If you sell goods or services into Romania, your invoices now live on a different clock than they did last year — and the tax authority's computer, not your customer's accounts-payable team, is the first audience that matters. Since January 1, 2026, Romania gives you five working days instead of five calendar days to transmit each invoice through the national RO e-Factura system. That sounds like breathing room. But the same ordinance that lengthened the deadline also widened the net: non-resident businesses registered for Romanian VAT are now explicitly in scope. If you invoice Romanian customers and assumed e-Factura was someone else's problem, this is the year that assumption expires.
What Actually Changed on January 1, 2026
Romania's e-invoicing framework rests on Emergency Ordinance 120/2021, which created the RO e-Factura clearance system run by ANAF, the national tax authority. On December 23, 2025, the government published Emergency Ordinance 89/2025 (GEO 89/2025), amending that framework with several changes effective January 1, 2026. The headline change for day-to-day operations is the transmission deadline.
Previously, every invoice had to be transmitted to RO e-Factura within five calendar days of issuance. Weekends counted. Public holidays counted. An invoice issued on a Friday effectively gave you until Wednesday, with two of those five days falling on a weekend when nobody was watching the queue.
Now the deadline is five working days from the date of issuance, for both B2B and B2C transactions. Weekends and public holidays no longer burn clock time. An invoice issued on a Friday is now due the following Friday, not Wednesday — a meaningful difference for small teams that batch their invoicing weekly.
One transition trap deserves attention: the cut-off is based on the invoice's issue date, not the submission date. Invoices issued on or before December 31, 2025 still follow the old five-calendar-day rule even if their deadline falls in January 2026. Only invoices issued from January 1, 2026 onward get the new working-day treatment. If your billing system applies one rule to everything, aged December invoices could silently breach the old deadline while you believe the new one protects them.
The Bigger Change: The Net Got Wider
The deadline relief came bundled with a scope expansion that matters more to cross-border sellers than the extra days do.
Non-resident VAT-registered sellers are now explicitly covered
GEO 89/2025 clarified and tightened the rules for taxpayers that are registered for VAT in Romania but have no fixed establishment there. If you are a foreign business holding a Romanian VAT number and you supply goods or services with a place of supply in Romania, your invoices for those domestic transactions must go through RO e-Factura. This closes a grey area that some non-resident sellers had been operating in — the "we're not really established here" reading no longer works.
The system keeps growing around you
To understand where Romania is heading, it helps to see the trajectory:
- January 2024: B2B e-invoicing becomes mandatory between Romanian VAT-registered businesses.
- July 2024: Only invoices transmitted through RO e-Factura count as valid invoices for B2B tax purposes. A PDF sent by email is no longer an invoice in the eyes of the law.
- January 2025: B2C e-invoicing becomes mandatory for Romanian-established suppliers.
- January 2026: The deadline moves to five working days, and non-resident VAT-registered sellers are pulled firmly into scope. Individuals operating under a personal identification number were initially required to register in the e-Factura registry before starting economic activity, but Law 88/2026 walked that back mid-year: for CNP-identified individuals, individual farmers under the special scheme, and foreign cultural institutes, system use is optional again from June 2026, and those already enrolled can request removal from the registry.
Romania now runs one of the most comprehensive e-invoicing regimes in the EU — B2B, B2C, and B2G all flow through the same clearance model. The direction of travel is unmistakable: every invoice touching Romania eventually passes through ANAF's platform.
How the 5-Working-Day Clock Works in Practice
RO e-Factura is a clearance model, not a reporting model. You do not send the invoice to your customer and then tell the tax authority about it. You submit the invoice in the required XML format to the ANAF platform, the platform validates it and assigns a unique identification number, and only then is the invoice legally valid for tax purposes. Your customer retrieves it from the system.
Counting the days
The clock starts on the invoice's issue date, and you count five working days from there. Romanian working days exclude Saturdays, Sundays, and official public holidays. In practice:
- An invoice issued Monday is due the following Monday.
- An invoice issued Friday is due the following Friday.
- A mid-week public holiday pushes everything out by a day — which happens regularly in Romania, a country with a generous holiday calendar.
Build the holiday calendar into your process, not just weekends. A submission routine that counts Monday-to-Friday but ignores holidays will eventually misfire.
Getting invoices into the system
There are two submission paths:
- API integration. Your ERP or accounting software connects directly to the ANAF interface and submits invoices automatically. This is the only sane option at any real volume, and it is what makes the five-day deadline comfortable rather than stressful.
- Manual upload. You upload the XML file through the SPV portal, which requires a qualified electronic signature. Workable for occasional invoices, punishing as a routine.
One practical complication for foreign sellers: the ANAF portal interface is available only in Romanian. If nobody on your team reads Romanian, manual submission means navigating a government portal in a language you do not speak, under a five-day deadline, with penalties attached. Direct API integration through your accounting stack — or a local fiscal representative — is strongly preferable to heroic manual efforts.
The 60-day download window
ANAF stores invoices on its platform for 60 days. After that, sender and recipient are each responsible for their own archiving, and Romanian rules require invoices to be retained for at least five years. Treat the platform as a transmission channel, not an archive. Your month-end routine should confirm that every transmitted invoice has been downloaded and filed in your own records before the 60-day window closes.
What Non-Compliance Costs
Romanian e-invoicing penalties come in two layers, and the second one is the dangerous one.
Layer 1: Tiered fines per infringement
Fines for failing to transmit invoices through the system scale with taxpayer size:
- Large taxpayers: RON 5,000 to 10,000 per infringement (roughly EUR 1,000 to 2,000)
- Medium taxpayers: RON 2,500 to 5,000 per infringement
- Other entities and individuals: RON 1,000 to 2,500 per infringement
"Per infringement" means these multiply across missing invoices. A systematic failure — an integration that silently stopped submitting in March — can stack into serious money fast.
Layer 2: 15 percent of invoice value
Since July 2024, issuing or receiving B2B invoices outside the RO e-Factura system carries a penalty of 15 percent of the total invoice value. Note that this exposure touches both sides of the transaction: the seller that issues outside the system and the buyer that books an invoice that never passed through it. For a cross-border seller, this means your Romanian customers have their own incentive to demand compliant invoices from you — a buyer that accepts your emailed PDF instead of a cleared e-invoice is taking on penalty risk itself. Expect larger Romanian customers to start rejecting non-system invoices outright, if they have not already.
The SME deferral is not an exemption
Small taxpayers with annual turnover under EUR 500,000 benefit from deferred enforcement of the full penalty regime until July 1, 2026. Read that sentence carefully: it is a deferral of penalties, not of the obligation. Covered small businesses are expected to use the system now — transmitting invoices, testing integrations, improving data quality — with the grace period functioning as a runway for getting compliant, not permission to ignore the mandate. That runway has now ended. If you treated the deferral as an exemption, the catch-up starts today.
Mistakes Cross-Border Sellers Keep Making
Most RO e-Factura failures are operational, not legal. The same patterns recur:
Counting calendar days out of habit. Teams that internalized the old five-calendar-day rule — or that run one global invoicing checklist — submit on day five by the old math and believe they complied early. Under the new rule that is harmless. The reverse error is the killer: December 2025 invoices judged by the new rule when the old one still applied.
Assuming the SME deferral meant "not yet." Foreign sellers under the turnover threshold who postponed integration work are now operating without a safety net. The obligation applied throughout the deferral period; only the fines were paused.
Emailing PDFs and calling it invoicing. In Romania's B2B market, an invoice that never passed through RO e-Factura is not a valid invoice. Sellers who keep their old email-PDF workflow alongside — or instead of — system submission are creating documents their customers cannot legally book, while both sides accumulate 15-percent exposure.
Booking received invoices that never cleared. The buyer's side of the 15-percent penalty is the one most businesses miss. If you purchase from Romanian suppliers, your accounts-payable process should verify that incoming invoices carry their e-Factura identifiers before you book them.
Treating ANAF as the archive. The 60-day platform retention catches teams that assume a government system keeps records indefinitely. When the window closes, reconstruction is your problem.
Underestimating the language barrier. The Romanian-only portal turns every manual submission into a slow, error-prone exercise for foreign teams. Manual upload as a permanent strategy does not scale and does not survive staff turnover.
A Compliance Checklist for Selling Into Romania
If you invoice customers from a Romanian VAT registration — established or not — work through this list:
- Confirm your scope. Do you hold a Romanian VAT number? Do you make supplies with a Romanian place of supply? If both answers are yes, you are in RO e-Factura's scope for those transactions, establishment or no establishment.
- Register in the system. Ensure your business is enrolled in the RO e-Factura registry and that your access credentials and electronic signature arrangements work before you need them under deadline pressure.
- Choose your submission path. At anything beyond occasional invoices, integrate your billing system with the ANAF interface. Reserve manual SPV upload for exceptions, and make sure someone who can navigate a Romanian-language portal owns that task.
- Reprogram the deadline. Update every checklist, SLA, and automated reminder from five calendar days to five working days for 2026 invoices — and keep the old rule coded for any stragglers dated December 2025.
- Load the Romanian holiday calendar. Your working-day count must skip public holidays. Hard-code the year's holidays into your invoicing schedule at the start of each year.
- Verify before you book — both directions. Outgoing invoices need their system identifiers before you consider them issued; incoming Romanian invoices need theirs before you book the expense. Build the identifier check into your close process.
- Automate the archive pull. Schedule a routine that downloads transmitted and received invoices from the platform well inside the 60-day window and files them in your five-year retention store.
- Track the e-invoice identifier in your ledger. Store the ANAF-assigned identifier alongside each invoice in your books, the way you would a payment reference. When the tax authority asks about a transaction, the identifier is the thread that ties your ledger to their system.
That last point deserves emphasis. Clearance-model invoicing changes what "complete books" means: your ledger entries for Romanian transactions are only fully supported when each one carries its system identifier. A sale recorded without one is either not yet transmitted or was transmitted and never reconciled — either way, it is a flag your month-end review should catch. Keep the identifier, the transmission timestamp, and the validation response with the transaction, and reconciliation becomes a matching exercise instead of an investigation.
Keep Your Cross-Border Records Audit-Ready
Romania's message to sellers is increasingly clear: the invoice is not real until the system says it is, and the deadline is measured in working days whether your process knows it or not. Getting the mechanics right — registration, integration, identifier tracking, archiving — turns a strict mandate into routine plumbing. Beancount.io provides plain-text accounting that gives you complete transparency and control over your financial data — no black boxes, no vendor lock-in. Get started for free and see why developers and finance professionals are switching to plain-text accounting.
