In short
- Domestic business-to-business invoices go through the state platform RO e-Factura, in scope since 1 January 2024.
- Consumer sales were added from 1 January 2025.
- The format is RO_CIUS, a national restriction of EN 16931 in UBL or CII — a European artefact with Romanian rules on top.
- The legal basis was a time-limited derogation. ViDA has since made that kind of basis unnecessary for domestic mandates.
Romania is the mandate to study if you want to see what happens when a tax administration moves fast. It went from an optional platform to compulsory clearance for all domestic business-to-business invoices in a little over two years, then added consumer sales twelve months after that. Read alongside the other national mandates and their dates, it stands out for how little time separated each stage, and for having got there by reusing a European format rather than inventing one.
What the obligation is
A taxable person issuing an invoice for a domestic supply to another business uploads it to RO e-Factura, the platform operated by ANAF. The platform validates the file, assigns it an index, and makes it available to the recipient. The recipient downloads it from the same platform. There is no network of accredited providers exchanging documents between themselves: the state is the hub.
That makes RO e-Factura a centralised design in the same family as Italy's exchange system and Poland's KSeF, and very different from the four-corner arrangement described in four corners versus five. The practical consequence is the same as in Italy: the question of whether an invoice exists is answered by the platform, not by the parties.
The timetable
- 2021-11RO e-Factura operational as a platform, initially for public procurement and on a voluntary basis for business-to-business invoices, under Ordinance 120/2021.in force
- 2022-07-01Compulsory use for business-to-business supplies of goods classed as high fiscal risk, under Law 139/2022.in force
- 2024-01-01Compulsory use for domestic business-to-business supplies generally, under Law 296/2023, authorised by Council Implementing Decision (EU) 2023/1553.in force
- 2025-01-01Consumer sales brought within the platform, under Emergency Ordinance 138/2024 as reported in the Commission's country factsheet.in force
- 2026-12-31The derogation granted by Decision 2023/1553 ceases to apply on this date, unless the ViDA transposition date arrives first.adopted
Dates as set out in the Commission's eInvoicing country factsheet for Romania and in the Council decision, both linked below. The factsheet lists the national instruments; ANAF is authoritative on the current text of each.
Two things stand out. The first is that the high-risk goods stage came before the general one, which is staging by sector rather than by turnover. The second is how quickly consumer sales followed: one year after the general business stage, at a point when most of Europe had no consumer e-invoicing obligation at all.
The format: European, restricted
RO_CIUS is a core invoice usage specification of the European standard EN 16931. It was approved by order of the Minister of Finance and can be carried in UBL 2.1 or in CII. That puts Romania on the European side of the line that matters most for a multinational: the semantic model is the same one used for public procurement across the Union, and the restrictions are layered on top rather than replacing it.
The restrictions are real, though. A CIUS can tighten cardinality, require fields the standard leaves optional, and constrain code values — all of which is explained in core invoice usage specifications and extensions. An invoice that validates against the standard can still be rejected by RO e-Factura, and the rejection message will cite a national rule. The implementation work is in the delta, not in the base.
The deadline that shapes the process
The law requires the invoice to reach the platform within a short, fixed period after issue — a matter of days, set by the national law, which ANAF publishes and which should be read in its current version. That window is the design constraint. It is long enough that the platform does not need to sit inside the invoicing transaction, which is why the Romanian model is sometimes described as post-issue clearance rather than real-time. It is short enough that a weekly batch is not compliant.
For a business with a Romanian entity, the question to answer is operational: what happens to an invoice that is rejected on day three? It has to be corrected, reissued and resubmitted inside the window, which means the exception has to be seen and worked in the same week. That is an exception-handling problem before it is a format problem, with less slack than most countries allow.
The recipient obtains the invoice from the platform. A buyer that continues to rely on the PDF sent by email is working from a copy that is not the legally relevant document, and will eventually post something that differs from what the administration holds.
The legal basis, and why it is about to matter less
Romania could only compel e-invoicing between businesses because the Council authorised it to derogate from the VAT Directive. Article 395 derogations are time-limited by design, and Romania's runs to 31 December 2026.
What has changed since is the VAT in the Digital Age package. Council Directive (EU) 2025/516 amended the VAT Directive so that a Member State may require structured e-invoicing for domestic transactions without asking for authorisation. The expiry of the Romanian decision therefore removes a legal crutch the national law no longer needs; it does not, on its own, switch anything off. The part of ViDA that will change Romanian practice is the later one — the alignment of national systems with the European standard and with digital reporting of cross-border supplies, discussed in the ViDA digital reporting requirements.
What to take from it
Romania is evidence that a clearance mandate can be built quickly on a European format, and that the speed is paid for by the taxpayer rather than by the administration. The format decision was the easy part. The hard part was a deadline counted in days, a platform that is the only source of truth, and a consumer stage that arrived before most businesses had stabilised the business one. Any project facing a similar timetable elsewhere should plan for exception handling first and format mapping second.
