Romania's village post offices: how far the nearest counter is

The comparison uses the same villages, the same points and the same rule in every year: the straight-line distance to the nearest locality with a counter open to the public. A unit that only changed kind — from office to agency, say — is not a closure: a closure means no counter of any kind is left in that locality. Matched one by one, the lists give 857 closures and 196 openings between 2014 and 2026; another 800 localities kept a counter of a different kind, of which 328 lost the full office and kept only an agency or a postal desk. The kind matters: in November 2026 an office typically opens 40 hours a week, a postal desk 30, an agency 10. Of the closures, 84 pair with an opening in the same commune within 5 km: there the counter moved, or its address was filed under another village. Leaving those out gives 773 closures and 112 openings, and the 784 villages without their own counter become 703. Almost every commune still has at least one counter: in 2026, 3,169 of the 3,181 communes, towns and cities have one.

If the question is "how far is any counter", the map has barely moved: villages over 10 km in a straight line from the nearest counter numbered 14 in 2014 and 16 in 2026. At smaller thresholds the distances creep up: over 5 km there are 483 villages in 2014 and 726 in 2026, and the village in the middle of the list moved from 1.7 km to 2.0 km. The large movement is at the full office: villages over 10 km from one rose from 4,819 to 7,334, and at the 15 km line from 1,714 to 3,826. It is not only a change of name: counting by opening hours alone, villages over 10 km from a counter open at least 20 hours a week rose from 808 to 3,088, and those over 10 km from an office or postal desk from 966 to 2,554.

The counter that stayed close is often open only briefly. Of the 4,813 counters whose hours in the November 2026 list can be added up over a week, 1,210 open for at most five hours — an hour a day, Monday to Friday, for instance — and 1,260 for under ten. The counter in the middle of the list is open 10 hours a week. A short distance to the agency buys short hours.

The communes where a village lost its own counter are not the fastest-emptying ones: between the 2011 and 2021 censuses the median such commune lost 7% of its residents, the same as communes in general (7.1%). Closures do not simply follow the depopulation map, and the distances alone do not assign a cause.

The 2026 network is a census of Poșta Română's public office finder, taken in November 2026: every county, every locality it lists and each unit returned. For the map, 4,811 counters were matched to 4,530 localities. The 2014 and 2016 networks are the official lists published on data.gov.ro (September 2014 and May 2016), counted by the same rule: post offices, postal desks and agencies. Transit centres, county directorates and courier hubs are not counters and are not counted. The 537 offices of 2026 are the units the finder labels "Oficiu Poștal" and that are open to the public (the 13 counters listed as suspended are not counted); another 16 counters carry no label (Sebeș and Teiuș among them). If all of them were offices, the villages over 10 km from an office would number 7,199 instead of 7,334.

The 4,813 counters with calculable weekly hours and the 4,811 matched to localities for the map are different groups: five in the first could not be matched to a SIRUTA locality, and three in the second have no calculable weekly hours. The operating status of those three needs confirmation from Poșta Română.

Each matched unit was placed in its locality in the SIRUTA register (first half of 2026) by county and name. The villages are the register's 12,491 rural localities; each village's point comes from OpenStreetMap (place nodes carrying the SIRUTA code). The distance is the straight line between the village point and the point of the nearest counter locality. By road the distance is always greater, so "over 10 km" is claimed only where the straight line already exceeds 10 km. A village with its own counter has distance zero.

The limits of the measure, stated once: a village point is a single point, usually the centre, so for spread-out villages a household's real distance can differ by a few hundred metres; the hours shown are those in the operator's list at the census date and can change; an agency can work seasonally. The 32 villages with no OpenStreetMap point of their own take the point of their commune's seat.