Investigation · 39,721 payments, August 2022 – October 2026
Romania’s EU recovery money: what your town or commune has been paid by the Development Ministry
After the 2025 revision, Romania’s Development Ministry kept contracts worth 27 billion lei (about €5.4 billion at 4.97 lei to the euro) in the EU-funded National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR), with town halls, county councils and public bodies, for renovated apartment blocks and public buildings, electric minibuses and buses, digital systems for town halls and new nurseries. By 22 October 2026 its published recovery-plan payment tables added up to 22.3 billion, including for projects dropped at the revision: 39,721 payments in 335 tables. The law that closes the plan gives it until 30 October 2026 to check and pay the final claims.
Contracts kept in the plan: 27 billion lei. Payments: 22.3 billion#
Romania’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) is how the country receives its share of the EU’s post-pandemic recovery fund. Part of it runs through the Ministry of Development, Public Works and Administration, which signs contracts with town halls and pays for the work invoice by invoice: the town hall pays the builder or supplier, asks the ministry for the money with a “transfer request”, and the ministry sends it. The ministry runs four components: renovating apartment blocks and public buildings (C5, the “Renovation wave”); electric minibuses and buses, digital management systems, charging stations, housing for young people and specialists, renovation of town-hall buildings and planning documents (C10, the “Local fund”); new nurseries (C15); and two cycle paths on river dikes (C11).
After the plan was revised in 2025, the ministry published, on 14 November 2025, the list of contracts that stay in the plan: 6,078 lines worth 27 billion lei including VAT. Payments are published separately, in tables by payment day: 335 tables, 39,721 payments, from the first, 79,100 lei for renovating the town hall in Fălticeni on 2 August 2022, to the last one published, on 22 October 2026.
The payments also include money for projects dropped from the plan at the revision, which are no longer on the list, so a town can show more paid than its current contracts. Where a link can be made, 96% of the contract value belongs to a town hall or a county council, and 95% of the money paid went to town halls.
1.1 billion lei paid in 2023, 8.3 billion by 22 October 2026#
The first payments were small: 21 million lei in 2022, 1.1 billion in 2023. The pace rose as works neared completion: 4 billion in 2024, 8.9 billion in 2025 and 8.3 billion in 2026, to 22 October 2026.
Payments topped one billion lei in seven months: December 2024, February 2025, August 2025, October 2025, December 2025, July 2026 and September 2026. On 1 July 2026 the minister, Cseke Attila, said every interim invoice filed by the end of May had been paid.
The deadline for works was extended twice. Then the law set the payment timetable#
Works under the ministry’s contracts were due to finish by 30 June 2026. A ministerial order of 7 April 2026 (no. 422) moved the date to 31 July, and another of 7 July 2026 (no. 770) to 30 August. “We will not be able to extend the deadline again,” the minister said at the time.
On 28 August 2026, Law 183/2026 on closing the plan set the final timetable: activities end by 31 August at the latest, beneficiaries file their final transfer requests by 30 September, and the ministry checks and pays them by 30 October. For certain unfinished investments, the law requires completion by 31 December 2026, from the beneficiary’s own money or other sources.
That explains the payments after 30 August: 2 billion lei in 3,223 payments to 1,010 town halls, up to 22 October 2026. They are 9% of everything the ministry has paid under the plan. By 30 August it had paid 20.3 billion.
By 31 July, communes had received 73.7% of their contract value, cities 70.5%#
The question was set before the calculation: by the deadline in force at the time, 31 July 2026, had the ministry paid communes a smaller share of their contracts than it paid cities? For each town hall, the sum paid in each component was compared with the value of its contracts on the November 2025 list, without counting money paid above the contract. A gap of at least ten percentage points, in both renovation and the Local fund, would have meant small town halls came last.
| Communes | Towns | Cities | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Renovation (C5) | 81.3% | 81.0% | 73.2% |
| Local fund (C10) | 73.1% | 74.1% | 67.4% |
| Nurseries (C15) | 56.0% | 58.0% | 64.1% |
| All | 73.7% | 75.1% | 70.5% |
| Localities | 1,752 | 191 | 105 |
The result went the other way. Communes had received 73.7% of their contracts, towns 75.1%, cities 70.5%. In renovation, communes stood at 81.3% and cities at 73.2%. Nurseries are the exception: 56.0% for communes, 64.1% for cities. The largest contracts are in the cities, and so are the largest sums not yet paid. Repeating the calculation at 30 August, after the last extension, gives the same result.
By 22 October 2026, 4.31 billion lei of town halls’ contract value had not been paid#
Of the 2,048 town halls with contracts on the list, 329 had received their full value by 22 October 2026, 162 less than half and 20 nothing. An unpaid sum is not money owed: part of a contract’s value is never spent (tenders won below the estimate, works dropped), and part was claimed by 30 September and is due to be paid by 30 October. The ministry’s tables do not say how many claims are waiting.
| Place | Contracts | Paid | Unpaid | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Buzău Buzău | 603.4 | 114.7 | 488.6 | 19% |
| Sectorul 4 | 1,440.5 | 1,261.1 | 179.5 | 88% |
| Galați Galați | 624.0 | 479.9 | 144.2 | 77% |
| București | 255.2 | 138.3 | 116.9 | 54% |
| Vaslui Vaslui | 208.5 | 94.3 | 114.2 | 45% |
| Craiova Dolj | 353.6 | 241.5 | 112.1 | 68% |
| Sectorul 2 | 244.6 | 149.9 | 94.7 | 61% |
| Cluj-Napoca Cluj | 380.4 | 291.7 | 88.7 | 77% |
| Sfântu Gheorghe Covasna | 230.2 | 150.7 | 79.6 | 65% |
| Sectorul 6 | 239.2 | 170.7 | 68.4 | 71% |
| Sectorul 3 | 629.7 | 561.6 | 68.1 | 89% |
| Iași Iași | 542.1 | 484.3 | 57.9 | 89% |
The largest gap is in Buzău: contracts worth 603 million lei, of which 115 million had been paid. Three quarters of that contract value is a single contract to renovate 30 apartment blocks, worth 461 million.
What your town or commune received#
Search for a place or pick it on the map. The record shows its contracts from the November 2025 list, with each contract number, the money received in each component, and every payment with its date. County councils are listed under the county’s name.
Or pick on the map. The colour shows how much of the contracts has been paid.
How the tables were read#
Every payment table was downloaded from the ministry’s payments page and its yearly archives for 2022–2025. The files also hold, on other sheets, an old 2014 ledger, which was ignored. Columns were recognised by their header, not their position, and rows with a running number were kept, plus two unnumbered payments in a December 2022 table: the totals at the bottom of the tables would have doubled the sum. Town halls were linked to their SIRUTA code (Romania’s official locality code) by name and county.
The result was checked against the sums the ministry announced. Of 145 press releases on recovery-plan payments, 133 give exactly the sum of that day’s table, to the leu; nearly all the others add two payment days together or include other programmes. Only two tables are missing, for 24 and 30 June 2025, which no longer open on the site: the releases for those days announce 252.9 million lei, which appears neither in the totals nor in the local records.
The tables carry no contract number, only the beneficiary, the sum, the component and the day, so payments cannot be tied to a specific project. Nor do they show when the town hall asked for the money, so the wait for each claim cannot be measured. From 2022 to mid-2023 the tables do not even give the component.
Sources and data#
Data
Sources
- Development Ministry: payments made, PNRR column, 2022–2026 (current page and 2022–2025 archives) mdlpa.ro
- Development Ministry: lists of C5, C10, C11 and C15 financing contracts kept in the plan, approved by memorandum (14 November 2025) mdlpa.ro
- Development Ministry: press releases on recovery-plan payments, February 2023 – October 2026 mdlpa.ro
- Law 183/2026 on the operational and financial closure of the PNRR, Official Gazette no. 721 of 28 August 2026 (arts. 8, 15, 27) lege5.ro
- Development Minister’s Order 770/2026 (Official Gazette no. 563, 8 July 2026), amending Order 422/2026 legislatie.just.ro
- Development Ministry: deadline moved to 30 August (8 July 2026) and the 1 July 2026 statement mdlpa.ro
- C10 “Local fund” applicant guide (Order 999/2022): names of investments I1.1–I4 legislatie.just.ro
- National Institute of Statistics: population by residence, 1 January 2022; locality outlines: geo-spatial.org, after ANCPI insse.ro