e-Factura Romania: who must issue, who reports, and what it costs to get it wrong

What e-Factura in Romania is, and why it matters even if you do not issue

RO e-Factura is the national electronic invoicing system operated by the Ministry of Finance together with ANAF. An invoice is issued as a structured XML file, uploaded to the system, checked against the Romanian rules, sealed electronically by the tax authority and delivered to the recipient inside the same system. The sealed XML is the legal original. A PDF generated alongside it is a convenience copy with no independent legal standing.

For a foreign company the first thing to understand is that e-Factura is not only an issuing obligation. It is also a reporting channel for the B2B invoices of companies that are not established here, and the channel through which your Romanian purchase invoices arrive. Even a company whose invoices are not issued through the system needs access to it, because that is where its B2B invoices are reported and where its suppliers’ documents are delivered, and those documents support the VAT deduction claimed in the Romanian VAT return.

Who must issue through RO e-Factura

The obligation follows establishment, not registration. This distinction is the single most misunderstood point in the English-language material on the subject.

Read the table with the second column in mind. A non-established company is not exempt from the system; it is exempt from issuing through it. The invoice issued under its ordinary rules remains the document sent to the customer, but for B2B transactions the same invoice also goes to RO e-Factura as XML, for reporting. Its B2C invoices stay outside the system. Its purchase invoices still land in RO e-Factura, and it still has to collect, archive and reconcile them.

Whether a fixed establishment exists is a factual question — permanence plus human and technical resources in Romania — and it is worth settling in writing before the first invoice, not after an inspection. We cover the underlying distinction on the tax compliance overview and in the guide to VAT in Romania for foreign companies.

The RO_CIUS format and what changes on the invoice

Romania did not invent an invoice format. It adopted the European semantic standard EN 16931 and layered a national implementation specification on top of it, RO_CIUS. That specification defines the mandatory fields, the business rules applied at upload and the Romanian particularities — the tax identification format, the way the country’s VAT rates are coded, how simplified invoices are treated.

Two consequences follow. First, an XML that validates against the plain European standard can still be rejected in Romania, because the national rules are stricter. Second, several fields your invoicing system treats as free text — the buyer’s identification, the unit of measure, the VAT category code — become controlled values drawn from a nomenclature. Cleaning up master data is normally the largest part of an implementation, not the technical connection.

Since 1 August 2025 the standard VAT rate is 21% and the reduced rate 11%, so the VAT category codes on invoices had to be updated as well. Systems still emitting 19% produce invoices that are wrong on their face.

Transmission deadlines and the five working day rule from 2026

The invoice must be transmitted to RO e-Factura within five working days from the date it was issued, or from the legal deadline for issuing it where the invoice was not issued in time. That wording comes from Emergency Ordinance 89/2025 (Official Gazette 1203 of 24 December 2025) and applies from 1 January 2026. Until then the term ran in calendar days. So what changed in 2026 is how the days are counted, for B2B and B2C alike — not the scope of the obligation.

Two practical notes. The term runs per invoice, not per period, so a monthly batch upload on the last working day will breach the deadline for everything issued earlier in the month. And the count is in working days, which means Romanian public holidays matter — they are not the same as the ones in your home country.

B2C invoices — invoices issued to individuals — have been inside the system since 1 January 2025, under Emergency Ordinance 69/2024, with the operative rules set by Emergency Ordinance 138/2024 and penalties applied from 1 July 2025. Where the buyer does not provide a tax identification number, a conventional code of thirteen zeros is used in its place. For a retail or marketplace business this was the bigger operational change, simply because of volume; the article on e-Factura, B2C and the transmission deadlines sets out the detail.

Penalties

Failing to transmit an invoice within the deadline is a contravention under Emergency Ordinance 120/2021. The fines are scaled by taxpayer category:

• RON 1,000 – 2,500 for small taxpayers;
• RON 2,500 – 5,000 for medium taxpayers;
• RON 5,000 – 10,000 for large taxpayers.

A separate and heavier sanction falls on the recipient: a buyer that records a B2B invoice which reached it outside the system is liable to a fine of 15% of the total invoice value. The rule in article 13^2(1)(b) concerns a recipient established in Romania and an invoice from a supplier also established in Romania; the reported invoices of a non-established company are outside it.

The indirect exposure is larger still. Where an invoice was required to pass through the system and did not, the buyer’s right to deduct the VAT on it is open to challenge. That turns a supplier’s process failure into a cash problem for the customer, which is why Romanian buyers increasingly refuse invoices that did not arrive through the system.

How we run e-Factura for you

The setup is done once. We register your access to the system in the Virtual Private Space, agree who signs and who transmits, and connect the invoice source — your ERP export, your invoicing platform, or an Excel file if that is what exists. Our generator converts the data into the RO_CIUS structure, validates it against the Romanian business rules, and uploads it.

The recurring work has three parts. Outgoing invoices are transmitted within the applicable term — issued through the system if you are established in Romania, or reported in parallel with your ordinary invoicing, for B2B transactions, if you are not — with the system response and the XML stored for you. Incoming invoices are collected from the system daily, matched against your purchase records and passed into the accounting file, so nothing sits unnoticed in the system while its VAT goes unclaimed. Reconciliation compares what went through e-Factura with what appears in the VAT return, the domestic transactions report and the SAF-T D406 file — because ANAF performs the same comparison.

The tax returns built on this data — the VAT return, the domestic transactions report, SAF-T — are prepared and filed by us, through the Virtual Private Space with our digital certificate, and you receive the ANAF receipts. If your team wants to stay hands-on with day-to-day invoicing, it can have its own access to issue and follow invoices in RO e-Factura, while we keep the validation and the reconciliation.

Specific situations

Marketplace and e-commerce sellers. Volume is the problem, and it has been a much larger one since January 2025, when B2C invoices entered the system for sellers established in Romania. The workable approach is a direct pipeline from the sales platform, with document numbering agreed in advance. The guide to e-commerce VAT in Romania covers the surrounding VAT treatment.

Self-billing. Where the customer issues the invoice on the supplier’s behalf, the obligation follows the party legally responsible for issuing. This has to be documented in the commercial agreement, because the system records who uploaded the file.

Non-established companies. Two flows run side by side. On the outgoing side, B2B invoices issued under your ordinary rules also have to reach RO e-Factura as XML, for reporting: the customer still receives your normal invoice, and the system receives the data. B2C invoices stay outside, and so do exports, intra-Community supplies and the other cases listed in article LIX paragraph (4) of Law 296/2023. On the incoming side, Romanian suppliers have been obliged since 1 January 2026 to pass the invoices they issue to you through the system; the practical requirement is a daily collection routine and an archive. Invoices in the system have a retention window; a company that does not collect them can end up without the original document supporting its VAT deduction. The article on e-Factura for non-resident companies goes through the legal basis, the exceptions and a worked deadline example.

Credit notes and corrections. A corrective invoice goes through the system like any other and references the original. Correcting outside the system leaves the sealed original standing on its own.

The errors we see most often

• Treating the PDF as the invoice. Once an invoice passes through the system, the sealed XML is the original; the PDF is a rendering.
• Batch uploads at month end, which breach the five working day term for every invoice issued earlier.
• Stale VAT rates in the invoicing system, still emitting 19% instead of 21% or 11%.
• Ignoring incoming invoices because the company’s own invoices are not issued through the system — the deduction depends on those documents.
• Confusing issuing with reporting. A Romanian VAT number without a fixed establishment does not move your invoicing into the system, but your B2B invoices still have to be reported there; establishment is what brings full issuing, B2C included.
• Unmapped partner data — a missing or malformed tax identification number causes rejection at upload, and the invoice is then not transmitted at all.