Romania’s Anghel Saligny programme: what each commune was promised, what it was paid and how long it waited

For two years, the money came in the order it was asked for#

Romania’s Anghel Saligny programme (Emergency Ordinance 95/2021) pays for works in communes, the country’s rural municipalities, invoice by invoice. The town hall receives the builder’s invoice for work done, uploads it to the Development Ministry’s platform as a “transfer request” and waits for the money; once it arrives, it has 20 working days to pay the builder (art. 13 of the rules). While a claim waits at the ministry, the builder is usually not paid. The platform gives every request a number, such as ASA4-18057, and a timestamp to the minute. The programme’s rules require requests to be paid “in the chronological order of registration” for as long as the year’s budget lasts (art. 12 of Order 1333/2021).

After each payment round the ministry publishes a table of the claims it paid. Added together, the 69 tables from November 2022 to October 2026 account for 99.2% of what the ministry reports as paid by 30 June 2026.

Until the end of 2024 the rule held with almost no exceptions. Of 10,044 claims paid in 2023 and 2024, only 35 were overtaken by a claim registered after them. Waits grew with the number of claims: the median was 25 days in 2023 and 72 days in 2024.

In 2024 the ministry paid 12.3 billion lei, five times as much as in 2023. As every year, the last quarter was the biggest (4.6 billion). The pace could not be kept.

From 2025 there was not enough money for everyone#

After 31 December 2024 the platform registered no new claims. Attila Cseke of UDMR, the Hungarian minority party, minister since 23 December 2024, said he had found 4.1 billion lei of payment claims waiting when he took office, across Anghel Saligny and the older PNDL programme. The platform reopened on 2 April 2025.

By then the rule had changed. Government Decision 42/2025 split the year’s money into nine categories: 45% for water and sewers, 30% for gas, 25% for roads and bridges, and within each field half for projects with more than 80% of the contract already paid, 30% for those between 40% and 80% and 20% for those under 40%. Order of arrival now applied only within each category. For 2026, Government Decision 2/2026 kept the same structure.

In 2025, 2,989 of the 7,670 paid claims with a registration date (39%) had been overtaken at least once by claims registered later; in 2026, 30%. Some of this is what the new rules ask for: a road that has barely started can wait while another commune’s nearly finished sewer goes first. In 2025 the median wait was 93 days and the longest 201 days. In 2026 the median fell to 46 days.

On 18 July 2025 Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan said the state would fund only advanced projects, at least for the following months. In early October 2025 the governing coalition decided to suspend the platform for new claims (Emergency Ordinance 52/2025 of 2 October allows the ministry to suspend filing when claims exceed the budget). Emergency Ordinance 87/2025 then halted filing from 1 January to 1 March 2026, and between 19 December 2025 and 18 May 2026 the ministry published no payments from the programme. On 10 September 2026 the ministry announced that the programme’s money for the year had run out until the budget revision.

The morning of 2 April 2025: the announced time was 8:30, the first paid claims are stamped 8:00#

On 31 March 2025 the minister announced that the platform would reopen “from 2 April, at 8.30”. For many town halls it was the first chance in three months to claim the money for builders’ invoices. Among the claims paid later, 924 are dated 2 April, 433 of them from the first hour.

The times in the payment tables do not match the announcement. The earliest paid claim of 2 April, ASA4-18057, is stamped 08:00; the paid claim just before it in number order, ASA4-18055, is from 31 December 2024. Between 08:00 and 08:29, 132 claims are registered, about four a minute on average and up to 12 in a single minute. At 08:30 exactly there are 92. When the platform reopened in March 2026, the first paid claim was stamped 08:30.

The tables list only paid claims, so they cannot show what happened to the others, or why. The gap could come from the platform opening earlier than announced, early access for some users, a platform clock that was off, or corrected requests, which receive a new number (art. 12(4) of the rules). Neither the ministry’s statements nor press reports explain it.

All 132 claims from the first half hour were paid on 27 May. From 2025, order of arrival decides only within each category. In the category of roads with less than 40% of their money paid, rebuilt here from earlier payments, 33 of those claims are stamped before 08:30. The 27 May payments in this category reach the claim stamped 08:41; the 139 claims in the same category registered after it that day were paid later, the first of them stamped 08:42.

The town halls with claims stamped before 08:30 do not lean to any party. By the mayors elected in 2024, 51.5% are PSD, 34.9% PNL and 5.3% UDMR, almost the same shares as among claims stamped after 08:30 (50.5%, 37.0% and 5.9%).

Did town halls run by the governing parties get more?#

The public data do not show it. The tests below were set before they were run, and each is set against a control test. Governing parties means PSD, PNL and UDMR when the money was shared out (August 2022); in the 2025–2026 queue, PSD, PNL and UDMR, plus USR from 23 June 2025.

When the money was shared out in 2022, the median commune got about 5,000 lei per inhabitant whatever the party of the mayor elected in 2020: 5,001 lei under PSD (Social Democrats), 5,005 under PNL (National Liberals), 4,794 under UDMR and 4,391 under USR (Save Romania Union, then in opposition). The parties differ in how much they asked for. Communes with USR mayors asked for 16,006 lei per inhabitant, those with UDMR mayors 10,384. That is why the share of the request granted looks better for UDMR, as the think tank Expert Forum reported in 2022.

The strictest test compares communes where a governing-party candidate narrowly won in 2020 with communes where one narrowly lost. There are only 172 such communes within a 10-point margin. The estimate comes out positive, but its interval runs from −12% to +251%, so the test is too small to settle the question. In this sample the communes won by governing parties are smaller, and small communes get more per inhabitant because of the caps per project.

In the 2025–2026 queue, a claim from a town hall run by a governing party was about as likely to be paid in the next round as an opposition claim in the same category filed in the same week. Town halls run by UDMR, the minister’s party, were not paid faster either. Per project, the share of the contract paid does not differ measurably by the party of the mayor elected in 2024.

The tests have limits. The payment files list only paid claims, not rejected ones. Mayors who changed party after an election are counted under the party they ran for.

What became of the 66.4 billion lei#

The initial allocation of 65 billion grew to 66.4 billion through top-ups (EO 105/2023). Of the 5,759 projects in the programme on 30 June 2026, the ministry had completion information for 563, 412 of them with a completion certificate validated on its platform. The ministry notes that a project can be finished before the certificate is filed. For 718 projects at least 99% of the contract had already been paid with no completion information at all.

1,162 projects, with 11.2 billion lei allocated, still had no financing contract signed with the ministry; 437 of them are gas networks. The legal deadline is 31 December 2026. On 14 October 2026 the Chamber of Deputies voted to move it to 31 December 2027.

32.6 billion lei of the allocation remain unpaid. At the 2025 pace of 12.6 billion a year, that would take another 2.6 years.

Every commune: what was promised, what was paid, how long it waited#

How the numbers were worked out#

Payments come from the tables the Development Ministry publishes for each round (the “Plăți” page and the 2022–2025 archives), 69 rounds with dated claims. The table of 26 March 2024 cannot be downloaded: the ministry’s link returns an error. Infrastructure claims paid on 17 January 2025 carry no registration date and are left off the chart but included in totals. Projects, allocated, contracted and paid sums and completion certificates come from “PNI Anghel Saligny – stadiu implementare – 30 iunie 2026”. Town halls’ original requests come from the list the ministry published in February 2022 (plus a separate list for gas).

An “overtaken” claim is one paid after at least one round in which a claim with a higher registration number was paid. For 2025 and 2026 each claim’s category (field and stage) was rebuilt from the project’s earlier payments. The ministry does not publish the category it assigned, and for 2025 sources describe the stage either as physical progress or as the share paid, so an overtake in these data does not prove that a rule was broken.

Mayors’ parties come from the official 2020 and 2024 local election results (Permanent Electoral Authority, prezenta.roaep.ro; 2024 through Code for Romania). Population by domicile on 1 January 2022 comes from the Development Ministry on data.gov.ro. The close-race test is a local linear regression with 5, 10 and 20-point bands. The queue test compares, in each round, claims in the same category registered in the same week, with errors clustered by town hall. The control runs the same calculation on 2024, when payment followed arrival order, and on randomly shuffled parties. A third test compares, within the same county and field, the share of each project’s contract paid by 30 June 2026, by the party of the mayor elected in 2024.

Data downloads

• Every commune and town (CSV)
• Every payment claim (CSV)

Sources

1. Development Ministry: payments made, Anghel Saligny programme (2022–2026) mdlpa.ro
2. Development Ministry: implementation status at 30 June 2026; list of requests filed (2022) mdlpa.ro
3. Order 1333/2021, programme rules (art. 12, order of payment) legislatie.just.ro
4. Emergency Ordinance 95/2021, consolidated (including EO 52/2025 and EO 87/2025) legislatie.just.ro
5. Agerpres, 13 February 2025: the 2025 priority criteria agerpres.ro
6. Government Decision 42/2025, the 2025 priority criteria legislatie.just.ro
7. Agerpres, 14 January 2026: the 2026 criteria (Government Decision 2/2026) agerpres.ro
8. News.ro, 31 March 2025: the same ministerial statement news.ro
9. Actual de Cluj, 6 October 2025: the platform suspended actualdecluj.ro
10. G4Media, 31 March 2025: platform to reopen on 2 April at 8.30 g4media.ro
11. Agerpres, 18 July 2025: Bolojan on funding only advanced projects agerpres.ro
12. Agerpres, 10 September 2026: 2026 credits exhausted agerpres.ro
13. Newsweek Romania, 14 October 2026: Chamber of Deputies extends the contract deadline by a year newsweek.ro
14. Permanent Electoral Authority: 2020 local election results by municipality prezenta.roaep.ro
15. Code for Romania, Rezultate Vot: 2024 local elections (electoral authority data) rezultatevot.ro
16. Development Ministry on data.gov.ro: population by domicile, 1 January 2022 data.gov.ro
17. Expert Forum, Policy Brief 145 (2022): Anghel Saligny allocations by party expertforum.ro
18. Commune outlines: geo-spatial.org, after ANCPI geo-spatial.org