Romania's national e-invoicing system did not change shape in 2026 — it tightened. The obligation is the same one you have been living with since 2024: invoices go through RO e-Factura, and a PDF emailed to a client is not an invoice as far as ANAF is concerned. What moved this year is the clock, the list of who is inside the system, and the arithmetic of getting it wrong.
Here is the short version, and then the detail.
What changed on 1 January 2026
The transmission deadline is now five working days. It used to be five calendar days from the invoice date. Emergency Ordinance 89/2025, the end-of-year "omnibus" ordinance, changed the unit of counting.
That sounds like a small edit, and for most invoices it is a small gift: an invoice issued on a Thursday now has until the following Thursday rather than the following Tuesday. The trap is the opposite case. Working days mean public holidays stretch the window, and it is very easy to convince yourself the deadline moved when it did not — the safe habit is to file on the day you issue, and treat the five days as slack you never spend.
Two details that catch people out:
- The clock starts at the invoice date, not at the date somebody in the office gets round to uploading it. Backdating an invoice does not buy you time; it spends it.
- The deadline is per invoice. There is no monthly batch that makes you compliant retroactively, and the penalty below is applied per document.
Who joins the system on 1 June 2026
From 1 June 2026, individuals carrying on an economic activity and identified by personal numeric code — the PFA world, freelancers, and farmers among them — are inside mandatory RO e-Factura.
The date that actually matters is earlier than the one people write down: registration in the RO e-Factura register has to be done by 26 May 2026. If you are in this group, or your clients are, that is the deadline to diarise, not 1 June. ANAF's RO e-Factura register is where the enrolment lives.
Foreign companies with a Romanian VAT number
Also from 1 January 2026, the obligation extends to invoices issued to taxable persons who are not established in Romania but are registered here for VAT. If you sell to a foreign group's Romanian VAT registration, that invoice now travels the same road as a domestic one.
This one is quietly disruptive, because it is usually the counterparty who has to change something: their finance team may still be expecting a PDF by email from a Romanian supplier. ANAF publishes guidance for non-residents on registering for the system.
What the fines look like
Two separate penalties, and it is worth keeping them apart in your head, because only one of them scales with the size of the invoice.
Missing the transmission deadline is a fixed-bracket fine, banded by taxpayer category:
| Taxpayer category | Fine per invoice |
|---|---|
| Large taxpayers | 5,000 – 10,000 lei |
| Medium taxpayers | 2,500 – 5,000 lei |
| Small taxpayers, other legal entities, individuals | 1,000 – 2,500 lei |
Invoicing outside the system entirely, in a B2B relationship between two parties established in Romania, is a fine equal to 15% of the total invoice value — and it lands on both sides. The issuer who never sent it through RO e-Factura is fined, and so is the recipient who received and recorded an invoice that never went through the system.
That second half deserves a moment, because it is the one that feels unfair. As a buyer, you cannot see whether your supplier transmitted their invoice; you only see the PDF that arrived by email. Recording it anyway exposes you to a penalty for something you did not control. The practical defence is the boring one: work from what the SPV actually delivered you rather than from your inbox, and chase the supplier when a document you were promised is not there.
What has not changed
Worth restating, because "everything changed in 2026" is doing the rounds and most of it did not:
- The scope. B2B, B2C and B2G are all in the system. That has been true since the 2024–2025 rollout.
- The format. Structured XML, delivered through the Virtual Private Space. Not a PDF, not a scan.
- The retention window in the SPV. ANAF keeps e-Factura documents available for a limited period. Anything older than that window has to live somewhere you control — this is the single most common reason a company discovers, two years later, that it cannot produce an invoice during an inspection.
A five-line checklist
- File on issue, not on deadline. Five working days is slack, not a schedule.
- Diarise 26 May 2026 if you or your regular counterparties are PFAs or individuals with economic activity.
- Check whether any of your customers are foreign entities with a Romanian VAT number, and tell them what is coming.
- Reconcile from the SPV, not from your email inbox — for incoming invoices especially.
- Archive outside the SPV, before the retention window closes on the documents you will need.
Where the invoice goes after ANAF delivers it
Everything above is about getting invoices into the system and getting them out of it intact. None of it pays anybody. That is the gap that swallows the time in most finance teams: the compliance work is now largely automated, and the payment work is still somebody opening an XML file, reading an IBAN off it, and typing that IBAN into internet banking.
That step is where the real money risk sits, too — a mistyped IBAN is not a compliance problem, it is a payment that has left. We wrote about closing that gap in paying the invoices ANAF delivers, and about the deadlines the other side of the relationship gives you in payment terms and late-payment interest.
OpenPay collects the supplier invoices that reach you through ANAF's e-Factura into one list, and pays the ones you approve through your own bank — you grant the ANAF access from inside your account, and you can withdraw it there at any time.