Stability bonus for young people in their first job finally has a procedure: 90 days to claim it

The stability bonus for young people in their first job, promised in March through an emergency ordinance, has had since the end of July the procedure that makes it claimable: a form, a 90-day deadline and a monthly certificate from the employer. Government Decision No. 570/2026, published on Tuesday in the Official Gazette of Romania, amends three acts dating from 2002 and implements the measures introduced into Law No. 76/2002 by Government Emergency Ordinance No. 11/2026. As with the procedure for the benefits for people with disabilities, published in the same issue of the Official Gazette of Romania, enforcement of the decision was suspended by a court shortly after it appeared.

The amount is not set by this decision, but by the law. Article 76⁵ of Law No. 76/2002, introduced by Government Emergency Ordinance No. 11/2026, provides for a stability bonus paid monthly for 24 months from the date of hiring: RON 1,000 a month for the first 12 months and RON 1,250 a month for the following 12 consecutive months. The bonus is not taxable and does not attract mandatory social contributions. In total, a young person who stays in the job for two years receives RON 27,000.

What was missing until now was the mechanism. Without the implementing rules, the employment agencies had no application form, no list of documents, no filing deadline and no rules for calculating months worked only in part. The present decision introduces all of these, through seven new articles in the implementing rules approved by Government Decision No. 174/2002 and eight new articles in the procedures approved by Government Decision No. 377/2002.

What it changes in practice

Who can claim the bonus. Three cumulative conditions, under the new Article 46¹⁰ of the rules: the young person must be registered with the employment agency covering their domicile or residence, must be entering employment for the first time, full time and on an open-ended contract, and must be hired by an employer that does not appear on the list of exceptions in the law. That list, in Article 76⁵ paragraph (2), rules out public institutions and authorities, autonomous public undertakings, national companies and companies in which the State or an administrative-territorial unit is the sole or majority shareholder, as well as the national research and development institutes. The bonus is therefore an incentive to take a job in the private sector.

The 90-day time limit runs on pain of forfeiture. The application, whose template is the new annex No. 14¹, is filed together with a copy of the identity document and a copy of the employment document, within no more than 90 days of the date of entering employment. The rules state expressly that the right is forfeited once it passes. They also specify that it expires at 24:00 on the 90th day and that, if that day is a non-working day, it is extended until the end of the first working day that follows. The documents may be filed in person, by registered letter with acknowledgement of receipt, by fax, by e-mail or online.

A safety net for incomplete files. If the documents sent in time are illegible or missing, the agency asks for them to be completed within 5 days of receiving the request, and whatever is sent then counts as filed in time. If even then the young person does not respond, they may file a fresh application, but only within the same 90-day forfeiture deadline.

The hiring date has a definition of its own. The date of entering employment means the date on which the activity begins as set out in the individual employment contract registered in the general register of employees. The first year expires at the end of the corresponding day of the 12th month, and the second year runs from the day immediately after.

Proof is filed every month, by the 15th. Each month, by the 15th inclusive for the month that has ended, the beneficiary must file a certificate issued by the employer showing that they are in employment. If they do not, the agency asks them in writing to produce it within 15 days of receiving the notice. If it still does not arrive, the agency contacts the employer. Where the checks show that the young person no longer meets the conditions, payment ceases from the month in which the conditions are no longer met. Where the checks leave the situation unclear, payment is suspended until it is clarified.

The bonus is calculated on days worked, not on the whole month. The monthly amount is set in proportion to the number of working days on which the young person actually carried out activity for the employer in that month. If they worked all the working days of the month and the entitlement period has not expired, they receive the full amount. If the period expires or the employment relationship ends during the month, the amount is calculated proportionally up to that date.

Changing jobs does not automatically break the entitlement. If the employment relationship ends during the entitlement period, the right is maintained provided the person is hired by another employer within no more than 60 days, again full time, on an open-ended contract and with an employer that is not on the list of exceptions. Payment is suspended between the two jobs, and the gap is not counted towards the 24 months. The same rule applies where the employment relationship is suspended.

Moving to another county. The entitlement is established by the agency where the young person was on the register, and the file is then transferred to the agency covering the new domicile or residence, which continues the payments and monitors compliance with the obligations.

Employers receive RON 2,250 a month for newly added categories. The subsidy provided for in Article 85 of Law No. 76/2002 is granted monthly, for 12 months, for each person hired on an open-ended contract from the categories concerned, with the obligation to maintain the employment relationship for at least 18 months. The March ordinance added to the list unemployed mothers with at least 3 dependent children under the age of 18, as well as unemployed people who have served a custodial sentence or who have received a sentence, an educational measure or another non-custodial measure. The present decision sets out which documents must be filed for each of these two new categories and updates the model agreements in annexes Nos. 19 and 20 accordingly.

Young unemployed people enter the long-term category sooner. The definition now turns on age: more than 12 months on the register for people aged at least 30, but only 6 months for those aged between 16 and 30. In practice, a young person becomes long-term unemployed in half the time an older person needs, which opens up faster access to the measures reserved for that category.

Anyone who resigns from a job obtained through an incentive measure waits 24 months. The new Article 61⁴ of the rules clarifies how the period is counted: in whole months, from the date of the first re-registration with the agency after the employment ended by resignation. Removal from the records and later re-registrations do not stop time running.

Payment is modernised. The decision rewrites the way entitlements from the unemployment insurance budget are paid: into a current account or a payment account with authorised credit or payment institutions, by card and other electronic payment instruments, or by postal order, as the beneficiary chooses.

What has changed compared with the previous situation

Until 28 July 2026, the stability bonus had existed in the law since March, but it could not be claimed. Government Emergency Ordinance No. 11/2026 had introduced Article 76⁵, amounts and 24-month period included, yet it did not say where the application was to be filed, with what documents, within what deadline and how the amount was to be calculated for a month in which the young person had not worked every day. All of this appears only now.

The most important practical consequence of that delay is dealt with separately, in Article IV of the decision. For young people hired between the date the ordinance entered into force and the date the decision entered into force, the 90-day deadline runs not from the hiring, but from 28 July 2026. Without this rule, some of them would have lost the right before the form for claiming it even existed. Their deadline expires towards the end of October 2026.

The second substantive change concerns the scope of the employer subsidy. Previously, the RON 2,250 a month was granted for unemployed people over 50, single parents heading single-parent families, the long-term unemployed and young NEETs. The list now also includes unemployed mothers with at least 3 dependent children and people who have served custodial sentences or non-custodial measures. For each of them, the decision adds to the implementing rules the list of supporting documents, from the children’s birth certificates to the certificate issued by the detention facility or by the probation service.

The third change concerns the documents required for the solidarity contract for young people at risk of social marginalisation. The decision introduces a new paragraph setting out, category by category, what proves that a person belongs to each group concerned: certificates for recipients of the minimum inclusion income, specific documents for asylum seekers and beneficiaries of international protection, a certificate from the town hall for people without a home, a certificate attesting the degree of disability and, for anyone else at risk, the social inquiry carried out by the public social assistance service.

Finally, Article 18 paragraph (3) of the procedures approved by Government Decision No. 377/2002 and Article 2 of Government Decision No. 1.090/2002 are repealed, and the payment of entitlements from the unemployment insurance budget is rewritten around three channels, one of them the bank card.

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