Earlier retirement for people in polluted areas: the Constitutional Court says only Parliament can extend the benefit

The 2-year reduction of the retirement age for people who spent decades living next to industrial plants and mines cannot be extended by judges to the old-age pension. The Constitutional Court dismissed as inadmissible the plea raised by Lidia Mihaela Dumitru and by Zorinel Pașa, in two cases before the Ploiești Court of Appeal and the Prahova Tribunal, holding that the extension sought would amount to supplementing the law, which is a power of Parliament. This is one more attempt to have the retirement rules rewritten that the Court has turned down, after it had already upheld the recalculation rule for people who retired before 2011. Decision no. 699 of 4 December 2025 was published in Official Gazette of Romania no. 605 of 24 July 2026.

The text at issue is one of the most concrete in the old pension law. Article 65(5) of Law no. 263/2010 listed by name the towns and communes affected by residual pollution from the extraction and burning of coal, from the processing of uranium ores, from non-ferrous metallurgy or from the refining of sulphurous crude oil, from Baia Mare, Copșa Mică and Zlatna to Rovinari, Motru, Năvodari or Săvinești. Anyone who had lived at least 30 years in one of them, or within a radius of 8 kilometres around the contaminated site, was entitled to a 2-year reduction of the standard retirement age, without the penalty normally applied to the partial early-retirement pension.

What the two authors objected to was a limit built into this benefit. The reduction worked only for the partial early-retirement pension, not for the old-age pension, although the substantive condition, long residence in the polluted area, is the same. They argued that exposure to harmful emissions had affected all the inhabitants of a town to the same degree, whatever the category of pension they apply for, and they invoked Articles 4 and 16 of the Constitution, on equality, Article 34, the right to the protection of health, Article 35, the right to a healthy environment, and Article 47, the standard of living.

Both referring courts considered the plea unfounded, and the Public Ministry asked for it to be dismissed, relying on Decision no. 123 of 27 February 2025. The presidents of the two Chambers of Parliament, the Government and the Ombudsman submitted no point of view.

What it changes in practice

The first effect is the most important and the easiest to misread. A finding of inadmissibility is not an endorsement. The Court did not say that Article 65(5) of Law no. 263/2010 is constitutional, but that it cannot examine on the merits a criticism which in reality asks it to add to the law. The difference matters for anyone who might want to reopen the discussion: the merits remain, formally, unsettled.

The second effect is procedural. The decision is final and generally binding from publication, and the same plea can no longer be raised, under Article 29(3) of Law no. 47/1992. The two cases, one concerning the conversion of a partial early-retirement pension into an old-age pension, the other the award of an old-age pension, go on without this argument.

The third effect concerns the reason for the refusal and is useful beyond this dispute. The Court pointed out, by reference to Article 2(3) of Law no. 47/1992, that it rules only on the constitutionality of the acts referred to it, without being able to amend or supplement the legal provisions under review. Extending a benefit from one category of pension to another falls exclusively to the legislature, under Article 47(2) and Article 61(1) of the Constitution.

The fourth effect is the substantive explanation the Court takes over from Decision no. 123 of 27 February 2025, which clarifies why the two pensions are not identical situations. For the old-age pension, the full contribution period also includes the assimilated periods under Article 49 of Law no. 263/2010, the applicant must have reached the standard retirement age, and that age can be lowered under Articles 55 to 61 in a wide range of situations. For the partial early-retirement pension, assimilated periods are not counted, but retirement is possible up to 5 years earlier, with a penalty from which Article 65(5) precisely exempted the inhabitants of polluted areas.

The fifth effect is the legal characterisation of the text, stated explicitly by the Court: Article 65(5) did not lay down a ground for lowering the statutory retirement age, but only an exemption from the penalty. There is no penalty attached to the old-age pension, because the pensioner already meets both the full contribution period and the standard retirement age, so a similar rule would have served no purpose.

The line between what a court rules on and what stays with somebody else has been drawn again, on another chapter of the pension law. In a decision published on 23 September 2026, the Court answered that a workplace cannot be declared to be under special working conditions by a court judgment, but only through the administrative procedure started by the employer.

What has changed compared with the previous situation

The biggest change does not come from the decision, but from the new pension law, and it has to be said plainly: the benefit discussed here no longer exists. Law no. 263/2010 was repealed by Article 168(1)(a) of Law no. 360/2023 on the public pension system, published in Official Gazette of Romania no. 1089 of 4 December 2023 and applicable from 1 September 2024. We went through the consolidated text of Law no. 360/2023, with its 176 articles: it contains no reference to pollution, to residual pollution or to any of the localities listed in the former Article 65(5).

In other words, the 2-year reduction for the inhabitants of polluted areas was not extended, as the authors of the plea asked, but disappeared altogether together with the old law. The discussion remains relevant only for pension applications and pending cases under the old law, where the text continues to produce effects.

The Court nevertheless ruled on a repealed text, and that is not an oversight. The rule comes from Decision no. 766 of 15 June 2011, published in Official Gazette of Romania no. 549 of 3 August 2011: a rule that is no longer in force may be subject to constitutional review as long as the outcome of a pending case depends on it.

A second point of context is Law no. 207/2020, which amended paragraph (5) of Article 65 and from which part of the criticism started. The authors argued that it is discriminatory for the new wording to apply only to pensions established after it entered into force, and not to those already being paid. The Ploiești Court of Appeal had replied, in its point of view, that this is precisely what Article 15(2) of the Constitution requires, under which the law provides only for the future.

Proposals to reinstate the reduction for polluted areas have been tabled in Parliament, justified by the lower life expectancy in these localities. As long as they remain proposals, the legal position is the one described above.

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