Two questions come up whenever cash is tight, and they are the same question from opposite sides of the table: how long do I actually have to pay this? and what can I claim from someone who has not paid me?
Romanian law answers both, and more precisely than most people expect. The instrument is Law 72/2013, which transposes the EU late payment directive and governs payment obligations between businesses, and between businesses and public authorities.
What follows is the practical shape of it. It is general information rather than advice on your contract — but knowing these four numbers changes how you negotiate.
When the contract is silent: 30 days
If your contract sets no payment term, the default is 30 calendar days, and penalty interest starts running after it. Article 3 counts those 30 days from the date the debtor receives the invoice.
Two consequences people miss:
- A missing payment term is not "whenever". Suppliers frequently believe that no agreed term means no deadline. The opposite is true: silence gives you the statutory 30 days automatically, with interest attached.
- The clock starts at receipt of the invoice, which is a fact you can now evidence precisely, because RO e-Factura timestamps delivery. That is a genuine improvement on "I never got it".
Between businesses: 60 days is the ceiling
Where the parties do agree a term, Article 5 caps it: the payment term cannot exceed 60 calendar days between professionals. Anything longer requires that it be expressly stipulated in the contract and objectively justified — it is not something you can slide into general terms and conditions and expect to hold.
For contracts with public authorities, the terms are stricter still, and the ceiling is set by reference to the statutory maximums rather than to whatever the authority proposes.
The practical read: if a large customer's standard terms say 90 or 120 days, that clause is not automatically enforceable simply because you signed it. It is worth knowing that before you accept it as a fact of life.
What you can claim when they are late
Two separate entitlements, and most small suppliers claim neither.
Penalty interest
Where the parties have not agreed an interest rate, the statutory penalty interest applies, calculated under Government Ordinance 13/2011. Between professionals and with public authorities, the rate is the National Bank of Romania reference rate plus 8 percentage points.
That is a formula, not a fixed number, and it is deliberately written that way here: the reference rate is the BNR's monetary policy rate and it moves. The rate in force on the first calendar day of a half-year applies for that entire half-year, so a debt spanning several months may be computed in segments. Take the current reference rate from the BNR rather than from an article — including this one.
Note how large "+8" is in practice. It is designed to be more expensive than bank credit, because the whole point of the directive was to stop large buyers from treating their suppliers as a cheap overdraft.
The fixed €40
This is the provision almost nobody uses. Under Article 10, a creditor who becomes entitled to penalty interest may also claim the lei equivalent of €40 as compensation for recovery costs — without having to prove any actual cost, and in addition to interest.
Forty euros will not change a year. But it is per debt, it requires no evidence, and it exists precisely so that chasing a small invoice is not economically irrational. For a supplier with a hundred late payments a year, it stops being a rounding error.
How this reads from the buyer's side
Everything above is usually written as advice for the unpaid. It is at least as useful in the other direction, because it tells you what your own late payments cost.
If you are paying suppliers late as a matter of routine — and many companies do, not from malice but because the payment run is a manual afternoon that keeps slipping — you are accruing a liability at the reference rate plus eight points, plus €40 a time, whether or not anyone invoices you for it. Most suppliers never claim it. The ones large enough to have a credit control function do.
There is also a non-financial cost that shows up sooner: suppliers who are paid late quietly reprice. The quote goes up, the priority goes down, and nobody tells you why.
Four things worth doing
- Read the payment term in your top ten supplier contracts. Not all of them. The ten that matter.
- Check whether any of your customers' standard terms exceed 60 days, and know that the ceiling exists before your next renewal.
- Date from the invoice, not from the email. With e-Factura, delivery is timestamped — use it in both directions.
- Make the payment run boring. Almost all routine lateness is an operational problem, not a decision. Our piece on paying invoices from e-Factura is about removing the friction that causes it, and who approves payments is about the approval step that most often becomes the bottleneck.
Keeping the dates in view
Due dates are only useful if you can see them. OpenPay pulls supplier invoices out of ANAF into a single list, so what is due, and when, is one screen rather than a folder of downloaded XML files — and the payment is initiated with your bank from that same list, once you have approved it.
If the compliance calendar is what worries you rather than the commercial one, e-Factura in 2026 covers the ANAF-side deadlines.