The Employer Eligibility Test Behind Every Non-EU Hire in Romania: What GEO 32/2026 Actually Requires

Before a Romanian employer can file a single work permit application for a non-EU worker outside a licensed placement agency, the company itself has to clear a separate eligibility test. GEO 32/2026, Official Gazette No. 335 of 27 April 2026, sets out the conditions an employer must meet, and they are company-level conditions, assessed independently of how strong the individual candidate's file is. A well-prepared employee file does not rescue an application if the employing company does not qualify.

This is where a number of otherwise straightforward hires stall. HR teams often build the candidate's documentation, the job offer, the qualifications, the salary threshold evidence, and only discover the employer-side condition is unmet once the file is already with ANOFM. Checking employer eligibility first, before a candidate's visa clock starts running, avoids that delay.

The conditions, in full

Under GEO 32/2026, an employer seeking authorization to hire non-EU workers directly, rather than through a licensed placement agency, must demonstrate:

• No outstanding obligations to the consolidated general state budget
• No record of offences under tax, accounting, customs, or financial discipline legislation in the company's fiscal record
• At least 24 months of effective, uninterrupted economic activity before the application
• An average of at least 50 employees across the prior year
• No more than 20 percent of the foreign nationals employed in the prior year having had their long-stay visa cancelled or revoked
• A financial guarantee of EUR 1,000 per foreign national to be employed

Each of these is checked independently, and ANOFM does not average them out. A company with an otherwise clean compliance record but only 18 months of trading does not qualify yet, regardless of headcount or financial standing.

What "no outstanding obligations" actually means in practice

The condition is phrased in general terms in the ordinance, but it maps directly onto documents Romanian companies already deal with routinely. A company's standing with the consolidated general budget is what the fiscal certificate of attestation issued by ANAF confirms, and the absence of recorded tax, accounting, customs, or financial discipline offences is what the fiscal record of offences, the cazier fiscal, is designed to show. Employers who keep both current as a matter of course, rather than requesting them only when a filing is imminent, tend to move through this part of the process without surprises. A fiscal certificate that is several months old, or a budget obligation the finance team considers immaterial but has not actually settled, can be enough to stall an application at the employer-eligibility stage.

The 24-month and 50-employee thresholds

These two conditions exist to limit direct non-EU hiring authorization to employers with an established operating history in Romania, rather than newly formed entities. A company incorporated specifically to employ a small number of foreign specialists, without the broader headcount or trading history, generally falls outside this direct-hiring route and would need to work through a licensed placement agency instead.

For multinationals establishing a new Romanian entity as part of a broader expansion, this has a direct planning consequence: the entity's own operating history starts the clock, not the parent company's history elsewhere. A newly incorporated Romanian subsidiary cannot borrow the group's 24 months of trading from another jurisdiction to meet this condition.

The 20 percent visa-cancellation cap

This condition rewards employers with a clean track record on the foreign workers they already sponsor. If more than one in five of the foreign nationals a company employed in the prior year had their long-stay visa cancelled or revoked, the employer's authorization to hire further non-EU workers directly is affected. In practice, this means an employer's visa-cancellation history from past hires carries forward and can affect entirely unrelated, future applications. Keeping accurate internal records of permit and visa status changes for every foreign employee, not just the ones currently active, is worth building into standard HR recordkeeping rather than reconstructing retroactively when a new application is filed.

The EUR 1,000 financial guarantee

This guarantee applies per foreign national the employer intends to hire, and it sits alongside the other conditions rather than replacing any of them. It is a straightforward budgeting line for HR and finance to plan into the cost of each non-EU hire, but it is easy to overlook when an initial hiring cost estimate is built around salary, relocation, and permit fees alone.

A related compliance point worth flagging

Separately from the employer-eligibility conditions, GEO 32/2026-era guidance also carries a penalty for employment contracts concluded only in Romanian for non-EU workers: an administrative fine of RON 6,000 per contract. Bilingual contract templates became mandatory under related 2026 guidance, and it is a low-cost, easily avoidable compliance gap for an employer that has otherwise cleared the harder eligibility conditions above.

How Nestlers Group Supports Employer Authorization

Nestlers Group's Immigration Services team assesses whether a client company meets the GEO 32/2026 employer-authorization conditions before a single work permit filing begins, including verifying fiscal standing documentation, confirming the 24-month and 50-employee thresholds against the client's actual Trade Registry and payroll history, and tracking visa-cancellation history across a client's existing foreign workforce so it does not become an unexpected blocker on a future application. Our Consultancy Services team advises multinationals setting up a new Romanian entity on how the 24-month trading history requirement affects the sequencing of a broader expansion plan, including when a placement-agency route makes more sense as an interim measure. Where the financial guarantee and bilingual contract requirements intersect with onboarding, our Work Permit and Visa Support team coordinates the documentation alongside the ANOFM authorisation and permit filing itself.

Sources: GEO 32/2026, Official Gazette No. 335, 27 April 2026, employer authorisation conditions for direct non-EU hiring (PwC Romania tax and legal alert); administrative fine of RON 6,000 for non-bilingual employment contracts under related 2026 guidance.