In brief
- From 1 October 2026 the rovinietă no longer costs the same for every car: 228 lei a year for an electric one, 254 for Euro 6, 292 for Euro 5 and Euro 4, 330 for Euro 3 and older. In September 2026 every passenger car paid 262.92 lei, no matter how much it polluted. Whoever drives an electric car pays 13.3% less, whoever drives a Euro 6 pays 3.4% less, and the owner of a Euro 3 car pays 25.5% more.
- Goods vehicles over 3.5 tonnes disappear from the table altogether. They move to payment by the kilometre, through the TollRo system. Minibuses and coaches, by contrast, stay, in two new categories, and pay between 23.7% and 78.7% more than they did in September 2026.
- The price is written in lei from now on, not in euro, and is updated once a year, with inflation. That means it no longer changes month by month with the exchange rate, but also that the level can from now on be raised by a minister’s signature, not by an ordinance or by a law. Those concerned are all owners of passenger cars, of light goods vehicles of up to 3.5 tonnes, of minibuses and of coaches that use the national roads.
Published: Official Gazette of Romania, Part I, no. 818 of 25 September 2026, pages 15-16
In force from: from publication, 25 September 2026, because Article 12(3) of Law no. 24/2000 on legislative drafting rules provides that normative acts, with the exception of laws and ordinances, take effect on the date of publication in the Official Gazette of Romania (Monitorul Oficial) unless they themselves lay down a later date. The levels in the annex, however, apply only to rovinietă periods that start on 1 October 2026 or later
The order published on 25 September 2026 puts an end to the rule under which every passenger car paid the same rovinietă, the charge for using the national road network. From 1 October 2026 the charge depends on three things: what kind of vehicle you drive, how much it pollutes and how many days you buy. For a car, the full year costs 228 lei if it is electric, 254 if it is Euro 6, 292 if it is Euro 5 or Euro 4 and 330 if it is Euro 3, Euro 2, Euro 1 or has no standard at all. Payment is checked through the same camera system for which the Government had approved, a week earlier, 300 control sites and 1,258 cameras, worth 132 million lei.
The comparison with what was paid until now is easy to make, because the road administrator, the National Company for Road Infrastructure Administration, publishes the charge in lei every month. For September 2026, at a rate of 5.2584 lei to the euro, a passenger car paid 18.40 lei a day, 31.55 lei for ten days, 49.95 lei for thirty days, 78.88 lei for sixty days and 262.92 lei a year. The same five periods remain in the new table, but each of them now carries four prices instead of a single one.
For passenger cars the change does not run in one direction only. The annual rovinietă falls by 13.3% for electric cars and by 3.4% for Euro 6 ones, but rises by 11.1% for Euro 5 and Euro 4 and by 25.5% for Euro 3 and older. The only exception to this pattern is the one-day rovinietă, which rises in all four columns: from 18.40 lei to 20, 22, 26 or 29 lei, that is, between 8.7% and 57.6% more. Whoever enters the country by car for a single day pays more, however clean the engine.
Light goods vehicles of up to 3.5 tonnes follow exactly the same curve: 521 lei a year for electric ones, 579 for Euro 6, 665 for Euro 5 and Euro 4, 752 for Euro 3 and older, against the 599.46 lei that all of them paid in September 2026. The differences are, in turn, minus 13.1%, minus 3.4%, plus 10.9% and plus 25.4%.
Passenger transport is another story. Minibuses with more than 9 and at most 23 seats paid 1,998.19 lei a year; from 1 October they pay between 2,471 and 3,569 lei, that is, between 23.7% and 78.6% more. Coaches with more than 23 seats paid 3,496.84 lei; now they pay between 4,326 and 6,249 lei, from 23.7% up to 78.7% more. No column falls, not even the one for electric vehicles.
What it changes in practice
The first effect is that the emission standard becomes, for the first time, a pricing criterion for the rovinietă. The basis is Article 4(2) of Law no. 226/2023, which says that the charge is set according to the category of the vehicle, to the class of pollutant emissions and to the length of use of the network. Until this order, the first and the third criterion worked, the second did not. The annex to the order puts it into effect with four columns: electric vehicles, Euro 6, Euro 5 and Euro 4 together, Euro 3 down to Euro 0 together.
Next comes the position of those whose emission standard cannot be established. Note 1 of the annex repeats the rule in Article 6(3) of the law: if no data on the emission class can be supplied, the vehicle is classified as Euro 0, that is, in the most expensive column. For a passenger car, the difference between having and not having the standard correctly recorded comes to 76 lei a year. Electric vehicles are expressly taken out of that rule: note 2 says that the entry on the energy source in box P.3 of the vehicle registration certificate stands in for the classification, so they go into the first column, not into the last.
The third effect is that lorries vanish from the table. The annex has four categories: passenger cars, goods up to 3.5 tonnes, passengers with 10 to 23 seats, passengers with more than 23 seats. Goods vehicles heavier than 3.5 tonnes, which until now took up four separate positions, no longer appear at all, because Article 4(1) of Law no. 226/2023 lifts the rovinietă off them. From 1 October they pay TollRo, that is, the unit charge multiplied by the distance travelled in whole kilometres. The unit charges are set by another order, no. 1.925/2025, and run from 0.08 lei per kilometre to 0.62 lei per kilometre, according to the category of the vehicle, the emission class and the type of road.
The fourth effect is the move from euro into lei. Before, the charge was written in euro in the annex to an ordinance, and the amount due changed every month with the exchange rate. From 1 October, the figure in the annex is itself the amount owed. The rovinietă no longer goes up because the euro has moved, but neither does it come down.
The fifth effect concerns who decides from here on. Article 5(4) of Law no. 226/2023 places the level of the rovinietă within the powers of the minister of transport and infrastructure. For the first time, the price that every driver pays for the national roads changes through a ministerial order, not through an ordinance or a law. The only written brake left is Article 5(2) of the same law, which ties the short charges to the annual one: one day may not exceed 9% of the charge for 12 months, ten days 12%, thirty days 19%, sixty days 30%.
What has changed compared with the previous situation
The previous level sat in Annex no. 1 to Government Ordinance no. 15/2002, last amended in 2025. There the charges were expressed in euro, and a passenger car had 3.5 euro a day, 6 for ten days, 9.5 for thirty days, 15 for sixty days and 50 euro a year. The ordinance is repealed on 1 October 2026, by Article 24(1) of Law no. 226/2023, with the deadline moved by Law no. 103/2026, so the order does not come on top of it but in its place.
The first change is the number of prices. The old annex had one price for each combination of vehicle and period. The new annex has four, one for each emission group. For the four categories and five periods that remain, that means 80 figures where, for the same categories, there used to be twenty.
The second change is the make-up of the categories. The old annex had eight positions, from A to H. Passenger cars remain category A, and goods up to 3.5 tonnes remains B. Minibuses, which were category G, become C, and coaches, which were H, become D. The four heavy goods categories, from 3.5 to 7.5 tonnes, from 7.5 to 12 tonnes and the two above 12 tonnes, have no counterpart any more: they move entirely to TollRo.
The third change is the size of the jump from car to minibus. The threshold stays where it was, at 9 seats including the driver, but the gap between the two categories grows. In September 2026 a minibus paid 7.6 times what a car paid, 1,998.19 lei against 262.92. From 1 October it pays 10.8 times more, 2,746 lei against 254, at the same Euro 6 standard. A vehicle with ten seats now pays almost eleven passenger-car rovinietă charges.
The fourth change is the mechanism by which the price rises. The old ordinance kept the charge in euro and let the exchange rate do the rest; anyone who wanted to raise it in real terms had to go through an ordinance or a law. Today’s order puts in the place of the exchange rate a formula for annual indexation with the consumer price index, applied by 31 December, taking effect from 1 January of the following year. The result is rounded to the leu by deleting the fraction, so always downwards.
Advantages and disadvantages
What it improves
- The price is written directly in lei and no longer changes from one month to the next. Until now, the same rovinietă for 12 months cost one thing in January and another in September, because euro were converted at the rate of the month of issue.
- Electric cars and Euro 6 ones pay less than they did in September 2026, by 13.3% and by 3.4% respectively on the annual charge. They are the only decreases in the whole table.
- All 64 ratios between the short charges and the annual one fall within the ceilings in Article 5(2) of Law no. 226/2023. The closest to the limit, the 60-day rovinietă for Euro 3 cars and older, reaches exactly 30.00% of the annual charge without exceeding it.
- Electric vehicles are expressly exempted from automatic classification as Euro 0, by note 2 of the annex. Without it, a car with no emission standard assigned to it would have ended up in the most expensive column precisely because it has no combustion engine.
- The periods of validity are defined in days, not by reference to another rule: ten days means the starting day plus another nine, and twelve months means up to the day before the same day of the following year.
- The level of the rovinietă no longer depends on how the European currency moves, so the road budget no longer rises automatically when the leu weakens.
What remains a problem
- The indexation formula in Article 2(1) defines the same index twice, in two different ways. See the section on errors below.
- Rounding down, up to and including 0.99 lei, in practice freezes the small charges. A rovinietă of 20 lei does not rise to 21 unless the consumer price index passes 105, that is, at inflation of at least 5%. The one of 330 lei moves from 0.30%.
- The first indexation has to be carried out by 31 December 2026, that is, after 92 days of the new charges being applied, with an index calculated over the interval from October 2025 to September 2026, when these charges did not even exist.
- The order does not say who carries out the annual update and where the result is published. Under the previous regime, the monthly conversion was published by the network administrator, the National Company for Road Infrastructure Administration, on its own site; from now on, nothing obliges anyone to publish the figure.
- The annex does not show where the four columns come from. They are generated from a single reference level, the Euro 6 one, with a reduction of about 10% for electric vehicles and increases of about 15% and 30% for the other two, but neither the percentages nor the base column are written anywhere.
- The structure of the short charges bears far more heavily on passenger cars than on coaches. The one-day rovinietă of a Euro 6 car is 8.66% of the annual one, close to the legal ceiling of 9%. For a coach, the same ratio is 2.00%, that is, under a quarter of the ceiling.
Practical advice
- Check the emission standard in your vehicle registration certificate before 1 October 2026. If no data on the emission class can be supplied, the vehicle goes automatically to Euro 0, that is, into the most expensive column, and for a passenger car that means 330 lei a year instead of 254.
- For electric cars, the applicable level is the one in the first column, on the basis of the entry in box P.3 of the vehicle registration certificate. Do not let yourself be classified as Euro 0: note 2 of the annex says expressly that the rule does not apply to them.
- The rovinietă may be bought at most 30 days before the start date of its validity, and the new levels apply to those starting on 1 October 2026 or later. If you have a Euro 3 car and the validity starts on 30 September, you pay the old level for the whole period.
- Over long periods, do the arithmetic before buying in pieces. For a Euro 6 passenger car, the annual rovinietă of 254 lei becomes cheaper than successive 30-day ones from the sixth onwards, and cheaper than 60-day ones from the fourth onwards.
- Owners of goods vehicles over 3.5 tonnes have no business in this table any more. They pay by the kilometre, through TollRo, and the figure depends on the weight, on the Euro standard and on the type of road.
- Watch the threshold of 9 seats, the driver included. A vehicle with 9 seats stays in the passenger-car category, at 254 lei a year for Euro 6; one with 10 seats moves into the minibus category and pays 2,746 lei.
Frequently asked questions
How much does the rovinietă cost for a year from 1 October 2026?
Am I paying more or less than before?
How do I know which column I fall into?
What happens to the rovinietă I have already bought?
Do lorries still pay the rovinietă?
Why can I no longer see the price in euro?
Who can raise the charges from now on?
When does the order take effect?
Errors and inconsistencies in the published text
- Article 2(1). The same sentence defines twice, in two different ways, the index that changes the charge every year. The first half calls for the consumer price index „comunicat de către Institutul Național de Statistică pentru anul anterior”, communicated by the National Institute of Statistics for the previous year, that is, over a completed calendar year. The second half, the one that explains the symbol in the formula, calls for the „indicele lunar al prețurilor de consum (IPC total)”, the monthly consumer price index, valid for the interval running from October of the previous year to September of the year in which the calculation is made. The two periods do not coincide and yield two different values, hence two different charges for the same vehicle. The first version is also the one written in Article 3(4) of Law no. 226/2023, which the order implements. On top of that, a monthly index cannot be valid for an interval of twelve months, because it measures a single month.
- Article 3(2) and (3). Paragraph (2) says plainly what the applicable level is established by: by the date on which the period of validity of the rovinietă begins. Paragraph (3) says only that the annually updated value „se aplică începând cu data de 1 ianuarie a anului următor”, that it applies from the start of the following year, without repeating the criterion. Since Article 5(3) of Law no. 226/2023 allows buying up to 30 days in advance, every December there is a window in which a rovinietă is paid for in one year and starts in the other. For it, the order makes it impossible to establish whether the old level or the indexed one is owed, while Article 8(2) of the law refers to the moment of payment, not to the moment the validity begins.
Editorial analysis
The annex to the order has eighty figures, but not eighty decisions. Checked one by one, the four columns are generated from a single one: the Euro 6 level. Electric vehicles get about 10% less, Euro 5 and Euro 4 about 15% more, Euro 3 and older about 30% more, with rounding to the leu that explains the small deviations. On the annual charge the fit is almost exact: 254 lei for Euro 6 give 228.6 minus ten per cent, 292.1 plus fifteen per cent and 330.2 plus thirty per cent, that is, precisely the published figures once rounded. The same percentages, 15% and 30%, also appear in the order that sets the TollRo charges for lorries. The real decisions are therefore twenty reference levels and three percentages, and the reader has no way of learning that from the act.
The second observation comes out of setting the annex against the ceilings in the law. Article 5(2) of Law no. 226/2023 says that the daily charge may not exceed 9% of the annual one, the ten-day charge 12%, the thirty-day charge 19%, the sixty-day charge 30%. All eighty figures respect the limits, but not at the same distance from them. For passenger cars and light goods vehicles, three of the ratios stop less than 0.02 percentage points below the threshold, and one, the 60-day rovinietă for Euro 3 and older, reaches exactly 30.00%. For minibuses and coaches, the same ratios are more than four times smaller: one day comes to 1.97% of the annual charge in category C, against a ceiling of 9%. In other words, the ministry used the whole of the legal margin for the short charges on cars, which are paid mainly by foreign drivers in transit, and only a quarter of it for coaches.
The third observation concerns the indexation. The order requires one update a year, by 31 December, taking effect from 1 January. The first falls on 31 December 2026, that is, after 92 days of the new charges being applied, and it uses an index calculated over the interval from October 2025 to September 2026, an interval in which these charges did not exist. On top of that comes the rounding rule in paragraph (2), which deletes fractions of up to 0.99 lei and therefore always cuts downwards. The consequence is easy to work out: a charge rises only if inflation exceeds the ratio between one leu and the charge itself. The one-day rovinietă for an electric car, 20 lei, stays unchanged at any inflation below 5%, and the ten-day one, 27 lei, below 3.7%. The annual charge of 330 lei moves from 0.30%. The result, over time, is that the short charges erode against the annual one, and the structure built today at the edge of the ceilings drifts away from them on its own.
The fourth observation concerns where the decision has moved. Until 30 September 2026, the level of the rovinietă sat in the annex to a government ordinance, so an increase required an ordinance or a law, went through Parliament or at least through a government sitting, and came with a public explanatory memorandum. From 1 October it sits in the annex to a ministerial order, and this order is signed by delegation, by a state secretary, on behalf of an interim minister. The only written limit left is the capping of the short charges against the annual one; the annual charge, which brings in almost all the revenue, has no legal ceiling at all. Add the fact that the order does not say who publishes the indexed value each December and you get a public price that can change every year without any text obliging anyone to announce it.
What should be changed
- The indexation index should be defined once. The order should keep only the wording in Article 3(4) of Law no. 226/2023, the index communicated for the previous year, and drop the second definition, the one with the twelve-month interval. Otherwise the first update will be carried out on one version and challenged on the basis of the other.
- It should be stated clearly whether the level is established by the date of payment or by the start date of validity. One sentence in Article 3(3), of the kind found in paragraph (2), would remove the ambiguity of the 30-day window every December and would spare distributors a decision they have no power to take.
- The order should name who carries out the update and where the figure is published. A publication deadline, say five days before 1 January, on the page of the National Company for Road Infrastructure Administration and in the Official Gazette of Romania, would preserve the transparency that the monthly conversion had under the previous regime.
- Rounding should be to the nearest leu, not always downwards. The present rule freezes the small charges at ordinary rates of inflation and distorts, year after year, the ratio between the short periods and the annual one. The simpler alternative is to keep two decimals in the basis of calculation and to round only on display.
- The annex should show the reference column and the percentages by which it is multiplied. Two lines of a note, instead of eighty figures with no explanation, would tell the reader that they are paying 30% more because they have Euro 3, not because that is how the table came out.
- The explanatory memorandum should explain why the short charges for passenger cars sit at the ceiling and those for coaches at a quarter of it. The difference shows up only by working out the ratios, not by reading the annex, and it bears directly on the price paid by transit traffic.
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. 818 of 25 September 2026, pages 15-16 16 pages PDF, 156 KB the act starts on page 15
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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.