In brief

  • The pay rise that the remuneration law had scheduled for 2021 never came, and the Constitutional Court has confirmed that postponing it was lawful. The contested text, Article I(1) of Government Emergency Ordinance no. 226/2020, held the basic salaries, the service pay and the allowances of all staff paid from public funds at the December 2020 level for the whole of 2021, on condition that the person held the same post and worked in the same conditions.
  • The losers were those who had not yet reached the final salary promised by Framework Law no. 153/2017, led by police officers and contractual staff of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Their trade union brought 27 cases before the Court, started before eight courts across the country, arguing that the freeze perpetuated differences that already existed, because the 2017 law had been applied to the categories of public employees at different speeds.
  • The plea was rejected unanimously, and the reasoning on the merits takes up two of the decision’s 32 paragraphs. The Court points out that it has already ruled four times in 2024 on the same criticism and from the same author, and that no new elements have appeared. The ordinance has not been in force since 2022, but it continues to decide proceedings started in 2021, and there Decision no. 43/2026 will apply directly.
Act: Decision of the Constitutional Court no. 43 of 20 January 2026 on the plea of unconstitutionality of the provisions of Article I(1) of Government Emergency Ordinance no. 226/2020 on certain fiscal and budgetary measures, amending and supplementing certain normative acts and extending certain deadlines
Published: Official Gazette of Romania, Part I, no. 819 of 25 September 2026, pages 3-6
Delivered: 20 January 2026, unanimously
Final and generally binding: 25 September 2026, the date of publication

Police officers asked the courts for the difference between the salary they were being paid and the one that Framework Law no. 153/2017 promised them for 2021, and the Constitutional Court has closed that road to them once again. By Decision no. 43 of 20 January 2026, published on 25 September 2026, Article I(1) of Government Emergency Ordinance no. 226/2020 remains constitutional. It is the fifth time that the same criticism, coming from the same trade union, receives the same answer, after four other decisions in 2024, and monitorlegal.ro also carries the case in which the Court examined together the freeze of 2021 and that of 2022.

To see what was postponed, one has to read what the remuneration law had promised. According to the statement of grounds of the plea, Framework Law no. 153/2017 had laid down a phased application of the pay rises for the period 2019-2022: salaries went up year by year, in steps, to the levels written in the annexes. Article I(1) of the 2020 ordinance derogated from that rule and wrote, for 2021, exactly the opposite: „cuantumul brut al salariilor de bază/soldelor de funcție/salariilor de funcție/indemnizațiilor de încadrare lunară de care beneficiază personalul plătit din fonduri publice se menține la același nivel cu cel ce se acordă pentru luna decembrie 2020 în măsura în care personalul ocupă aceeași funcție și își desfășoară activitatea în aceleași condiții”, the gross amount of the basic salaries, service pay, post salaries and monthly allowances of staff paid from public funds is kept at the same level as that granted for December of that year, in so far as the staff hold the same post and carry on their activity in the same conditions. The step for 2021 vanished, and the basic salary remained, for twelve months, the one from December 2020.

Who paid for the postponement can be seen from the make-up of the cases. All 27 were brought by the National Trade Union of Police Officers and Contractual Staff of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, on behalf of union members, and reached the Court from the Bucharest County Court, the Craiova Court of Appeal, the Iași Court of Appeal, the Timișoara Court of Appeal, the Pitești Court of Appeal, the Constanța County Court, the Galați Court of Appeal and the Suceava Court of Appeal. Seventeen of them came from Craiova alone. The argument on the merits was that the freeze did not create the inequality but fixed it in place: the 2017 law had exempted certain categories from the phased application, through Article 38(2) and (3), and civil servants with special status in the ministry and military personnel were not among them.

The second criticism concerned a particular comparison. While the salaries of police officers were halted, the medical and pharmaceutical teaching staff of universities with accredited faculties of medicine, dental medicine and pharmacy had received a new pay entitlement through Law no. 205/2020. Besides the Constitution, the union relied on the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union and on two directives on equal treatment in employment.

The Government replied that future salaries do not fall within the scope of the right to property and relied, to that end, on the Court’s own case-law and on judgments of the European Court of Human Rights, among them the one of 8 November 2005, delivered in the case of Kechko v. Ukraine. The Court never reached those arguments. In paragraphs 30 and 31 it pointed out that decisions no. 388 of 17 September 2024, no. 515 of 17 October 2024, no. 531 of 22 October 2024 and no. 631 of 7 November 2024 had already found the same text constitutional, against identical criticisms and from the same author, and that, in the absence of any new elements, the solution stands.

What it changes in practice

Government Emergency Ordinance no. 226/2020 is no longer in force: its application was limited to 2021. The examination nonetheless took place, on the basis of Decision no. 766 of 15 June 2011, according to which a text that has left the statute book is reviewed for as long as it continues to produce effects in the cases in which it was invoked. That also says what the real effect of the decision is: it changes no salary today, but it decides the proceedings started in 2021 and still pending.

For the union members in the 27 cases, the effect is that the courts will dismiss the claims for payment of the salary differences for 2021. For any other proceedings with the same object, the effect is identical: from 25 September 2026 the decision is final and generally binding, so a court seized of the same criticism can no longer send it to the Court.

A less visible effect concerns the budget. Had the text been struck down, the State would have owed retroactively the difference between the step for 2021 and the salary actually paid, for all staff paid from public funds in the same situation, plus interest. The decision closes off that possibility for 2021.

What has changed compared with the previous situation

Nothing new appears in positive law. The decision confirms a text that has not applied since 2022 and repeats a solution already given four times in 2024. What changes is the procedural position of the claimants: until publication, a lawyer could hope that some panel would send the question to the Court again; from 25 September 2026, the argument is spent.

The substantive change took place on 1 January 2021, when the mechanism devised in 2017 was halted for a year. Framework Law no. 153/2017 had been built on the idea of a predictable transition, in annual steps, and the freeze broke the timetable for everyone who had not reached the final level. The categories exempted through Article 38(2) and (3) had kept their rises, so 2021 found the public pay system already split in two: those who had arrived and those stopped along the way.

The second thing that has changed over time is the length of the litigation itself. Between the publication of the ordinance, 31 December 2020, and the delivery of the decision, 1,846 days passed. The text had been dead for four years and 20 days by the moment the Court said it was constitutional.

Advantages and disadvantages

What it improves

  • The proceedings started in 2021 get a clear answer and can be closed, instead of waiting for a possible change of case-law.
  • The Court keeps to its line: same text, same criticism, same author, same solution. Predictability has a value of its own, including for those who lose.
  • The State budget escapes a retroactive obligation that would have stretched over all staff paid from public funds, not only over police officers.
  • Joining 27 cases into one spared the Court and the ordinary courts 27 parallel procedures on the same question.
  • The decision confirms expressly that a text no longer in force may be reviewed for as long as it still decides proceedings, which helps anyone caught up in old litigation.

What remains a problem

  • The reasoning on the merits, paragraphs 30 and 31, takes up 1,229 characters out of a text of 29,570, that is, 4.2% of the decision. The rest is procedure and lists.
  • The most concrete criticism, the comparison with the medical and pharmaceutical teaching staff of the medical universities, for whom Law no. 205/2020 had created a new entitlement, receives no answer of its own. The reference to the 2024 decisions does not say whether those examined precisely this argument.
  • The reliance on the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union and on the two directives likewise goes unanswered, and Article 148 of the Constitution does not appear among the reference norms listed in paragraph 29.
  • Between the referral by the Bucharest County Court, 25 March 2022, and delivery, 1,397 days passed, and publication added another 248. The people in those cases waited almost four and a half years to learn that the case-law is not changing.
  • The inequality complained of remains standing, only now declared constitutional. Whoever reads the decision does not learn whether the differences between the categories of public employees have narrowed in the meantime or stayed as they were.

Practical advice

  1. If you have proceedings about salary differences for 2021, ask your lawyer whether the case rests on the unconstitutionality of Article I(1) of the ordinance. If it does, the argument has been spent since 25 September 2026.
  2. Check which period you are claiming for. The 2020 ordinance covered only 2021; for the following years other acts apply, with other texts and other case-law.
  3. Read the condition at the end of the text: the freeze applied only „în măsura în care personalul ocupă aceeași funcție și își desfășoară activitatea în aceleași condiții”, in so far as the staff hold the same post and carry on their activity in the same conditions. Anyone who was promoted, changed post or moved to other working conditions during 2021 does not fall within the text, and that is a matter of applying the law, hence a matter for the courts.
  4. If you are unhappy with the way your employer calculated the salary, the road remains the administrative court, not the Constitutional Court. The Government itself pointed out in the file that the concrete manner of application is a question of interpreting the law.
  5. Keep in mind the distinction on which all the case-law in this field rests: a salary already earned is an asset, a future salary is an expectation that the legislature may change.
  6. If you represent a trade union, ask the court to check whether a new criticism was genuinely analysed in the decisions relied on as precedent. A general reference to case-law is not the same as an answer to your argument.

Frequently asked questions

What exactly was postponed by the 2020 ordinance?
The pay rise step scheduled for 2021 within the phased application of Framework Law no. 153/2017. The basic salary, the service pay, the post salary and the grading allowance stayed, throughout 2021, at the December 2020 level.
Who bore the cost of the postponement?
All staff paid from public funds who had not yet reached the final level set out in the annexes to the law. In these cases, the police officers and the contractual staff of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, who had not been exempted from the phased application through Article 38(2) and (3).
Is the ordinance still in force?
No. Its application was limited to 2021, and the review took place because the text continues to produce effects in the proceedings in which it was invoked, in accordance with Decision no. 766 of 15 June 2011.
Can I still claim the salary differences for 2021 in court?
The claim can be made, but it can no longer rest on the unconstitutionality of the text. From 25 September 2026 the decision is final and generally binding.
Why did it take almost four and a half years?
The decision does not explain. The first referral came from the Bucharest County Court on 25 March 2022, delivery took place on 20 January 2026, and publication on 25 September 2026. The 27 cases were joined to the first one registered, no. 978D/2022.
Did the Court also examine the argument about the teaching staff of the medical universities?
Not expressly. The decision refers to four of its own rulings from 2024, delivered, it says, on identical criticisms by the same author, without taking up the argument again in the reasons.

Editorial analysis

The clearest figure in this decision is neither the number of cases nor the year of the freeze, but the proportion between question and answer. The published text has 29,570 characters. The statement of grounds of the plea, paragraphs 15-21, takes 4,764. The examination on the merits, paragraphs 30 and 31, takes 1,229, that is, 4.2% of the decision. The lists of cases and of names in paragraph 3 and in the operative part add up, on their own, to 6,908 characters, more than five times the reasoning. A decision in which the list of parties is five times longer than the reason why they lose does not convince, even if the solution is right.

The second observation comes out of putting two paragraphs together. In paragraph 21, the union raises a precise and verifiable argument: over the very interval in which the salaries of police officers were halted, another category of public employees, the medical and pharmaceutical teaching staff of universities with accredited faculties of medicine, dental medicine and pharmacy, received a new pay entitlement through Law no. 205/2020. In paragraph 30, the Court answers that these are „critici identice”, identical criticisms, to those in four decisions from 2024. The two statements cannot be checked against each other, because the decision quotes no passage from those four. The reader has to open four issues of the Official Gazette of Romania (Monitorul Oficial) to find out whether their argument was ever analysed.

The third observation concerns the ratio between the speed demanded of the addressee and the speed that the administration of justice grants itself. The ordinance was published on the last day of 2020 and took effect the next day, 1 January 2021, with no period of adjustment at all. The question whether that overnight leap was constitutional was answered 1,846 days later, and the answer became enforceable after another 248. The salary changed in a day, the review took five years.

In other respects the decision is technically clean. The quotation from Article I(1) matches the text published in Official Gazette of Romania, Part I, no. 1332 of 31 December 2020, the numbers of the 27 cases in paragraph 3 are all found, without exception, in the operative part, and the 27 cases from the ordinary courts correspond to the Court’s 27 files. The problem lies in the economy of the reasoning, not in its accuracy.

What should be changed

  • When it dismisses by reference to its case-law, the Court should quote the paragraph of the earlier decision that answers the criticism. A single exact reference, of the kind „see Decision no. 388/2024, paragraph X”, turns a statement of authority into a verifiable argument and shortens the work of the courts that apply the solution.
  • Criticisms based on European Union law should receive an explicit answer, even one of inadmissibility. The union relied on the Charter of Fundamental Rights and on two directives; the decision says neither that they apply nor that they do not. One sentence closes the matter and spares the courts a question they have no answer to.
  • The lists of cases and of names should be moved into an annex to the decision. That would cut the length of the published text by almost a quarter, would make the reasoning readable and would lose no information, since the annex is published together with the decision.
  • Ordinances that freeze pay entitlements should say what happens to the step that is skipped. The 2020 ordinance suppressed the rise for 2021 without saying whether it is recovered, lost or shifted. Out of that silence the 27 cases were born.
  • The period between delivery and publication should be written into Law no. 47/1992. 248 days means 248 days in which a solution exists but cannot be relied on in any proceedings. A deadline of 30 or 60 days would remove this grey zone.
  • The Ministry of Labour should publish, by category, what percentage of public employees had reached the final level of Framework Law no. 153/2017 by 31 December 2020. Without that figure, the claim that the freeze perpetuated inequalities remains a party’s assertion, impossible for a judge and for a reader alike to verify.

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. 819 of 25 September 2026, pages 3-6 16 pages PDF, 143 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.