Romania with 2,027 town halls instead of 3,181, worked out in a second

How many town halls does Romania have, and how many cover their staff costs?#

Romania has 3,181 local administrative units: 2,862 communes, 216 towns and 103 municipalities, Bucharest included. Each has a mayor, a council and its own staff. At the 2021 census half of them had fewer than 2,894 residents, 2,501 had fewer than 5,000 and 464 fewer than 1,500, the minimum Law 351/2001 now sets for creating a new commune. 6.32 million people live in units of under 5,000. These counts use the resident population of 2021; the law counts people registered as domiciled, so on that basis the number of units below these thresholds could differ.

The average hides the problem. At 5,990 residents per unit, Romania sits close to the EU average of 5,960, which France and Czechia, with thousands of tiny communes, pull down. Next to the countries that reformed, though, Romanian units are small: Denmark has 98 municipalities averaging almost 60,000 people, and Greece 332 (325 after the 2011 reform, 332 since 2019).

Money tells more than population. In 2025, 1,977 of the 2,862 communes (69%) did not cover their staff costs from their own revenue: local taxes and fees plus their share of income tax, without the equalisation grants they receive from the state. This definition reproduces the Court of Accounts’ numbers: according to the audit’s press release, as reported by Radio Free Europe, only 31% of communes covered their staff costs from own revenue in 2023, and the Ministry of Development’s data for that year, computed this way, give 31.1%. The figure depends on the definition and the year: under the legal definition, which counts equalisation grants as own revenue, the 2025 count is 494 communes (17%), while the Court of Accounts’ test gives 48% in 2022, 69% in 2023, 74% in 2024 and 69% in 2025. Staff costs include the staff of the town hall’s subordinate institutions, and probably the personal assistants of disabled people, though that split was not checked. The median unit outside Bucharest gets 80% of its revenue from sources other than its own revenue.

After 1989 the map moved the other way. In the first 15 years after the revolution, 339 units were created by splitting or by a change of status: 233 communes, 59 towns and 47 municipalities, according to the Court of Accounts’ 2025 audit as reported by Radio Free Europe in March 2026. The towns and municipalities include places that already existed and only changed rank, so the net increase in the number of units is smaller. In 1968 the communist reform had cut 4,258 communes to 2,706 within ten months: the February law created the counties, and the communes were set by government decisions and a December law.

The new communes at the default settings#

1,524 new units are formed from several of today’s units, or stay below the threshold, at the default settings. The first name is where the town hall would be. The list is rebuilt in the simulator whenever you move a threshold, the maximum drive or the art. 10 tolerance.

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