The earthquake-risk class of every school and kindergarten in Romania, building by building

What class I means, and what “Neîncadrată” means

A seismic risk class comes from a structural survey of a building and states how it is expected to behave in the design earthquake, the one buildings in that area are calculated for. Romanian law has four classes:

Class I

buildings that may collapse, wholly or partly, in the design earthquake

Class II

buildings that may suffer major damage that endangers the people inside, though total or partial collapse is unlikely

Class III

buildings that may suffer moderate damage that may endanger the people inside

Class IV

buildings expected to behave like those designed under current technical rules

Neîncadrată

unclassified: no class on the list

“Neîncadrată” (unclassified) is not a fifth class. It is what the list says for a building with no class recorded. The list does not say why: perhaps no survey was done, perhaps one was done and never entered. The ministry says the list reflects what schools entered in their database, SIIIR, and asked town halls, which manage the buildings, to give schools the official papers where they exist.

At 81.1% of units (13,031 of 16,059), every building is “Neîncadrată”. A parent who finds their child’s school among them has learned something: the ministry’s list has no answer.

How the list changed from February 2023 to today

The ministry has published the list 33 times, from 24 February 2023 to 21 September 2026: weekly until the end of April 2023, then roughly monthly, with gaps. Class I buildings rose from 45 to 161, and units with at least one, from 39 to 133. The biggest jumps came in February 2024 and April 2025.

The share of buildings with no class fell slowly, from 86.9% to 82.9%. The list does not only gain classes: at 241 units, a building had a class on the list at some point, and on the list of 21 September 2026 all their buildings are “Neîncadrată” again. Of the 39 units with a class I building on the first list, 28 still have one.

The 133 school units with a class I building

Every unit with at least one class I building on the list of 21 September 2026, with the building’s use and the list since which the unit has had at least one class I building on every list. Buildings carry no code on the list, so there is no telling whether it is the same building from one list to the next. Most are in Bacău and Bucharest (11 each), Iași (9) and Vrancea (8). They are 66 primary and lower-secondary schools, 37 kindergartens and nurseries, 25 high schools and colleges, and five other units: a military NCO school, the Brăila county school inspectorate, the Iași Children’s Palace, and the Ilfov teachers’ centre and school sports club.

What the list does not say

A row on the list is one building of a school unit, with its class and its use, as the school entered them. The list gives no address for the building, no code, no year of construction and no survey date. When a school has several buildings with the same use, their rows are identical and there is no telling which is which.

Nor does the list say whether lessons take place in a building now. In February 2023 the ministry said the list covers every building, whether in use, mothballed, with lessons moved elsewhere, or under strengthening. A class I building may have been closed for years; the school can say, the list cannot.

A reading of the list as a record, county by county, is in “Into the Fog”: what the ministry’s register leaves out.

What a parent can ask

The head teacher and the town hall, which manages state school buildings, can say whether a building has a structural survey, from which year, what class it gives, and whether lessons still take place in class I or II buildings.

The question can also be put in writing as a freedom-of-information request under Romania’s Law 544/2001. The institution must answer in writing within 10 days of registering the request. If it needs longer, it must say so in writing within those first 10 days and answer within 30 days of registration at most.

Where the data comes from and how it was read

The source is the 33 lists the Romanian Education Ministry published on its “Situații de urgență” (emergencies) page (24 February 2023 – 21 September 2026); each list is dated by the date written in the file (“Generat la data”). A row is a building; identical rows were not merged. Names, places and uses are as on the list, in Romanian.

A unit was followed from one list to the next by its SIIIR code, found by county, place and name in the school network lists the ministry publishes on data.gov.ro (school years 2022–23 to 2025–26). Where a name changed between lists in the same place, the two names were joined only when the match was unique. 99.3% of the units on the latest list have a code; the others are followed by name. Addresses come from the 2025–26 school network.

Place coordinates are from Wikidata (SIRUTA code) and county outlines from geoBoundaries. The unit data can be downloaded: units.json.gz (gzipped JSON).

Sources

1. Romanian Education Ministry, “Situații de urgență”: the 33 lists
2. The list of 21 September 2026 (xlsx)
3. Education Ministry press release of 24 February 2023 on the list
4. School network 2025–26, data.gov.ro (CC BY 4.0)
5. Law 212/2022, art. 1(2): the seismic risk classes
6. Law 544/2001 on access to public information