In brief
- 26 localities have to draw up an air quality plan, the rest of the country only a maintenance plan. From 26 October 2026, Order no. 2.167/2026 of the Minister of Environment, Waters and Forests divides the territory into two management regimes: regime I, for the areas where the air has to be brought back within limits, and regime II, for those where it only has to be kept as it is.
- Particulate matter is the reason in 21 of the 26 cases. The regime I list has 25 rows and 26 administrative-territorial units, because a single row puts together the communes of Holboca and Ungheni in Iași County. For PM10 particulates 21 localities are in, for nitrogen dioxide and nitrogen oxides 9, for PM2.5 particulates three, and for benzene two.
- Classification is by pollutant, not by locality. The municipality of Bucharest is in regime I for nitrogen dioxide, PM10 and PM2.5, but in regime II for the other seven pollutants on the list. The municipality of Brașov is in regime I for nitrogen dioxide alone, the municipality of Constanța for PM10 alone, and the municipality of Ploiești for nitrogen dioxide, PM10 and benzene.
- The rest of the country comes in through zones and agglomerations. Annex no. 2 lists 13 agglomerations and all 41 county zones, each with ten pollutants monitored: nitrogen dioxide, PM10, PM2.5, benzene, nickel, sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide, lead, arsenic and cadmium. The localities placed in regime I appear there as exceptions in brackets, against the pollutant concerned.
- The order sets no deadline. There is no date by which the plans have to be drawn up and none on which the classification is redone. Order no. 2.761/2025, published 364 days earlier, is repealed, and the measures already started under the previous plans remain in force for the whole period for which they were undertaken.
Published: Official Gazette of Romania, Part I, no. 893 of 26 October 2026, pages 3-6
In force from: 26 October 2026, on the date of publication, since the order does not provide for a later date
From 26 October 2026, 26 localities in Romania are required to draw up an air quality plan, that is a programme of measures to bring the air back within limits, while the rest of the country, grouped into 41 county zones and 13 agglomerations, has only an air quality maintenance plan to produce. The division is made by Order no. 2.167/2026 of the Minister of Environment, Waters and Forests, published in the Official Gazette of Romania, Part I, no. 893. The same ministry had, through an order published five days earlier, cut the deadline for issuing the integrated environmental permit to 20 working days, the act that keeps the emissions of large industrial installations under control, which is precisely one of the sources the air quality plans have to put in order.
The order has eight articles and all its substance in the two annexes. Article 1 approves the regime I list, Article 2 the regime II list, Article 3 says who draws up which kind of plan, Article 4 explains the data on which the classification was decided, Article 5 saves the measures already begun, Article 6 gives the annexes the force of the act, Article 7 repeals the 2025 order, and Article 8 orders publication.
The difference between the two regimes is the difference between repairing and keeping. Under Article 3, the localities in Annex no. 1 „draw up an air quality plan or, as the case may be, an integrated air quality plan”, while those in Annex no. 2 „draw up an air quality maintenance plan”. The first kind of plan calls for measures that change the situation on the ground, the second calls for what exists not to be spoilt.
Classification is made for each pollutant separately, not for the locality as a whole. Annex no. 1 has four pollutant columns: nitrogen dioxide and nitrogen oxides, written NO2 and NOx, PM10 particulates, PM2.5 particulates and benzene, written C6H6. In the second annex there are ten, because that is where the pollutants also come in for which no area in the country has reached regime I: nickel, sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide, lead, arsenic and cadmium. A locality can therefore be in regime I for one pollutant and in regime II for the other nine, and that is the usual situation.
The 26 administrative-territorial units in Annex no. 1 are 17 municipalities, 5 towns and 4 communes. The municipalities: Bucharest, Brașov, Cluj-Napoca, Constanța, Craiova, Iași, Ploiești, Timișoara, Deva, Sebeș, Suceava, Târgu Mureș, Sighetu Marmației, Târgu Jiu, Dej, Miercurea-Ciuc and Codlea. The towns: Rovinari, Buftea, Voluntari, Bragadiru and Filiași. The communes: Brazi in Prahova County, Glina in Ilfov County and Holboca together with Ungheni in Iași County.
For every row the person answerable for the plan is named as well. In 22 rows it is the mayor: the General Mayor of Bucharest, the mayor of the municipality, of the town or of the commune. In three rows, those of the municipality of Ploiești, the commune of Brazi and the pair Holboca and Ungheni, responsibility passes to „the technical committee coordinated by the county council”, the formula by which the order marks the integrated plan, the one covering several localities at once.
Annex no. 2 is built differently. It has a chapter of agglomerations, with 13 large cities, and one of zones, where each row carries the name of a county and is explained in the table heading as „the zone (the administrative boundary of the county)”. The agglomerations are the municipalities of Bacău, Baia Mare, Brașov, Brăila, Bucharest, Cluj-Napoca, Constanța, Craiova, Galați, Iași, Pitești, Ploiești and Timișoara. Of these, five have all ten pollutants in regime II: Bacău, Baia Mare, Brăila, Galați and Pitești. The other eight are in Annex no. 1 for between one and three pollutants.
The localities that have entered regime I remain inside their county zone and are subtracted from it one pollutant at a time. Against Alba County, the PM10 column carries the note „with the exception of the municipality of Sebeș”; against Ilfov County, the same column says „with the exception of the towns of Buftea, Voluntari, Bragadiru and of the commune of Glina”; against Iași County, the PM10 column takes out the municipality of Iași and the communes of Holboca and Ungheni, while the nitrogen dioxide and PM2.5 columns take out the municipality of Iași alone. In total, the 23 exception brackets in Annex no. 2 are spread across 15 counties. The other 26 counties come into regime II with no reservation at all, for all ten pollutants.
What it changes in practice
The concrete obligation is one of paperwork and local administration. The mayor of a locality in Annex no. 1 has to start drawing up an air quality plan for the pollutant or pollutants against which the tick appears, and the county councils have to start the maintenance plans for their zones. Article 6 states that the annexes form an integral part of the order, so the ticks in the tables carry the same force as the text of the articles.
For a resident, the immediate effect is indirect but verifiable: if the locality appears in Annex no. 1, the local authority has a set of measures on that source of pollution to prepare and put out for consultation. If the locality does not appear there, it is covered by the county maintenance plan, a far less demanding document, which asks that the situation not deteriorate rather than that it improve.
For businesses, the effect shows later, through the plans. The measures in an air quality plan usually end up in the operating conditions of installations and in the locality’s decisions on planning, traffic and heating. The order itself imposes no direct obligation on any company, but it establishes in which localities such measures are going to be written.
Continuity is secured by Article 5, and local administrations have reason to note it: the measures in the air quality plans, integrated plans and maintenance plans started following the previous classification „are implemented for the whole period for which they were undertaken”. In other words, a locality now leaving regime I cannot stop the measures it has undertaken for a longer term.
A quieter administrative effect concerns cross-references. Every local document that invoked Order no. 2.761/2025 has been left, from 26 October 2026, resting on a repealed legal basis. The repeal in Article 7 takes that order out of force in its entirety, lists included.
What has changed compared with the previous situation
Until 26 October 2026, the lists in force were those in Order no. 2.761/2025 of the Minister of Environment, Waters and Forests, published in the Official Gazette of Romania, Part I, no. 986 of 27 October 2025. Article 7 of the new order repeals it on the date the new order enters into force, so the two lists do not coexist for a single day.
The basis on which the new division was made is written in Article 4: account was taken both of the previous classification into management regimes and of the results of the national air quality assessment, obtained from „fixed measurements carried out in 2025”, with the stations that form part of the National Air Quality Monitoring Network. The list is therefore not a reassessment from scratch, but an annual correction applied on top of the old list.
What the order does not show is precisely the difference. The act publishes two final lists and nowhere says which locality has entered regime I, which has left and for which pollutant, although Article 4 confirms that the previous classification was one of the two criteria. Anyone who wants to see the movement has to compare the tables with those in the 2025 order themselves.
The structure of the act remains the same as that of the one it replaces: two annexes, one for regime I with four pollutant columns and a column for the person answerable, one for regime II with ten pollutant columns and none for responsibility. The rhythm, in turn, looks settled without being written down anywhere: 364 days passed between the publication of the 2025 order and that of the 2026 order.
Advantages and disadvantages
What it improves
- Coverage is complete. The 41 county zones plus the municipality of Bucharest as an agglomeration close off the entire surface of the country, so no area is left without a management regime assigned to it.
- Classification is by pollutant, not by whole locality. A town with a nitrogen dioxide problem is not saddled with writing an air quality plan for lead or cadmium as well.
- Annex no. 1 names the person answerable on each row, in a form that can be enforced: the mayor of the municipality, of the town, of the commune, the General Mayor or the technical committee under the coordination of the county council.
- The exceptions in Annex no. 2 match Annex no. 1 row for row. Each locality that has entered regime I is taken out of its county zone exactly for the pollutant for which it entered and for no other, so no locality is left without a regime and none ends up under two opposing regimes for the same pollutant.
- Article 5 does not break off the measures already started, however much the classification may have changed from last year.
What remains a problem
- There is no deadline anywhere in the order. Not for when the plans are drawn up, not for when they go out for consultation, not for when the classification is redone.
- Annex no. 2 has no column for the person answerable, although Annex no. 1 does. For the 41 county zones nobody is named, and the title of the annex speaks of administrative-territorial units while its rows are zones and agglomerations.
- The data are measurements from 2025, and the order is published 299 days after the end of that year of measurement.
- The movement compared with the 2025 list is shown nowhere, although Article 4 says the previous classification counted.
- Around Bucharest, five air quality plans on the same pollutant are being drawn up separately, by five different authorities, with no integrated plan.
- Bistrița-Năsăud County appears in Annex no. 2 under the shortened name „Bistrița”, which is the name of the county seat municipality, not of the county.
Practical advice
- Look for your locality in Annex no. 1 first. If it appears there, see which column the tick is in: that is the air pollution problem for which the local authority has an air quality plan to write.
- If you do not find it in Annex no. 1, look for the county in Annex no. 2 and read the brackets. If the name of the locality appears there, it has been taken out of the county zone for that pollutant, a sign that it is in Annex no. 1 for it.
- Bear in mind that the two regimes can overlap on the same locality. The municipality of Iași, for instance, has an air quality plan for nitrogen dioxide, PM10 and PM2.5 and a maintenance plan for the other seven pollutants.
- If you live in one of the 26 localities in Annex no. 1, ask the town hall for the air quality plan and its timetable. The order sets no deadline, so the question worth pressing is when exactly, not whether.
- If you run a company with installations in one of the 26 localities, follow the work on the plan from the draft stage. The measures that affect you are negotiated there, not after the plan has been approved.
- For Ilfov County, note that four localities, the towns of Buftea, Voluntari and Bragadiru and the commune of Glina, each have their own plan for PM10, while the rest of the county is on a maintenance plan.
- Check whether the local documents you rely on, from permits to council decisions, still invoke Order no. 2.761/2025. From 26 October 2026 that legal basis is repealed.
Frequently asked questions
What do management regime I and management regime II mean?
How do I find out which regime my locality is in?
Which are the 26 localities in regime I?
Which pollutants are monitored?
Who draws up the plan?
By when do the plans have to be drawn up?
Why does my locality appear under „with the exception of” against the county?
What data was the classification based on?
What happens to the measures started under the old lists?
Is the 2025 order still valid?
Editorial analysis
As a normative act, the order is an example of a list that closes. We redid the match between the two annexes, row by row and column by column, and found no crack. The 26 localities in Annex no. 1 add up to 35 locality-pollutant pairs. Three of them belong to the municipality of Bucharest, which is not part of any county, so 32 pairs remain that have to be taken out of the county zones in Annex no. 2. In Annex no. 2 there are exactly 23 exception brackets, and the difference of nine is explained entirely by the six brackets that cover several localities at once: the PM10 exception for Ilfov County takes in four localities, that for Iași County three, those for Dolj and Gorj counties two each, and Prahova County has two brackets with two localities each, at nitrogen dioxide and at benzene. The sum comes out exactly. No pollutant is left without a regime for any locality and none ends up under two opposing regimes.
The weak part is not in the tables, it is in what the order does not say about time and about persons. The thing that shows only when the two annexes are put side by side is something else, and it concerns the air of Bucharest. The capital is in regime I for PM10, and around it, in Annex no. 1, there are four more localities from Ilfov County, also for PM10: the towns of Buftea, Voluntari and Bragadiru and the commune of Glina. These are five different administrations, with five separate plans, on the same pollutant, in the same air basin, and Annex no. 1 gives them five distinct persons answerable: the General Mayor of Bucharest, three town mayors and one commune mayor. Nowhere in the order does an integrated plan appear for them. At the same time, the order uses twice over exactly the mechanism that ought to have worked here: at the municipality of Ploiești and the commune of Brazi, in Prahova County, and at the communes of Holboca and Ungheni, in Iași County, where responsibility passes to the technical committee coordinated by the county council. The most crowded case in the whole list, with five localities right next to one another and the largest population exposed, is treated as five isolated cases, while the smallest ones, with two localities, get county coordination.
The same inconsistency appears at Iași, inside the same county. The municipality of Iași is in regime I for PM10 and has the mayor of the municipality as the person answerable. The communes of Holboca and Ungheni, its neighbours, are also in regime I for PM10 and have the technical committee under the coordination of the county council as the person answerable. So for the same pollutant, over a continuous surface, the order opens two planning processes, with two different holders. If the particulates in Holboca justify an integrated plan coordinated by the county, it is not clear why the neighbouring municipality, which has the same problem, plans separately.
The third observation concerns the relationship between the administration’s time and the addressees’ time, and it is the more visible because one side of the scales is empty. The approval note of the Directorate-General for Impact Assessment, Pollution Control and Climate Change bears no. DGEICPSC/125953 and the date 30 September 2026. The order is signed on 19 October 2026, that is 19 days after the note, and published on 26 October, another seven days later. In all, 26 days from the note to the Official Gazette of Romania. The data on which the whole construction rests are measurements from 2025, and 299 days passed between the end of that year and the publication of the order. For the 26 localities and the 41 county councils that have the plans to write, on the other hand, the order lays down no deadline. The administration counts its days precisely; the addressee has nothing to start counting from.
The fourth observation concerns the form of Annex no. 2, and it is the only one that can raise questions in practice. The first list has a column headed „Person answerable for drawing up the air quality plan/integrated plan”, filled in on every row. In Annex no. 2 there is no equivalent column, although its title announces a „list of administrative-territorial units”, while its rows are in fact 13 agglomerations and 41 zones defined as the administrative boundary of the county. Article 3 says that „the administrative-territorial units set out in Annex no. 2 draw up an air quality maintenance plan”, but a county zone is an area comprising all the administrative-territorial units in the county, less the exceptions in brackets, and is not itself an administrative-territorial unit. The act does not itself close the question of who signs the maintenance plan for the zone of a county, and Annex no. 1 shows that the issuer knew how to close it: by writing the name of the office in the table. The question is not purely theoretical, because the difference is between a single county plan and a few dozen local ones.
Finally, a small observation, but one visible on first reading of the list of counties: between Bihor and Botoșani, in the second annex, the county is entered as „Bistrița”. There is no county by that name. There is the municipality of Bistrița and the county of Bistrița-Năsăud. The alphabetical position, the chapter heading and the fact that all the other 40 counties are present leave no room for any other reading, so nobody will misapply it on that account. It remains, nonetheless, the only name of an administrative-territorial unit written incompletely in an act whose very subject is the list of administrative-territorial units.
What should be changed
- A column for the person answerable in Annex no. 2, as in Annex no. 1. For each of the 41 county zones and each of the 13 agglomerations, the name of the office that signs the maintenance plan. The practical effect is that the argument over whether the plan is made by the county council or by each town hall separately can no longer arise, and a late plan would have an identifiable holder.
- A deadline for drawing up the plans, at least under regime I. A single sentence in Article 3, along the lines of „within x months of the entry into force of this order”, would turn an obligation with no due date into a verifiable one. As things stand, a locality that starts nothing for a year breaches no provision of this order.
- An integrated plan for the municipality of Bucharest and the four Ilfov localities in regime I for PM10. The mechanism already exists in the act, in the form of the technical committee coordinated by the county council, and it is used for pairs of far smaller localities. Applied here, it would replace five independent plans with a single one for the capital’s air basin and would make possible the measures that only work when coordinated, from traffic to storage and burning.
- The same solution for the municipality of Iași together with the communes of Holboca and Ungheni. The order already sends the two communes to the county technical committee for PM10. Bringing the municipality into the same integrated plan would do away with the situation in which two different documents deal with the same particulates over a continuous surface.
- An annex matching the list against the 2025 one. Two columns, entries and exits, with the locality and the pollutant. Article 4 says the previous classification was one of the criteria, so the comparison exists at the issuer in any case. Published, it would spare every town hall and every operator from reconstructing the movement between two tables of ten columns each on their own.
- Correcting the name of Bistrița-Năsăud County in Annex no. 2. A one-word correction, which removes from the act the only incomplete name of an administrative-territorial unit.
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. 893 of 26 October 2026, pages 3-6 16 pages PDF, 103 KB the act starts on page 3
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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.