is felt by future initiative committees rather than by the signatories of this one. In paragraphs 22 to 26 the Court set out what it understands by „fiscal matters”, and the reading is a broad one. It covers taxes and duties, and beyond them „those elements which have a major impact on the State budget and which do not concern the future design of how it is formed but are intended to apply within current budget execution, such as, for example, the grant of increments or of fixed sums from the State budget”. The reason, the Court says, is that citizens do not have the overall view of budget revenue and expenditure, and a major rise in public spending necessarily calls for a rise in taxation as well.
What has changed compared with the previous situation
Until this ruling, Article 74(2) of the Constitution barred „fiscal matters” from citizens’ initiatives without saying which they are. The Court openly acknowledges, in paragraph 22, that the text „refers generically”, without drawing any boundary, and that it had to start from the definition of the treasury in the Academy’s dictionary to find out what it means. The conclusion in paragraph 26 is that it falls to the Court to establish, case by case, which fiscal aspects are barred. The boundary therefore moves out of the text and into case law.
In substance, the change of regime is this. Before, an initiative committee could assume it was barred from proposing taxes and duties. From now on it knows it is also barred from proposing an expense that weighs on the current year’s budget, even where the expense is called a scholarship, an installation allowance or a holiday voucher. What stays permitted, at least on this precedent, is the organisational part: how many pupils sit in a class, how many hours a teacher teaches, what the job description says. Which is exactly the part that does not translate immediately into lei paid out of the budget.
The money paid to pupils therefore stays in the hands of the Government: in September 2026 a decision left school scholarships at 450 and 300 lei, but took them out of the deadline that expired with the school year.
The second change worth noting is the Court’s mirror demonstration. Reducing the teaching load in pre-university education, Article III, is not fiscal, even though it increases the number of funded posts. Reducing the university load from 18 to 16 conventional hours, Article II point 6, is not fiscal, for the same reason. But the scholarships, the installation allowance and the two salaries on retirement are fiscal. The dividing line the Court draws is not „does it cost or not” but „is this a sum paid directly to a person, or a rule of organisation that has, among other things, a cost”.
As for the laws the initiative wants to amend, the comparison shows how much would change. On class sizes, the current form of Article 23 of Law No 198/2023 is the one written by Law No 141/2025: an average of 18 pupils and a maximum of 24 in primary education, 20 and a maximum of 28 in lower secondary, 23 and a maximum of 30 in upper secondary, 26 and a maximum of 32 in post-secondary, 17 and a maximum of 22 in a preschool group. The initiative asks for 16 and a maximum of 22 in primary education, 18 and a maximum of 26 in lower secondary, 22 and a maximum of 26 in upper secondary, 22 and a maximum of 28 in post-secondary, 15 and a maximum of 20 for preschoolers. The largest drop is in upper secondary and post-secondary education, four pupils in each case.
The real ceiling, though, is something other than the figure in the table, and that shows up only when paragraph (1) is set beside paragraph (6). Today the county education directorate can approve exceeding the maximum by up to four pupils, so an upper secondary class can lawfully reach 34. The initiative keeps the ceiling of four but requires ministry approval for any excess above two. With the maximum lowered to 26, an upper secondary class could no longer pass 30. The difference therefore shows up in two places: four pupils in the figure in the table and four in the effective ceiling.
Just as important is a provision that appears in no headline, paragraph (11) of that same Article 23, introduced by Law No 141/2025. It requires study groups, for each level, track and specialisation, to exceed the average value in paragraph (1), with a single exception per school under paragraph (12). This is the mechanism that produces class mergers, not the maximum. The initiative repeals it, in Article I point 2, and that point passed.
On the teaching load, today’s position comes not from Article 207 of Law No 198/2023, which also says 18 hours, but from Article LVIII of Law No 141/2025, a time-limited derogation: from the 2025-2026 school year to the start of the 2029-2030 school year, the load is 20 hours in lower secondary, upper secondary and post-secondary education, 18 hours instead of 14 for grade I teachers who act as mentors and 26 hours instead of 24 for practical training. Article III of the initiative does not repeal the derogation, it ends it, providing that Article 207(4) applies again from 1 September 2026. The practical effect would be to cut the derogation short by three school years.
On the two-hour reduction for length of service, what the initiative asks for is not an addition, it is a transfer. Today Article 207(3) allows a two-hour weekly reduction in the time allocated to activities outside teaching, for teachers with more than 25 years of service and teaching grade I, and equally for those who have shown educational performance, under a methodology approved by ministerial order. The initiative deletes that provision, in Article I point 7, and puts in its place, in point 8, a two-hour reduction in the teaching load, at the teacher’s request, with no methodology and no cut in salary. The „educational performance” category disappears from the beneficiaries.
On doctoral grants, Article II point 1, the one that passed, goes in the opposite direction to the rest of the initiative. The current form of Article 63(5) of Law No 199/2023, as written by Law No 141/2025, contains a second sentence: the individual scholarships of State-funded doctoral candidates enrolled full time are awarded throughout the calendar year. The text proposed by the initiative keeps the first sentence and leaves the second out. Adopted as drafted, the point would remove from the law the guarantee that a doctoral scholarship is also paid in the months without classes.
Advantages and disadvantages
What it improves
- An exercise backed by 153,532 citizens reaches parliamentary debate, and the ruling was reached unanimously, so with no dissenting opinions to weaken its authority.
- The Court did not throw out signatures over formal defects on the part of town halls: the absence of a certification date, which affected 3,856 supporters, and the absence of an express certification formula were treated as irregularities without consequence, following Ruling no. 1 of 26 March 2024.
- It said plainly that the delay in publishing the proposal, 25 days over the statutory deadline, does not on its own defeat a citizens’ exercise. A procedural defect at an earlier stage can no longer be used as a pretext for blocking it.
- For the first time there is an explicit test for the phrase „fiscal matters” in Article 74(2) of the Constitution. The next initiative committees can check their draft before gathering a single signature.
- The Court expressly refused to go into the merits, in paragraph 11. Parliament stays free to adopt, amend or reject the validated part, and political responsibility stays where it belongs.
- The part that passed is exactly the part that is felt in the classroom rather than on the payslip: the number of children in a group, the eighth grade run separately in isolated localities, the teaching hours per week.
What remains a problem
- The broad reading of „fiscal matters” takes out of citizens’ hands almost any initiative that costs money in the current year. All that stays available is legislating with no immediate cost, which narrows a constitutional right appreciably.
- Eleven of the draft’s 19 units fall, and the filter is not random: every measure that would have put money in someone’s pocket fell, and what remains is organisational.
- The ruling sat unpublished for 57 days. The law gives the Court 30 days to rule, a deadline met in 14 days, but imposes no deadline for publication, even though binding force depends on publication.
- The only validated provision with a date of its own, Article III, set 1 September 2026. The 2026-2027 school year began on 7 September 2026, and the ruling appeared on 10 September. The provision has already expired on the day it becomes debatable.
- Paragraph 28 lists the provisions that pass and does not mention Article II point 6, the university load of 16 conventional hours. The operative part leaves it standing, because it does not appear in the list of exceptions, but the reasoning does not examine it.
- Paragraph 30 describes the first point of Article IV as concerning the compensation of overtime with time off alone. The provision repealed by that point, Article XVIII(9) of Law No 141/2025, is about something else: the ban on paying money in lieu of untaken leave for 2026.
- Paragraph 13 cites „Law No 188/1999” as governing the citizens’ legislative initiative. Law No 188/1999 is the Statute of Public Servants, repealed in 2019. The correct law, cited in the previous sentence, is No 189/1999.
Practical advice
- Change nothing at school on the strength of this ruling. It amends no law. Class sizes, the 20-hour teaching load, the hourly rate for paid-by-the-hour teaching and the scholarships stay exactly as they are, until Parliament adopts a law.
- If one particular point interests you, follow it by the draft’s numbering rather than by subject. What fell is Article I points 4 to 6, Article II points 2 to 5 and point 7, plus Articles IV, V and VI. The rest goes into debate.
- Head teachers and inspectors should read Law No 182/2026 first, published on 28 August 2026, not the initiative. The teaching load relief rules applicable today come from there, and the part of the initiative that dealt with relief was declared unconstitutional.
- When you follow the debate, check whether the adopting law contains an express derogation from Article 10(2) of Law No 198/2023 and from Article 260(16) of Law No 199/2023. Without it, the measures are put off by one school year and one academic year respectively.
- State-funded doctoral candidates on a scholarship should read Article II point 1 of the initiative alongside the current form of Article 63(5) of Law No 199/2023. As drafted, the point removes from the law the sentence guaranteeing the scholarship throughout the calendar year. It is worth flagging to the parliamentary committee, since it is a one-sentence correction.
- Mayors and officials who certify supporter lists should note which defects cost signatures: certification made in rural areas by someone other than the mayor, urban certification with no mention of the instrument of empowerment, a missing stamp and lists sent as copies. In Dolj county, 55.8% of the certified signatures were lost that way.
- Future initiative committees have two deadlines to remember: the proposal is published in the Official Gazette of Romania within 30 days of the Legislative Council’s opinion, and registration with Parliament takes place within 6 months of publication. The second was met here, the first was not.
Frequently asked questions
What exactly did the Constitutional Court decide?
Why is it a ruling and not a decision?
Does anything change for pupils, students or teachers from 10 September 2026?
What exactly is left of the initiative?
What fell, and why?
Can the measures that fell never be adopted?
How many signatures were there and why were so many rejected?
Why only 12 counties, if more than 185,000 signatures were gathered?
When could the measures enter into force, if Parliament adopts them?
Where can I find the full text of the ruling and of the proposal?
Editorial analysis
The ruling solves a real problem and it does so carefully. The constitutional text the Court had to apply, „fiscal matters may not be the subject of the citizens’ legislative initiative”, is written in a few words and says nothing about what a fiscal matter is. The Court did not dodge the difficulty. It started from the definition of the treasury in the Academy’s dictionary, went through the budget architecture in Articles 138 and 139 of the Constitution, invoked the duty to provide a financial statement under Article 111, and arrived at a functional criterion: the bar also covers large items of expenditure that apply within current budget execution, because citizens cannot weigh their sustainability. The argument is honest and verifiable, and the unanimity shows that it was not contested inside the Court either.
The first observation that does not emerge from reading the ruling end to end concerns the margin by which the territorial spread condition was met. The Court writes, in paragraph 19, that the 12 counties represent „more than a quarter of the counties of the country”. Romania has 41 counties, and a quarter of 41 is 10.25, so the constitutional minimum is 11. Of the 12 units the Court counted, one is the municipality of Bucharest, which is not a county, and Article 74(1) of the Constitution treats it separately, „and in the municipality of Bucharest respectively”. That leaves 11 counties, exactly the minimum, with zero margin. Had a single one of those 11 fallen away when the certifications were checked, the whole initiative would have failed on territorial spread, whatever the 153,532 signatures. And one county was on the edge in the other direction: Maramures missed the threshold of 5,000 by 8 signatures.
The second observation comes from comparing the deadlines the act imposes on others with the one the constitutional jurisdiction allows itself. The initiators were measured precisely: the Court found, in paragraph 13, that the proposal was published without observing the 30-day deadline from the Legislative Council’s opinion. Recalculated, the opinion is dated 10 December 2025 and publication 3 February 2026, so 55 days, 25 over the deadline. Correctly found. In mirror image, Article 7(3) of Law No 189/1999 gives the Court 30 days to rule, and it ruled in 14, which is remarkable. But 57 days went by between delivery and publication, that is nearly double the deadline for judgment, and for publication no law lays down any deadline at all. Since the ruling becomes generally binding only on publication, under Article 11(3) of Law No 47/1992, the delay is not administrative, it goes to legal effect.
What was lost in those 57 days can be counted. Article III of the proposal, the only validated provision with a date of its own, sets 1 September 2026 as the moment from which the teaching load returns to 18 hours. The 2026-2027 school year began on 7 September 2026 and the ruling appeared on 10 September, so the provision is retroactive from the first day on which it can be debated. In the same interval, on 28 August 2026, Parliament adopted Law No 182/2026, which rewrote the teaching load relief rules in Article 208 of Law No 198/2023, precisely the subject the initiative attacks through Article IV, a point declared unconstitutional. And one more provision expired of its own accord: Article LIX of Law No 141/2025, whose repeal the initiative sought, applied only to the 2025-2026 school year, which ended before the ruling was published. The Court declared fiscal a request to repeal a provision that no longer produced any effects.
The third observation concerns a consequence that neither the ruling nor the press releases mention, but which emerges from combining the proposal with the law it amends. Article II point 1, validated by the Court and described neutrally in paragraph 28 as concerning „the content of the grants attached to doctoral studies”, takes over the current form of Article 63(5) of Law No 199/2023 and leaves out the second sentence, the one guaranteeing the scholarships of State-funded doctoral candidates throughout the calendar year. Adopted word for word, the point would cut an entitlement rather than restore one. And the Court’s logic explains why it passed: reducing an expense does not increase the budget, so it is not fiscal. The consequence is hard to read without irony. Of the whole scholarship chapter of the initiative, the only point citizens are entitled to take to Parliament is the one that takes a scholarship away, while the symmetrical request for Romanians abroad, the same calendar-year duration, fell as a fiscal rule.
What does not convince are three drafting slips which do not change the outcome but weaken an act meant to be cited for years. Paragraph 13 cites „Law No 188/1999” instead of No 189/1999, that is the Statute of Public Servants, repealed since 2019, even though the correct law is cited in the immediately preceding sentence. Paragraph 30 describes the first point of Article IV of the proposal as concerning the compensation of overtime with time off alone, that is paragraph (1) of Article XVIII of Law No 141/2025, whereas the provision repealed by that point is paragraph (9) of the same article, which concerns the ban on paying money in lieu of untaken leave for 2026. And paragraph 28, which lists what passes, omits Article II point 6, the lowering of the university load from 18 to 16 conventional hours, even though the operative part leaves it standing. None of the three is an error with legal consequences, though: the operative part is clearly drafted, by way of listed exceptions, and a reader acting in good faith arrives at a single answer in each case. Three places remain, all the same, where the act is misread at first pass.
What should be changed
- A statutory deadline for publishing rulings delivered under Article 146(j) of the Constitution. Article 7(4) of Law No 189/1999 states that the ruling is communicated and published, without saying within what time. Effect: there could be no repeat of a situation in which an act becomes generally binding 57 days after delivery and a validated provision turns retroactive before it is even debated.
- A criterion written into the law for the phrase „fiscal matters”. The Court acknowledges in paragraph 26 that it falls to the Court itself to establish, case by case, what is barred. Effect: an initiative committee could find out before gathering 185,568 signatures that half its draft has no chance of passing, and the months of collection would not be spent for nothing.
- Completion of the reasoning with Article II point 6. The university load of 16 conventional hours passes through the operative part but appears nowhere in the Court’s analysis. Effect: the parliamentary committee would no longer have to infer from the list of exceptions why a provision was validated, and the reasoning would cover everything that was reviewed.
- Correction of the citation in paragraph 13 and of the description in paragraph 30. Law No 189/1999 instead of No 188/1999, and paragraph (9) of Article XVIII of Law No 141/2025 instead of paragraph (1). Effect: anyone citing the ruling would no longer pass on a reference to a repealed law, nor attribute to the repealed paragraph content that is not its own.
- An express position in the operative part on the condition that the proposal be published. Article 48(b) of Law No 47/1992 puts publication among the things the Court verifies, and the Court found the deadline exceeded by 25 days, yet the operative part is silent. Effect: it would no longer be possible to argue in Parliament that this condition went unverified.
- Alignment of Article III of the proposal with the date of adoption, during the parliamentary debate. The date of 1 September 2026 has passed, and Article 10(2) of Law No 198/2023 postpones amendments to the following school year in any event. Effect: the adopting law would state the date from which each measure actually applies, instead of leaving schools and inspectorates to work it out for themselves.
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. 769 of 10 September 2026 16 pages PDF, 116 KB the act starts on page 8
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