In brief

  • The Chamber of Tax Consultants has published the material the examination of 31 October 2026 is set on: 11 examination fields, from value added tax to money laundering prevention, each with its own syllabus and bibliography.
  • The bibliography has 45 entries, which amount to 35 different titles. The Tax Code and its implementing rules come up again in six fields, so the list looks longer than it is.
  • The decision does not say how much each field weighs. The weightings sit in the examination rules, and out of them comes a figure worth reading twice: the tax and customs block is on its own worth 77.5 points, 2.5 above the pass mark.
Act: Decision of the Chamber of Tax Consultants no. 8/2026
Published: Official Gazette of Romania (Monitorul Oficial) no. 763 of 8 September 2026
In force from: 8 September 2026, the date of publication

From 8 September 2026, anyone who wants to become a tax consultant knows exactly what there is to learn for the test of 31 October. The Chamber of Tax Consultants has published in the Official Gazette of Romania the decision approving the examination fields, the syllabus and the bibliography for the October 2026 session, both for the capacity of tax consultant and for that of assistant tax consultant. The material covers eleven fields, and one of them, tax procedure, moves so fast that part of the rules the candidates know changed in the very week of publication: the procedure for the advance tax ruling was rewritten by an order that appeared a day earlier, too late to enter the examination material.

The decision bears the number 8 and the date of 1 September 2026, following the meeting of the Chamber’s Higher Council of 31 August. It has two articles and one annex. Article 1 says that the examination is held on 31 October 2026, online, as a multiple-choice test built exclusively from the annex. Article 2 orders publication. The rest, that is everything that matters to a candidate, is the annex.

The annex opens with a footnote that fixes the most important rule of the whole document: the acts covered by the syllabus are those updated with the amendments and additions that entered into force by 1 August 2026. Whatever changed after that date is not examined, even if it applies in practice. Between 1 August and the day of the examination there are 91 days in which tax legislation can move as much as it likes, without the questions following it.

The fields are, in the order of the annex: value added tax, corporate taxation in Romania, tax procedure, taxation of individuals’ income and social contributions, excise duties, accounting, law, international taxation, customs duties, local taxes and duties, and preventing and combating money laundering and terrorist financing. The field with the richest bibliography is corporate taxation, with nine entries, among them the transfer pricing guidelines of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the law transposing global minimum taxation. At the other end, money laundering has a single entry, Law no. 129/2019.

The full count looks like this: 45 bibliography entries, unevenly spread over the eleven fields, but only 35 different titles. The difference comes from the fact that Law no. 227/2015 on the Tax Code and Government Decision no. 1/2016, which approves its implementing rules, appear six times each, in the fields covering VAT, corporate income tax, income tax, excise duties, international taxation and local taxes. A candidate who opens the list and counts the lines believes he has 45 acts to read. He has 35 to read, two of which will take him longer than all the others together.

What it changes in practice

The decision changes no tax rule. It closes a list. From 8 September 2026, the examination board can no longer set questions outside the eleven fields, nor from acts that do not appear in the bibliography. For the candidate, that turns a theoretically infinite subject, Romanian taxation, into a perimeter that can be covered.

The second effect is one of calendar. From publication to the examination there are 53 days. Enrolment, set by an earlier decision of the Chamber published in April 2026, takes place online between 21 September and 9 October 2026, and the fee is 600 lei. Anyone reading the annex on the day of publication has 31 days to decide whether to enrol and another 22 days after enrolment closes in which to learn.

The third effect is less visible. The decision contains no weighting, no number of questions, no allocation of marks across the fields. Those elements come from the examination rules approved by Higher Council Decision no. 9/2024, invoked in the preamble. The rules split the test into four blocks: tax, customs and tax procedure legislation, 77.5%; commercial and financial-fiscal law, 10%; financial management and company accounting, 10%; money laundering prevention, 2.5%. Passing requires at least 75 points out of 100, and the test lasts no longer than three hours. Anyone reading only the decision of 8 September learns none of this.

What has changed compared with the previous situation

The previous session was governed by Decision of the Chamber of Tax Consultants no. 8/2025, adopted on 29 August 2025 and published in Official Gazette of Romania no. 813 of 2 September 2025, for an examination held on 22 November 2025. The structure of the document is the same: two short articles and an annex with fields, syllabus and bibliography.

What has visibly changed is the preparation window. In 2025, between the publication of the material and the examination there were 81 days. In 2026 there are 53. In other words, this autumn’s candidates have 28 days less, almost a third of last year’s window, for the same amount of material. The difference does not come from a delay on the Chamber’s part, but from moving the examination three weeks earlier in the calendar, from the end of November to the end of October, without the publication of the syllabus moving in the same direction.

The decision does not say what exactly has changed inside the syllabus compared with the previous session. There is no list of changes, no marking of the entries newly added to or removed from the bibliography. A candidate who sat the examination in November 2025 and is repeating it now has to put the two annexes side by side and compare them line by line, because the act offers him no landmark.

Advantages and disadvantages

What it improves

  • The perimeter is closed and public. The questions cannot go outside the eleven fields and the 35 titles, and that can be checked after the examination.
  • The reference date of the legislation, 1 August 2026, is written out expressly. The candidate knows which version of the Tax Code counts and does not have to guess whether a September amendment enters the questions or not.
  • The syllabus is detailed down to sub-point level, it does not stop at chapter headings. In accounting, for instance, the international standards concerned are named, from IAS 1 to IAS 20, instead of asking for „the accounting regulations” in general.
  • The footnote requires the questions to be matched to the syllabus for each field separately, which gives a basis for a challenge if a question falls outside the perimeter.

What remains a problem

  • The document does not say how much each field is worth. The weightings have to be looked for in another act, and the candidate who does not find them divides up his study time by guesswork.
  • Neither enrolment, nor the fee, nor the pass mark appear here. The complete information about a single examination session is scattered across four different decisions of the Chamber.
  • Two bibliography entries, the OECD transfer pricing guidelines and the model convention of the same organisation, are listed with no edition and no year. The rule about updating to 1 August 2026 does not settle them, because they are not Romanian legal acts and they do not „enter into force” on a date.
  • The 53 days between publication and the examination are almost a third fewer than at the last session, for material of the same extent.
  • The bibliography keeps two orders of the minister of finance on the same subject, the consumer price index for updating advance payments of corporate income tax, one from 2022 and one from 2025, without saying which applies to the situation examined.

Practical advice

  1. Start with the weightings, not with the first page of the syllabus. The tax and customs block is worth 77.5 of the 100 points and takes in eight of the eleven fields. Accounting and law take 10 points each, and money laundering 2.5.
  2. Cut the bibliography down to 35 titles before you estimate your time. Law no. 227/2015 and Government Decision no. 1/2016 cover six fields on their own, so a careful reading of them works for more than half the examination.
  3. Work on the form of the legislation as it stood on 1 August 2026. If you are using a collection updated to the day, check what changed after that date and mark the passages, so as not to learn a solution that is not asked for.
  4. Do not put off the decision to enrol. The period runs from 21 September to 9 October 2026, the fee is 600 lei, and applications are filed exclusively online on the Chamber’s website.
  5. Train on the format, not only on the content. The test is an online multiple-choice paper, it lasts no longer than three hours and it requires 75 points out of 100, which leaves a smaller margin for error than a classic examination.
  6. For the two OECD materials, ask the Chamber in writing which edition is meant before you enrol. The transfer pricing guidelines differ in substance from one edition to another, and the question can only be answered by the body that set it.

Frequently asked questions

When and how is the examination held?
On 31 October 2026, online, as a multiple-choice test. The date and the form are fixed by Article 1 of the decision.
Which fields does the examination cover?
Eleven: value added tax, corporate taxation, tax procedure, taxation of individuals’ income and social contributions, excise duties, accounting, law, international taxation, customs duties, local taxes and duties, and preventing and combating money laundering and terrorist financing.
How many acts are there actually to read?
The bibliography has 45 entries, but only 35 different titles. The Tax Code and its implementing rules are listed six times each, once for every field in which they apply.
Is there a separate syllabus for the assistant tax consultant?
No. There is a single annex and it covers both capacities. The difference between them lies in the conditions of access, among them the length of professional experience, two years for the assistant and five for the tax consultant, and in the range of activities the assistant may carry out, only under the guidance of an active tax consultant.
How much does each field weigh in the mark?
The decision does not say. The examination rules approved by Higher Council Decision no. 9/2024 set four blocks: tax, customs and tax procedure legislation 77.5%, commercial and financial-fiscal law 10%, financial management and accounting 10%, money laundering 2.5%.
What does it mean that the legislation is updated to 1 August 2026?
That the questions are built on the form of the acts in force on that date. An amendment published in August, September or October 2026 applies in practice, but is not examined.
When is enrolment and how much does it cost?
Enrolment takes place online between 21 September and 9 October 2026, and the fee for 2026 is 600 lei. Both are set by other decisions of the Chamber, not by this one.
What is the pass mark?
At least 75 points out of 100, under the examination rules. The written test lasts no longer than three hours.
Can you pass without accounting and law?
Arithmetically, yes. Accounting, law and money laundering add up to 22.5 points, so the tax and customs block on its own reaches 77.5, above the threshold of 75. In practice nobody answers perfectly 77.5 points’ worth of tax questions, but the ratio shows where the real weight of the examination lies.
What has changed compared with the November 2025 session?
The decision does not list the changes of content. The measurable change is one of calendar: in 2025 there were 81 days between the publication of the syllabus and the examination, now there are 53.

Editorial analysis

The most useful figure in this act is not in the act. The decision approves eleven fields and 45 bibliography entries, but says nothing at all about the marking. The weightings come from the examination rules: 77.5% for tax, customs and tax procedure legislation, 10% each for law and for accounting, 2.5% for money laundering. Set beside the pass mark of 75 points out of 100, these percentages produce a result that no reading of the annex brings to light: the three non-tax fields are worth 22.5 points together, so a candidate who answered impeccably on the tax and customs block alone would gather 77.5 points and would pass. Fields 6, 7 and 11 contain 16 of the 35 distinct titles in the bibliography, that is almost half the reading material for less than a quarter of the marks.

The same arithmetic bites inside the big block as well. Eight fields share 77.5 points, which gives an average of 9.7 points per field, below the 10 points that accounting takes on its own. Except that the internal allocation of those 77.5 points is published nowhere. The candidate does not know whether value added tax is worth 20 points or 6, although it occupies the longest syllabus paragraph in the whole annex. The result is that the best informed candidate is not the one who has read the most, but the one who guessed the allocation right, and that guess is usually bought at the preparatory courses.

The second thing that shows only if you put the acts end to end is the calendar. The date of the examination was fixed by Decision no. 5/2026, published in Official Gazette of Romania no. 269 of 3 April 2026, that is 211 days before the test. The material came on 8 September, 53 days before. Between those two moments more than five months went by in which the candidates knew the day but not what they had to learn. And the syllabus appeared 38 days after the date on which the examinable legislation was frozen, 1 August 2026, which means that nothing prevented its publication in August. The comparison with the last session reinforces the picture: in 2025 the syllabus appeared on 2 September for an examination on 22 November, so 81 days. The examination moved three weeks earlier, the publication of the syllabus did not move at all, and the difference came straight out of the candidates’ preparation time.

For the rest, the act is clean. It has no internal contradictions, it imposes no impossible deadlines and it leaves no category of candidates outside the rule. The two articles say what they have to and nothing more, and the annex is detailed down to sub-point level, which is not a given in a document of this kind. Its problems are not ones of drafting, but of what the Chamber chose not to put into it.

What should be changed

  • The weighting written next to each field, in the annex. The candidate would divide up his time by the marks from the first day, and the informational advantage of those who take preparatory courses would disappear.
  • The allocation of the 77.5 points across the eight tax and customs fields. Without it, half the pass percentage remains a black box, and challenges about the balance of the questions have nothing to rest on.
  • A table of the changes compared with the previous session. Anyone repeating the examination would see in a few minutes what has been added and what removed, instead of comparing two annexes line by line.
  • The edition and the year for the OECD materials. The transfer pricing guidelines and the model convention change from one edition to another, and the rule about updating to 1 August 2026 does not work on documents that do not enter into force.
  • A single act gathering the session together. Today the date, the enrolment, the fee, the rules and the syllabus sit in four different decisions of the Chamber, published between February and September 2026. A consolidated text, published together with the syllabus, would spare every candidate the same search.
  • Publication of the syllabus in August. The examinable legislation stops on 1 August, so the annex can be finalised immediately after that date. Five weeks gained there would bring the preparation window back to the level of the 2025 session.

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. 763 of 8 September 2026 8 pages PDF, 77 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.