Law no. 169/2026 — the Code of Spatial Planning, Urbanism and Construction, known in Romania as CATUC — was promulgated by Decree no. 720 of 4 August 2026, published in Monitorul Oficial no. 661 of 10 August, and entered into force on 25 August 2026. It runs to 584 articles in two books, and it repeals in full both Law 350/2001 on urbanism and Law 50/1991 on building authorisation, and in part Law 10/1995 on construction quality. It is the most extensive rewriting of the Romanian planning and permitting framework in thirty-five years.

The pace of adoption is explained by its context. The Code was a milestone under Romania's national recovery plan, and failing to adopt it by the end of the summer would have cost the country roughly 972 million euro in non-reimbursable EU funds, a figure cited publicly by the minister of development. The text had been sitting in Parliament since 2023 and was voted through in the last week of July 2026.

What follows is a review of the changes that matter to anyone building here. One caveat at the outset: the secondary legislation has not yet been adopted, and the specialist analyses published in the first weeks do not agree on every deadline. We have marked the divergences explicitly, because concealing them would be more dangerous than flagging them.

Which set of rules applies to your project

The transitional rule is more generous than it first appears. Urbanism certificates issued before 25 August 2026 remain valid, and the permit that follows from them is issued under the law in force at the date of the certificate. In practice, a certificate obtained in July locks in the old regime for the whole chain that follows. Likewise, procedures begun before entry into force continue under the rules applicable when they were filed; files do not restart.

There are exceptions running the other way. Partial receptions follow the new rules even for works already under construction. And where the Code moves issuing competence, the authority with which an application has already been filed remains competent for that file.

The first thing to do, therefore, is an inventory: for each project, its exact procedural stage as of 25 August 2026 and the date of its urbanism certificate. Everything else follows from that.

The urbanism certificate: five types instead of one

The single certificate has been replaced by five types, according to the purpose of the request: for information, for cadastral operations, for the construction or demolition of buildings, for engineering works, and for special-category construction.

Issuing deadlines are reported differently across sources. Some analyses state deadlines differentiated by type, in the range of 5 to 15 working days, replacing the previous flat 30 days; others state a general maximum of 15 working days from registration of the application. One source partly reconciles the two: 15 days for the construction certificate, 5 days for the information certificate once the digital platform is operational, and 10 days during the transition. Until this is clarified, prudent programming uses the longest figure.

Validity is reported in the range of 12 to 36 months, longer for public investments, with an express extension mechanism introduced for the first time. One change worth noting: an incomplete certificate is now void, where previously the consequence was merely disciplinary liability for the issuing officer.

Integrated assessment and tacit approval

The most consequential procedural change is the move from approvals collected in sequence to a single integrated assessment. A national commission and local integrated assessment commissions are created at county, metropolitan, municipal and town level, within the chief architect's structure. The reported deadline for standing them up is 45 working days from publication, with an inconsistency in the text itself flagged for the local commissions.

The most valuable effect for an investor is preclusive: once integrated clearance is obtained, no other authority may request further approvals or levy additional fees.

A tacit approval rule is added. If the reviewing body does not respond within the deadline, does not request clarification and does not issue a reasoned refusal, the approval is deemed granted, and the applicant must be able to prove complete documentation and expiry of the term. The exceptions are reported differently: defence, public order and national security institutions appear in every source, while some add historic monuments, the civil aviation authority, and environmental approvals, where the clock starts only once the specific environmental procedure is complete.

For the building permit itself, two independent sources give a deadline of 30 calendar days from submission of complete documentation, with an expedited route of up to 7 working days against a local fee. Individual approvals carry a maximum of 15 days. The government has communicated a target of roughly 65 days for the whole path, against 4 to 8 months in current practice — a figure that assumes complete documentation and deadlines actually met.

Notification and works requiring no formality

The Code introduces a simplified notification regime for a list of minor works: exterior annexes to single-family rural dwellings up to 50 sqm in total, one rural dwelling of ground floor or semi-basement plus ground floor up to 150 sqm, roof replacement, attic conversion without structural intervention, non-structural partitioning, unified enclosure of balconies in apartment blocks, and change of use without works requiring a permit. The authority has 15 working days to accept, request clarification, impose specific approvals, or rule that a full permit is required. Silence means acceptance.

Here the sources disagree on whether a second waiting period of 15 calendar days applies before works may start, or whether they may begin as soon as the first deadline passes. Notified works must be executed within three years, and reception and entry in the technical book and the National Register of Constructions are mandatory.

Separately, the Code lists works that may be carried out with no formality at all: repairs to roofing, joinery and finishes, interior installations, local heating systems. Photovoltaic panels for own consumption require prior notice. Note, however, that these exemptions do not apply within historic monument protection zones or protected built areas, and compliance with the local urbanism regulation remains mandatory even for exempted works.

Planning documentation: PUG, PUZ, and a transformed PUD

General urban plans older than seven years must be updated within three years of entry into force, that is by August 2029. The sanction is not a freeze on permitting but the loss of the local authority's access to reimbursable and non-reimbursable public funding. The general plan must now be produced and administered in GIS, and its mandatory content expands considerably: urban regeneration zones, zones where a zonal plan becomes mandatory, zones where amending the regulation is prohibited, green and blue infrastructure, contaminated sites, Seveso establishments.

For privately initiated zonal plans, sources report a ceiling on increasing urbanistic indicators of 20 percent above approved values, reduced to 10 percent in protected zones. The increase is relative, not in percentage points: a site coverage of 40 percent may rise to at most 48. It is not an automatic entitlement of the developer. A substantive condition also appears: a private zonal plan must address the integrated development of its area, and the infrastructure set out in the accompanying action plan must be commissioned before the private buildings.

The largest single change concerns the PUD, now called the detailed urban project and moved into a separate category of urban design. It is no longer approved by local council decision but by mayoral order, within 15 days of the chief architect's technical approval. As to what it can do, sources indicate a single increase of up to 20 percent in site coverage or floor area ratio, a change to the maximum permitted height, a change to the building regime, and a subdivision of up to 12 plots for individual dwellings, with some analyses restricting the grounds to imperative technical or architectural reasons. What a PUD cannot do is change the land use function; that still requires a zonal plan. A minority position holds that the PUD may not derogate from superior plans at all, but the majority of analyses, and the wording quoted from the text, support the limited-derogation reading.

The Code also introduces a metropolitan general urban plan, which may replace the individual plans of the constituent administrative units, and a single unitary zonal plan for investments spanning more than one administrative unit.

New obligations for developers

Three instruments appear with a direct effect on a project's budget. An urbanisation contract allows the administration to negotiate with the investor the financing of public works generated by the project: roads, utilities, community facilities. A local territorial equipment charge is introduced. And developers of complexes exceeding 500 dwellings in large cities must contribute to financing local public infrastructure — nurseries, kindergartens, schools.

For a development appraisal these are not details. They move part of the cost of public infrastructure into the project budget, and the requirement that infrastructure be commissioned before the private buildings changes the phasing as well as the sum.

Regularisation: a one-year window

The Code creates a regularisation permit. On a permanent basis it covers single-family dwellings of ground floor or ground plus one storey up to 150 sqm, annexes up to 150 sqm, and balcony enclosures that do not extend onto public land, excluding historic monuments and protected zones.

On top of that baseline, for a maximum of one year from entry into force, a window opens through which any other category of unauthorised construction may apply for regularisation. The conditions are demanding: compliance with the urbanism regulation in force at the date of the application, technical expertise against the fundamental requirements, settlement of all fiscal obligations and fines, and possibly remedial works or partial demolition first. The cost is substantial — state control quotas and the certificate and permit fees are calculated at ten times their normal value. Separately, building tax rises by 100 percent from the moment the breach is established until regularisation or demolition, and paying the tax does not legalise the structure.

In parallel, an important escape route disappears. Under Law 50/1991, an unauthorised but urbanistically compliant building could be registered once a three-year limitation period expired. That mechanism is abolished, and the period within which the authority may act becomes ten years from actual completion of the works.

Design verification and site roles

Importance categories are replaced by consequence classes, CC1 to CC4, and technical verification is organised in four corresponding levels, NVP1 to NVP4. At NVP1, verification by a certified verifier is no longer mandatory: responsibility is assumed by the architects and engineers who produced the design. At NVP4, independent parallel calculations are required, with a permitted divergence of no more than 5 percent.

The verifier is liable for ten years from delivery for the conclusions of the verification, with unlimited liability in time for structural defects. Professional indemnity insurance becomes mandatory for the entire duration of practice, for verifiers as well as for site supervisors and technical execution officers. Site supervisor authorisations are issued by the State Construction Inspectorate for an indefinite term subject to periodic confirmation, with an additional authorisation required for work on historic monuments.

Until secondary legislation maps existing attestations onto the new levels, professionals continue to operate under the previous rules.

Bucharest

From 1 November 2028, all urbanism certificates and building permits in the capital will be issued by the Bucharest City Hall, and the sector city halls lose these powers entirely. A general directorate is created under the city chief architect, with seven deputy chief architects, and sector specialists are to be transferred. The reorganisation methodology is expected by July 2027. Files in progress at the date of transfer pass to the new authority without restarting.

The Bucharest branch of the Order of Architects publicly opposed this centralisation, arguing that the city hall already exceeds statutory processing deadlines and lacks the digitalisation and resources required. Their position, stated in July 2026, is that full centralisation carried out without prior administrative preparation is not a sustainable solution.

What remains unclear

The most serious problem flagged by legal analyses concerns the right to build itself. The Code limits authorisation to holders of the ownership right or of other real rights specific to public property. Read strictly, a superficies right over privately owned land no longer constitutes a basis for a permit — a common structure in this market, including in renewable energy projects. The law firms that raised the point treat it as a probable drafting error: one recommends legislative amendment as soon as possible, another recommends monitoring administrative practice before relying on that structure. Neither asserts a settled interpretation.

Also unresolved are the exact deadlines for each certificate type, the terms of the extension mechanism, a consolidated list of exceptions to tacit approval, and whether the notification regime involves one waiting period or two. The national digital platform has no communicated launch date; until then documentation is filed by email. Authorities have 120 days from publication to update their procedures, and internal regulations are to be revised by 31 December 2026.

What we are doing in practice

On our own projects we began with four operations. An inventory of the procedural stage of every file as of 25 August 2026, together with the date of its urbanism certificate, to establish which law applies. A review of the ownership structure of each site against the superficies question. A re-planning of the early phases for projects still at site selection, around the new certificate types. And a re-examination of the cases where we had assumed a zonal plan was necessary, to see whether the new detailed urban project now covers them — the difference, in time, is between several months and a few weeks.

We will update this text as the secondary legislation and the first administrative practice appear. This is a reading from design practice, not legal advice; for decisions that turn on the interpretation of a specific provision, and above all on the superficies question, specialist legal counsel is required.