In brief
- The State is taking another 134,890 square metres at Azuga and Bușteni and paying 23,087,988.44 lei. There are 168 privately owned properties, entered on a list separate from the corridor approved fourteen months ago. The site described as „additional” is larger than the original one: on the private side, 134,890 square metres against 104,059.
- Almost a quarter of the money goes back to the town halls. Twenty-two entries on the list belong to the private domain of the towns of Azuga and Bușteni, add up to 35,435 square metres and 5,623,076 lei, that is 24.4% of the total compensation. Another 44 entries carry the note „proprietar neidentificat”, unidentified owner.
- The price depends on the town, not on the land. For the same category, yards and buildings within the built-up area, the annex gives 147.20 lei per square metre at Azuga and 320.60 or 436.25 lei at Bușteni. The two towns are neighbours, and the road being built links them.
Published: Official Gazette of Romania (Monitorul Oficial), Part I, no. 807 of 23 September 2026, with annexes no. 1-4 in no. 807 bis of the same day
In force from: 23 September 2026, the date of publication, because government decisions are not subject to the three day period laid down for laws and ordinances
On 18 September 2026 the Government adopted the second expropriation decision for the same road on the Prahova Valley, and its text appeared on 23 September 2026 in the Official Gazette of Romania. The procedure is the usual one, the same as that used for the conservation works at Lacul Roșu, adopted in the same government sitting: the State approves a site, puts the private properties on it on a list, sets a sum for each and becomes the owner within a few weeks. What is new is the size of the list. The corridor approved in July 2025 covered 121 private properties and 104,059 square metres. The additional site approved now covers 168 properties and 134,890 square metres, 29.6% more than the first time.
The works are called „Acces rutier complementar descărcare A3 Azuga-Bușteni” and are in fact the bypass of the two mountain towns in Prahova County. The road runs about 9.5 kilometres, is meant to take through traffic off DN 1, and the total value of the investment exceeds 843 million lei including VAT. The expropriating authority is the Romanian State, represented by the Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure, through the National Company for Road Infrastructure Administration, known as CNAIR. The topographic plans in Annex no. 1, however, carry a different beneficiary, Prahova County Council, which commissioned the survey and accepted it in May 2026.
The sum the decision sets aside is written in Article 3 rounded, in thousands of lei: 23,088. Adding the 181 individual values in Annex no. 2 gives 23,087,988.44 lei, exactly the total printed at the end of the list, so the rounding in the body of the decision is 11.56 lei on the high side. The money comes from the state budget, through the budget of the Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure, but not from a line of its own spending: the chapter is 84.01 „Transporturi”, the title is 56 „Proiecte cu finanțare din fonduri externe nerambursabile (FEN) postaderare”, and the budget article is 56.48, the programmes financed from the European Regional Development Fund for the 2021-2027 financial framework.
The annexes did not fit in the ordinary issue and were published separately, over 96 pages, in Official Gazette of Romania, Part I, no. 807 bis of 23 September 2026. The first of them holds 85 plates at scales of 1:500 and 1:1000, Annex no. 2 is the list of private properties, Annex no. 3 covers 11 properties in the public domain of the State with 68,805 square metres, and Annex no. 4 covers 13 properties in the public domain of the towns of Azuga and Bușteni with 14,199 square metres. The land added now amounts, together with the publicly owned properties, to 217,894 square metres, that is nearly 22 hectares.
What it changes in practice
The decision does not itself transfer ownership. It opens the procedure laid down by Law no. 255/2010, and from publication a calendar of fixed deadlines starts to run, unevenly shared between the owner and the State. CNAIR notifies the owners and posts the list at the town hall and on its own website. From that moment, the owner has 30 working days to appear at the offices of the expropriating authority with the title documents, under Article 8(2). Five working days after that period expires, the expropriating authority issues the expropriation decision, under Article 9(1), and Article 9(3) states plainly that the decision is issued even if the owner has not come forward or if no agreement has been reached. Ownership passes by operation of law on the date the decision is issued, once the sums have been deposited.
On the money side, the deadlines run differently. The Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure transfers the sums into a treasury account opened in the name of CNAIR within at most 30 days, but not from the publication of the decision, rather from the approval of the request to open appropriations, as provided by Article 4(8) of the implementing rules approved by Government Decision no. 53/2011. That request has no deadline of its own. Further on, the owner has 10 days from the bringing to public notice to file the claim for payment and 15 days to complete the file required, while the commission verifying the ownership right is appointed within five days of the issuing of the expropriation decision. Actual payment is made within at most 90 days of the commission’s decision. Anyone dissatisfied with the sum may go to court within the general limitation period, but a challenge suspends neither the transfer of ownership nor the works.
The third effect concerns the publicly owned properties. Annex no. 3 takes out of current use 68,805 square metres in the public domain of the State: a stretch of DN 1 administered by CNAIR, the beds of the Prahova river and the Jepilor brook, administered by the National Administration „Apele Române”, railway land held under concession by the National Railway Company CFR and 350 square metres of forest administered by Romsilva. The same happens, through Annex no. 4, with 14,199 square metres in the public domain of the two towns, mostly roads. For neither of these two categories does the decision provide compensation, because the transfer takes place between public entities.
Finally, the act has an effect that shows only if you open the list. Forty-four of the 168 entries carry the note „proprietar neidentificat”, unidentified owner, and the footnote to the annex lists them all, from entry 1 to entry 164. For them the money is deposited anyway, and the names are looked for only afterwards, so that the files can be completed. In practice, the property passes to the State before the State knows whom it took it from.
What has changed compared with the previous situation
The original corridor was approved by Government Decision no. 585/2025 of 14 July 2025, published in Official Gazette of Romania, Part I, no. 681 of 21 July 2025. There, Annex no. 2 had 121 entries, 104,059 square metres and a total of 23,241,424 lei. Annex no. 3 recorded 89,411 square metres in the public domain of the State, and Annex no. 4 had 22,395 square metres belonging to the two towns. The original corridor came to 215,865 square metres.
Comparing it with the act of 23 September 2026 gives an unexpected result. The additional site has 217,894 square metres, that is 2,029 more than the one it is supposed to complete. On the private side, the only side that is paid for, the difference is even clearer: 134,890 square metres now, against 104,059 then. The sum stays almost unchanged, 23,087,988.44 lei against 23,241,424, because the new list takes in a great deal of cheap land: 37,327 square metres of forest outside the built-up area, valued at 18.39 lei per square metre at Azuga and 23.65 lei at Bușteni. Taken together, the two decisions remove from private ownership 289 properties, 238,949 square metres and 46,329,412.44 lei.
The same kind of decision was adopted for a railway as well, with far smaller areas and sums: the additional site between Caransebeș and Arad adds 362 private entries, and the median compensation is 901 lei.
The legal basis has changed as well. The 2025 decision was issued solely on the basis of Article 5(1) and (11) of Law no. 255/2010. The 2026 one adds Article 11(6), the text that allows the identification details of the properties to be updated when the site of the works changes after a revision of the feasibility study. Article 11 has itself been cut down in the meantime: by Decision no. 482/2024, published in Official Gazette of Romania, Part I, no. 186 of 4 March 2025, the Constitutional Court declared paragraphs (61), (63) and (68)-(610) unconstitutional, and they ceased to produce legal effects on 18 April 2025. They governed the reverse route, the removal of properties from a corridor and their return to the former owners when a project is abandoned.
Finally, the prices have changed, and that can be measured exactly, because some properties appear on both lists. The company Hidro Jepi S.A., formerly Omnimpex Hârtia S.A., was recorded in 2025 with 68 square metres expropriated out of a plot of 1,241 and with 20,502 lei, that is 301.50 lei per square metre. On the new list it appears at entry 168 with the rest of the plot, exactly 1,173 square metres, and with 376,054 lei, that is 320.59 lei per square metre, to which are added 89,424 lei for a building of 83 square metres. Likewise, an owner in Bușteni had received 114,874 lei in 2025 for 381 square metres, again 301.51 lei per square metre, and now receives 197,805 lei for 617 square metres, again 320.59. The increase, on the same plots and in the same category, is 6.3% over fourteen months.
Advantages and disadvantages
What it improves
- The works now have a complete corridor, so the contractor is no longer working on an incomplete site, and the deadline committed to for the bypass, December 2027, remains theoretically within reach.
- The sum is allocated in the same act as the list, and the total printed in the annex checks out to the last leu against the 181 individual values.
- The footnote lists, entry by entry, all 44 cases without an identified owner, so an heir can find their plot even if their name appears nowhere.
- The compensation for buildings and for standing timber is calculated separately from the land, which gives the owner a clear basis for challenging each component.
- Annex no. 1 has 85 plates at scales of 1:500 and 1:1000, so the boundary of the corridor can be checked on the ground, not only on paper.
What remains a problem
- Owners lose their ownership right on a date chosen by the expropriating authority, while the money arrives at the end of a chain that begins with a request to open appropriations that has no legal deadline.
- The same kind of land is paid more than twice as much at Bușteni as at Azuga, and the decision explains the difference nowhere.
- Even within the town of Bușteni, yards and buildings inside the built-up area receive two different rates, 320.60 and 436.25 lei per square metre, with no visible criterion in the act.
- A quarter of the money goes back to the two town halls, as compensation for their private domain, even though they too benefit from the road.
- The „additional” site exceeds the original corridor, which shows that the 2025 documentation was approved on a technical solution that had not been settled.
- The works carry in their name the slip road off the A3 Comarnic-Brașov motorway, which in 2026 was still at the feasibility study stage.
Practical advice
- Look for your plot in Annex no. 2 in Official Gazette of Romania, Part I, no. 807 bis, not in the decision in no. 807. The cadastral number and the land book number are printed there, and identification is made by them, not by name.
- If your plot appears at one of the 44 entries marked „proprietar neidentificat”, go to CNAIR anyway with your land book extract. The sum is already deposited against that entry and is waiting for you, but it is not paid out automatically.
- Keep in mind the 30 working days from notification. After them, the expropriation decision is issued within five working days, whether you came forward or not, and ownership passes to the State at that moment.
- Check the three components of the sum separately: the land, the building and the standing timber. Eight entries on the list also have compensation for a building, and five also have it for timber, with values ranging from 184 to more than 1,000 lei per square metre of building.
- Compare the unit price you receive with the one in the annex grid for the same category and the same town. If you are given 320.60 lei per square metre at Bușteni while the neighbour across the road has 436.25, you have a concrete starting point for a challenge.
- If you were expropriated in 2025 on the same plot as well, ask for both valuation reports to be put on the file. The measurable difference between the two acts is 6.3% per square metre, and it shows which grid was used each time.
- Challenge the amount in court if you have reason to, but do not count on the works being suspended. Article 9(2) of Law no. 255/2010 provides that the expropriation decision is an enforceable title and that a complaint does not stop the transfer.
- If the expropriation cuts your plot into unusable pieces, say so in writing to the commission from your very first appearance. The case of entry 168, where everything left after the first expropriation is now being taken, shows that the situation is recognised in practice.
Frequently asked questions
What does „additional site” mean and why was it needed?
When do I lose ownership and when do I get the money?
How much is paid per square metre?
What do I do if my entry says „unidentified owner”?
Do the town halls of Azuga and Bușteni receive money?
Is this road a motorway?
Can I challenge the amount, and what happens to the works meanwhile?
Where do I find the plans with the exact boundary of the corridor?
Editorial analysis
The heaviest observation comes not from the text of the decision but from setting the two annexes side by side, the one from July 2025 and the one from now. The original corridor had 215,865 square metres. The „additional” site has 217,894. The completion is larger than the thing completed, and on the private side, the only side that costs money, the ratio is 134,890 to 104,059, an increase of 29.6%. A site does not double because of detail adjustments. It doubles when the technical solution on which the first list was approved had not yet been settled, and that is exactly the chronology acknowledged in the project documents: the corridor was approved in July 2025, the expropriation decision was issued in September 2025, and the technical design received its approvals only between December 2025 and March 2026. The first expropriation was therefore carried out ahead of the technical design. The cost of that order of events shows outside the offices too: 168 families and companies enter a procedure they thought was over, and some of them, like the owner at entry 168, have been expropriated twice on the same plot, the first time for 68 square metres, the second for everything that was left.
The second observation concerns the price and shows only if you sort the list by value per square metre. The result shows eight fixed rates, repeated identically from one entry to the next. At Azuga, yards and buildings within the built-up area take 147.20 lei per square metre, and hayfields, pastures and forests within the built-up area take 105.11. At Bușteni, the same category of yards and buildings takes 320.60 or 436.25 lei. Between the two towns, for exactly the same kind of land, the ratio is 2.2 to 1, and against the upper rate at Bușteni it reaches 3 to 1. Azuga and Bușteni are neighbouring localities on the Prahova Valley, four kilometres apart, and the road being built links them both. The explanation for the difference appears nowhere in the act, because the valuation reports are not published. Nor does the 36% gap between the two rates applied inside the same town have any criterion visible in the published text.
The third observation is about who pays whom. Of the 168 entries, 22 are plots in the private domain of the towns of Azuga and Bușteni, adding up to 35,435 square metres and 5,623,076 lei. Almost a quarter of the compensation, 24.4%, therefore travels from the state budget to the two town halls, which are at the same time the beneficiaries of the road. It is not unlawful, because the private domain of an administrative-territorial unit is expropriated like any private property, but the overall effect is worth stating: part of the funding nominally intended to compensate people turns into local budget revenue.
Finally, two details that say something about proportions. The State is paying 147 lei for a single square metre at entry 32, 321 lei for one square metre at entry 51 and 436 lei for one square metre at entry 117, that is three complete expropriation procedures, with notification, commission, file and decision, for sums smaller than the administrative cost of the procedure itself. At the other end, entry 22 takes 6,930 square metres out of a forest holding of some 780 hectares, recorded in the annex in the names of Margareta, Elena, Sofia and Maria of Romania and of Irina Walker, paid at 18.39 lei per square metre, plus 24,960.80 lei for the standing timber. The largest compensation on the list, 1,354,578 lei, goes to the town of Azuga, for 12,887 square metres of hayfield in its private domain. The act itself is properly drawn up: the totals close to the last leu, the footnote matches exactly the 44 entries without an owner, and the references to Law no. 255/2010 and to Government Decision no. 53/2011 lead where they should. The problems lie in the decisions, not in the drafting.
What should be changed
- The valuation reports should be published together with the annex. As long as the price grid stays unpublished, an owner in Azuga cannot find out why they receive half as much as one in Bușteni, and has nothing to challenge beyond their own sum.
- An expropriation decision should not be adopted before the technical design has been approved. Had the documentation been complete in July 2025, the 168 entries of today would have gone on the same list as the 121 of that time, and the owners would have passed through the procedure once.
- The request to open appropriations should have a deadline of its own. Today the owner loses ownership on a date that can be calculated from the law, while the State starts counting its 30 days for the transfer from an act it issues whenever it chooses.
- A simplified procedure should be provided for entries of under 5 square metres. Three of the entries on the list are worth between 147 and 436 lei, and the administrative machinery set in motion for each of them costs more than the compensation.
- The annex should show, for each entry, whether the property has been expropriated once before. A column referring to the earlier decision would make visible cases like entry 168, where the second expropriation takes everything left after the first.
- The note „unidentified owner” should be accompanied by a search deadline and by a mechanism for public notice. As things stand, 44 entries pass to the State with the money blocked in an account and with nobody obliged to look for the owner within any particular period.
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. 807 of 23 September 2026 8 pages PDF, 82 KB the act starts on page 5
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The other editions cited: nr. 807 bis/2026
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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.