Bucharest · Single monthly budget · ZH / RO / EN
What Does a Month in Romania Cost? A Budget Simulator
The shape up front: the food basket is observed item by item, transit is official tariff, FX is pinned to the ECB date; rent is missing — not from neglect, but because portal terms ban aggregation: enter your own figure.
Dataset v2026-09-20: 13 foods (Auchan + Carrefour online prices, observed 2026-09-17, valid through 10-17); STB 80/160 lei (official, rechecked 09-20); ECB 5.2647/7.6755 (dated 2026-09-18, re-pinned 09-20). Outside Bucharest, no total.
Single-person v1: 2+ people are not computed, other cities are not computed, an expired dataset freezes the total — all deliberate, not bugs.
Simulator: pick options, enter your numbers
Blank lines stay out of the total (each flagged). The total is an if-everything-lands-low/high envelope, not a probability.
The total appears here after options + numbers, with data vintage.
Below-result context (not evidence)
The three blocks have nothing to do with the calculation; they only help you weigh them, visually and evidentially separate from the total.
- Old scholarships (2016, bilateral RO–CN exchange, historical note): undergrad $250/mo, postgrad $350/mo, scholar $400/mo, plus one round trip; the Romanian side waives tuition + lodging. Decade-old figures, orders of magnitude only (S11).
- Salary bands (2025, net, quoted from the sibling page): IT&C 10,801 lei/mo highest, hotels-restaurants 3,368 lowest, national mean 5,536 — the mean describes no sector well. See the salaries page (S12).
- €50/day (from 01's ledger, with the full caveat): CG Miami + IGI + UPT subsistence-context figures, operative force pending verification — a visa-context reference, not a living-cost finding. See the visa page (S13).
- Potato anchor (INS series): INS market potato, Iași 4.0 lei/kg (June 2026). Proves only that an official market series exists; excluded from the calculation (S9, S10).
Method: ledger, envelope, suppressed lines
- Basket (13 items, Bucharest online prices, observed 2026-09-17): oil 7.49/L, flour 1.99–2.69/kg, rice 6.79–10.49/kg, eggs 12.99/10, milk 5.99–10.79/L, bread 4.30/500g, potatoes 5.20/kg (12.99/2.5kg), onions 4.69/kg, chicken breast 34.99/kg, pasta 4.69–6.79/500g, butter 8.49/200g, sugar 3.59–3.79/kg, apples 6.00/kg (11.99/2kg). Intervals are min–max across two chains; points are single-chain observations. Monthly quantities (convention): oil 2L, flour 1.5kg, rice 2kg, eggs 30, milk 6L, bread 10, potatoes 6kg, onions 3kg, chicken 4kg, pasta 2kg, butter 0.6kg, sugar 1kg, apples 4kg, plus 10% wastage (convention). (S8; records FD-OIL-1L…FD-APPLE-KG, 13 lines; snapshot = the observation log, no page archive — retailers block automated fetch, re-probed 09-20: still a JS shell.)
- No tomatoes: only premium cherry/cocktail packs observable online; loose price unobserved — the whole line is dropped, not modeled (S8; record FD-TOMATO, suppressed).
- Transit (STB official, VAT included, 2026-09-17): surface monthly 80, surface + metro 160, 10-trip 25, integrated 120-min 7. Metro-only monthly is nowhere official (5 attempts: services page has no tariffs, legacy tariff URL 404s, search yields no official figure; re-probed 2026-09-20 on the 14MB services page: priced items are only parking monthlies, one student weekly, and 2012/2015 historical tariff news — still no current standard metro-only monthly) — the line is missing (S5; record TR-METRO-ONLY); the 160 integrated pass stands in. (S4; records TR-STB-SURF-1MO/TR-STB-INT-1MO/TR-STB-10TRIP; STB fares rechecked 2026-09-20: still 80/160/25.)
- Taxi (official PMB user guide): approved max 3.5 lei/km, practiced majority 1.39–1.40; taxi-mix line = 8 trips × 8 km (convention) × [1.39, 3.50] = [88.96, 224.00] lei. Flag-fall nuance unmodeled (flagged). (S15; records TR-TAXI-KM/TR-TAXI-MIX; PMB guide PDF re-fetched 2026-09-20, 324KB, present.)
- Rent has no official interval: Storia's private-user Terms (current ed., in force 1 June 2022) §2.2(3)(a) ban any reuse without written consent and (b) ban aggregating and processing on-site data for sharing with third parties — no written consent held, so rent and private-room lines permanently run on “enter your figure” (S6; records RN-RANGE/RN-SHARED, suppressed-tos; terms PDF re-fetched 2026-09-20, 308KB/20pp). The pilot (Bucharest 9, Iași 10) sits below the n≥30 floor: method demo, never copy.
- FX is pinned: ECB reference dated 2026-09-18 (RON 5.2647, CNY 7.6755), re-pinned 2026-09-20 (HTTP/2 200, 1547 bytes, in-file vintage 09-18), formula CNY = RON × 7.6755 ÷ 5.2647; ECB declares information-only rates, updated ~16:00 CET on working days. Reference ≠ street rate; remittances out of scope. (S1, S2; dataset fx block, ECB eurofxref-daily.)
- Envelope arithmetic: independent interval lines summed, low = all-low, high = all-high; points feed both ends. The lifestyle multiplier touches only eating-out (canteen included) + fun: lean 0.7, standard 1.0, comfortable 1.4 (convention).
- Freeze rule: any required cell expired → total frozen + last valid snapshot shown separately + the missing cell named. Food holds 30 days (through 2026-10-17), passes likewise (2026-10-17), taxi-mix through 2026-12-17, FX pinned per build (this build: 2026-10-17); an unselected taxi line never triggers the freeze.
- Four limits: online shelf ≠ market haggle; reference ≠ cash in hand; the pilot is never published; single never computes family.
Questions
Why is there no rent reference?
Storia's private-user Terms §2.2(3)(b) (current 2022 ed.) ban aggregating on-site data for sharing with third parties, and no written consent is held; the pilot sample also sits far below n≥30. Rent runs on “enter your figure” — not a gap, a deliberate compliance blank (S6).
Does it work for other cities?
No. Basket and tariffs are Bucharest-observed only; other cities are never modeled, no total — picking another city shows the missing cells.
How do I read the total interval?
Low = every line at its floor, high = every line at its ceiling. It is an if-all-low / if-all-high envelope, not a probability and less a promise.
Is the yuan figure a bank rate?
No. It converts at the pinned ECB reference date (S1, S2), magnitudes only; street, bank, and remittance costs are not on this page.