Romania's economy, by sector · National statistics, 2000–2025
The average isn't employed anywhere
Romania's National Institute of Statistics has tracked the average net monthly wage in each of the economy's nineteen sectors every month since 2000. In 2025, the best-paid sector, information and communication, earns 10,801 lei a month. The worst-paid, hotels and restaurants, earns 3,368 lei. The national average, 5,536 lei, describes neither: in every one of the last twenty-six years, at least eleven of the nineteen sectors have paid below it.
The instrument
Nineteen sectors, one ranking
Each row below is a sector of the national economy, ranked by its average net wage for the chosen year. Drag the year slider to watch the ranking reshuffle from 2000 to 2025, then type your own net salary to see where it would land among the nineteen.
Enter an amount to see where it would rank.
The average, on its own, doesn't say whose salary it belongs to. The ranking above shows why: the nineteen sectors don't sit symmetrically around the national average. Most sit below it, and a small group sits far above it.
Top and bottom of the ranking
Only one change of hands in twenty-six years
First place has had exactly one new owner since 2000. Finance and insurance paid the most for sixteen straight years, from 2000 to 2015. In 2016, information and communication took over first place and has held it for ten years, through today.
Last place moved twice early on, then locked in place. From 2000 to 2003 it belonged to "other service activities", from 2004 to 2007 to administrative and support services, and since 2008 to hotels and restaurants, which kept it even through the pandemic years, when the sector lost close to half its activity.
18 YEARS IN LAST PLACE
What the average hides
The lei gap grew. The relative gap didn't.
The ratio between the best-paid and worst-paid sector moved between 3.18 and 4.77 times, with no clear direction, across all twenty-six years of the series. In 2000, information and communication wasn't yet the top sector, but the ratio between the extremes was even wider than today: 4.77 times. The narrowest year was 2019, at 3.18 times.
In lei, though, the gap widened a great deal. In 2000, the difference between first and last place was 456 lei a month. In 2025, the same difference is 7,433 lei, 16.3 times larger. That growth was still slower than the 25.5-fold rise in the average wage across the whole economy over the same period, which is why the ratio between extremes never exploded even as the lei amount separating them grew more than sixteenfold.
The real constant is different: in every year from 2000 to 2025, at least eleven of the nineteen sectors paid below the national average. The average has always been a line most sectors look up at, not the middle rung of a symmetric ladder.
Sources
Primary document
Method note: net wage is gross earnings minus mandatory employee social contributions and income tax. The INS monthly survey covers around 24,200 economic and social units in 2025, with full coverage of the budgetary sector. The nineteen sectors correspond to sections A–S of the CAEN Rev.2 classification; the national average shown is the "TOTAL" indicator from the same series, not a simple average of the nineteen values.