In 2025, Romania's state social-insurance budget received 39.24 billion lei in subsidies, equal to 2.03% of GDP. This is budget financing, not the net pension gap. On a matched cash basis, payments for pensions and old-age support exceeded contribution receipts by 35.53 billion lei, or 1.84% of GDP. The 3% reference applies to the general-government deficit as a whole; this cash gap is not the state's total deficit.
Test three changes — retirement age, net migration and fertility — and the engine recalculates the population pyramid, contributor-to-pensioner ratio and Pillar I net cash gap through 2060.
Three systems, one word
Pillar I — public, pay-as-you-go
Of the 25% pension contribution (CAS) withheld from every paycheck, 20.25 percentage points flow straight to today's pensions. Nothing accumulates: one employee's contribution today pays someone else's pension today. The system has 5.7 million contributors and 4.66 million pensioners — 1.22 contributors for every pensioner, down from 3.3 in 1990.
Pillar II — private, mandatory, individual
The remaining 4.75 points of CAS go into an individual account, managed by a private fund each contributor chooses. The money accumulates and is invested; at retirement, the account belongs solely to its holder. At the end of 2025, 8.46 million participants held over 200 billion lei in assets — nearly 11% of GDP.
Special pensions — occupational, non-contributory
Magistrates, military personnel, police, intelligence officers, civil aviation staff, diplomats: pensions calculated under their own rules, unlinked to actual contributions, funded directly from the state budget or the relevant ministry's budget. A judge's occupational pension averages over 25,000 lei a month, of which under 7,500 comes from their own contributions — the rest is a direct subsidy.
Calculating…
Contributors and pensioners, 2026-2060, in the current scenario.
Pillar I net cash gap — pension payments minus contribution receipts, % of GDP. The 3% line is the general-government-deficit reference, not a pension target.
Where the 3% threshold comes from — and why it matters
Protocol No. 12 to the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union sets 3% of GDP as a reference value for the general-government deficit. It applies to the whole general-government sector, not to the pension budget.
The chart uses the 3% line only to compare scale. The engine projects the cash difference between Pillar I pension payments and contribution receipts; it does not calculate the consolidated government deficit. BASS subsidies are financing and are not added to that difference. Read Protocol No. 12.
What the engine moves
The engine starts from Romania's actual population pyramid (Eurostat, single-year-of-age, 2025) and ages it forward year by year using a real mortality table (Eurostat, 2023) and three levers you control:
- Retirement age — Law 360/2023 sets 65 for men (already reached) and a phased rise for women, from 63 today to 65 by 2035. The engine uses one unified retirement age as a declared simplification: move the slider to test a symmetric reform, not the exact birth-month schedule in the law's annex. It's the slider that changes the answer the most, because it instantly shifts the line between who pays in and who draws out.
- Net migration — after a decade of mass emigration, Romania has logged three consecutive years of positive net migration: +97,114 (2022), +66,065 (2023), +36,200 (2024) — a positive but narrowing trend. The slider also lets you test a return to net emigration.
- Fertility rate — Romania's rate fell from 1.54 (2023) to an estimated 1.39 children per woman (2024), the sharpest year-on-year drop in the EU. This slider can never change the number of pensioners in this window — everyone who will retire by 2060 is already born — but it does change the number of contributors from the 2040s onward, as today's children reach working age: across the slider's full range, that difference reaches nearly a million contributors by 2060. The effect is real, but it arrives much later and builds much more slowly than retirement age, which reclassifies millions of people in a single move. A child born in 2027 can affect contributions only around 2047, at age 20. The slider shows the demographic effect of a given fertility rate; the cost of a policy designed to change that rate is a separate calculation.
What the engine does not simulate
The model is a declared simplification, not an official forecast.
At every selected retirement age, the engine moves the boundary between the working-age and retired populations immediately. For ages above 65, it assumes that people aged 65–69 join the contributing population from the first projected year at the same average contribution rate as everyone else, and no longer counts them as pensioners. There is no effective date, transition period, or age-specific employment rate for people close to retirement; in reality, employment falls at older ages, so the effect of a higher retirement age may be overstated, especially in the short term.
The engine projects only the gap between Pillar I pension payments and contribution receipts. It excludes military, police and intelligence-service pensions paid from other budgets; available sources use different accounting bases for those payments. Pillar II and Pillar III are individually accumulated accounts and do not enter this calculation. Mortality stays fixed at the 2023 table. The formalization and coverage rates are calibrated once on 2025 data and held constant. Wages, average pension payments and GDP follow one assumed macroeconomic path; GDP does not change when you move migration or retirement age. This is an exploration of three variables, not an official forecast.
What the official data already show
The European Commission's 2024 Ageing Report — which uses the same demographic assumptions as its baseline for every EU country — projects Romania's old-age dependency ratio (population 65+ over population 20-64) rising from 33.5% in 2022 to a peak of 60% in 2056. In the same projection, the public pension system's balance, currently -2.6% of GDP, deepens to -5.4% of GDP by 2047 before easing later in the century, as already-legislated reforms — the retirement age, the indexation formula — take effect. The engine above recalculates this kind of trajectory starting from your own assumptions, not the Commission's single scenario.
Method and sources
Romania's 2025 population pyramid, by single year of age and sex: Eurostat, table demo_pjan, "Population on 1 January by age and sex," pulled directly from the Eurostat dissemination API. The 2023 mortality table: Eurostat, demo_mlifetable, lx (survivor) values by age and sex; the annual survival probabilities the engine uses are computed directly from this table. For ages above 95, where Eurostat's table collapses into a single open group, the engine extrapolates a smoothly declining survival rate — a declared approximation with negligible effect on aggregate results.
The age distributions used for fertility and migration follow standard bell-shaped curves centered on typical childbearing (age 28) and migration (age 27) ages — declared modeling assumptions, standard practice for this kind of demographic engine; only the annual totals (the fertility rate, net migration) are calibrated to your sliders.
In CNPP's execution account at 31 December 2025, Annex 3/20, page 3, row 2000 "Insurance contributions", column 6 "Receipts" shows 118,687,890,285 lei. On page 9, row 6803-03 "Pensions and old-age support", column 7 "Payments made" shows 154,220,713,826 lei. The difference between those cash flows is 35,532,823,541 lei. On page 6, row 4203-24, column 6, the budget received 39,236,930,691 lei in subsidies; this is financing, not the net difference between the two rows above. Nominal GDP sums to 1,929,930 million lei in Eurostat's unadjusted quarterly 2025 series for Romania, namq_10_gdp. Subsidies equal 2.03% of GDP; the cash gap equals 1.84%. Contributor and pensioner counts (5.7 million and 4.66 million), March 2025, come from CNPP via Agerpres; the model divides the execution cash flows by these rounded populations for per-person calibration. The initial budget allowed 35,443,076,000 lei in subsidies, 3,793,854,691 lei below cash receipts.
Separately from Pillar I, the MAI Sectoral Pension House reported gross payments of 8,182,358,178 lei in 2025, including recalculations and payment differences. The MApN Sectoral Pension House reported 5,583,260,295 lei in 2025, including arrears from earlier years. The sources use different scopes; we do not add the values into a total, and the model does not project or add these gross payments to the Pillar I net cash gap.
The contribution rate (CAS 25%, of which 20.25 points go to Pillar I and 4.75 to Pillar II) and Pillar II's participant count and assets (8.46 million participants, over 200 billion lei, end of 2025): the Financial Supervisory Authority, via Digi24 and Radio România. The retirement age and the schedule for women: Law 360/2023, Annex 5. Nominal GDP: Eurostat, quarterly table namq_10_gdp, unadjusted series for Romania in current lei. This series is revised; the calibration uses the data available on 16 October 2026. The long-run European Commission projection (dependency, PAYGO balance): the 2024 Ageing Report — Country Fiche for Romania, Economic Policy Committee.
The 3% reference value is defined in Protocol No. 12 to the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union and applies to the general-government deficit. Financial data were checked on 16 October 2026; review is due by 16 October 2027 or when CNPP publishes a newer final annual account, whichever comes first.