Local taxes pay a Romanian commune's town-hall staff for 5.9 months out of 12

The commune in the middle of the line, Eșelnița (Mehedinți), paid its people from local taxes for 5.9 months; the rest of the year came from its share of income tax, equalisation money and transfers from the state. The jar holds a town hall's revenue for one year, measured in months of wages: each mark etched on the glass is one month of the wages of the town hall and its services, and the red ribbon is the twelfth, a whole year. The glass holds two years; whatever rises past the rim spills over. At the bottom, the amber is local taxes and fees: on buildings, land and vehicles, plus the charges the local council sets. Above them come the town hall's share of income tax, its other own revenue, equalisation money and, at the top, money earmarked by the state and EU funds. The buttons under the jar choose what you count as the town hall's own money: the layers counted stay lit, the rest go dim, and the map and the line recolour.

The red line holds the wages of the town-hall office and its services: local police, culture, public works, the school costs the town hall carries. It leaves out the personal assistants of people with severe disabilities, who are employed by the town hall but care for people at home, and the medical staff of town-hall hospitals and surgeries. In communes the personal assistants and medical staff together are 39% of all personnel spending; with them on the line, the median commune would cover 3.6 months from local taxes.

Each dot is one of 3,185 town halls and Bucharest sector halls, placed by how many months of wages the definition chosen above covers. The red line is one year. On local taxes most of the line sits beneath it: 2,794 town halls, that is 2,561 communes and 233 towns and cities; all six Bucharest sector halls are above it. The communes that rise above it are mostly places where companies pay a lot of building tax: in 24 of the top 30 communes, more than half of local taxes comes from tax on company buildings. Dragomirești-Vale (Ilfov county) covers 101.0 months of wages from local taxes, Chiajna (Ilfov) 67.2. At the bottom, Bunila (Hunedoara), with 247 residents, covers 1.3 months.

The question “does the commune pay its people from its own money?” has as many answers as “its own money” has definitions. The page starts from the narrowest: local taxes and fees, the only money a town hall both sets and collects. Each step below adds layers of the jar and shows how many communes stay under the 12-month line.

The second step adds the residents' income-tax share and other current revenue, without any equalisation money: 932 communes (33%) stay below the line. It is the test used by Romania's Court of Accounts, with one difference: the Court and the page on redrawing Romania's administrative map put all personnel spending (title 10) on the line, so personal assistants too. On that basis the data here give 1,938 communes below the line in 2025 (68%), and that page counts 1,977 (69%) from the Development Ministry's tables; for 2024, 74% here, 74% there. The third step is the line printed on the execution forms, Venituri proprii (own revenue, code 49.90), which also counts income-tax money shared out for equalisation: on it, no commune stays below the line. The gap between 90% and zero comes from the definition, not from the communes.

Of every leu (100 bani) that reached the communes' budgets in 2025, 9 bani were local taxes, 17 other own revenue (income-tax share, rents, sales), 15 equalisation money and 59 earmarked money. For all town halls together, towns and cities included, the parts are 10, 29, 10 and 51.

If there were a size below which a commune cannot stand on its own, it would show here. The data show a slope, not a cliff: the median commune under 1,500 residents covers 4.4 months of wages from local taxes, the median one over 7,000 covers 10.5. A larger commune has more buildings, land and vehicles to tax.

The median commune covered 4.8 months from local taxes in 2019, 5.5 in 2021, 5.3 in 2024 and 5.9 in 2025. Between 2024 and 2025 the communes' local taxes rose from 3.8 bn lei to 4.3 bn lei, while the wages on the red line stayed at 6.1 bn lei. The step with equalisation moves with the way the state sends the money: communes received 6.8 bn lei of equalisation in 2025, against 10.1 bn lei in 2024, and more of it through income tax than through VAT, and code 49.90 counts only the income-tax part. The last column is the before-equalisation test with personal assistants on the line, the Court of Accounts basis.

Each county's town halls in 2025: how many cannot cover their wages from local taxes, how many months the local taxes of all of them together cover, and how many stay below the line even before equalisation money. Bucharest collects property taxes in its sectors.

The communes with the fewest and the most months of wages covered by local taxes, with 2024 alongside: a one-year jump, as at Izvoru Bârzii (13.0 months in 2024, 84.8 in 2025), can come from one large payment by a company rather than a lasting change. Selecting a name opens that commune in the jar.

The money is each town hall's annual budget execution from the Romanian Ministry of Finance's Forexebug system, read through the public Transparenta.eu mirror, for 2019, 2021, 2024 and 2025, in the consolidated form of the principal authority (including the institutions the town hall runs). The universe: 3,185 town halls and Bucharest sectors with complete revenue and spending in 2025, joined through the SIRUTA settlement code and the fiscal code as registered with ANAF, the tax agency (3,187 rows: 3,181 local authorities and 6 sectors). Of Romania's 2,862 communes, two have no fiscal code in the crosswalk, Abrămuț (Bihor) and Alexandru I. Cuza (Iași), and show grey on the map; Orașu Nou (Satu Mare), listed in the crosswalk as a town, is counted as the commune it is. County councils are left out.

The red line: personnel spending (economic title 10) without chapter 68, social assistance, where the personal assistants sit, and without chapter 66, health. The jar's layers, by revenue chapter: local taxes = chapters 03, 07, 15, 16 and 18; income-tax share = 04.02.01; other current own revenue = 30 and 33–36, without hospitals' contracts with the health-insurance fund (33.21); asset sales and financial operations = 39, 40 and 41; income-tax money for equalisation = the rest of chapter 04 (04.02.04–04.02.07); VAT money for equalisation = 11.02.06; earmarked money = the rest of chapter 11, subsidies (42–43), EU funds (45, 48), voluntary transfers (37), hospital contracts (33.21) and a few small chapters (0.1% of revenue). The “code 49.90” step follows the formula printed on the execution form: current revenue minus VAT allocations minus voluntary transfers, plus capital revenue and financial operations, here without the hospital contracts, whose wages are also off the line. Tax on company buildings is line 07.02.01.02. Investment is titles 71, 72 and 75. Population is the resident count at the 2021 census (INS, the national statistics institute). Outlines come from the geo-spatial.org set after ANCPI, the cadastre agency, simplified for the map; Bucharest is one outline, and its sectors are chosen from it.

In Bucharest, property taxes go to the sectors, so the city hall's local-tax layer is small by construction. Earmarked money passes through the local budget without the town hall being free to move it onto wages; the jar shows it as volume, and the comparison with the 12-month line measures how much of the wages each source would cover, not which account actually paid them. The 2025 execution was complete in the source at extraction (6 November 2026). Rounding: percentages to whole numbers, months to one decimal, large sums in millions or billions of lei to one decimal, and the bani in a leu rounded to sum to exactly 100.

Related pages: Redrawing Romania's administrative map (what merging small communes would change), What your commune received (Development Ministry investment money), The town hall's team (sports clubs paid from local budgets), Firms without employees and Press paid by town halls.