🇷🇴 Tax residency in Romania

Romania's tax residency test starts with the day count: 183 days or more in any 12-month period makes you a tax resident. Behind it sits the centre of vital interests test: if your permanent home, family, and main economic ties are in Romania, you can be deemed resident even below 183 days.

What builds that picture: real estate you actually use as a home, a spouse or children living in Romania, a company registered and actively managed here. None of these is decisive alone, but ANAF weighs them together, and a house plus resident family plus a local business is a settled case regardless of what the calendar says. The test exists precisely to catch people who stay just under six months while keeping their actual life and income base in the country.

The reason people care about Romanian residency at all: the flat 10% personal income tax, one of the lowest rates anywhere. Residents are taxed on worldwide income, so the 10% applies to your global earnings, not just Romanian-source income. Employment and freelance income sit at the flat rate. Dividends and capital gains follow their own separate rules and rates, so do not assume every income type lands at exactly 10%; check the treatment of each stream you have rather than extrapolating from the headline number.

Romania has no special digital-nomad tax regime, and it does not need one: the flat 10% is simply the standard system, which is what makes it competitive without any application, qualification, or sunset date. There is no exemption for foreign-source income, though. Resident means worldwide, at the flat rate.

On treaties: the US and Romania have an income tax treaty in force, which provides credit relief so the same income is not taxed in full twice; US citizens file US returns on worldwide income regardless of where they live. The UK-Romania and Germany-Romania double tax treaties likewise exist. What a treaty does is allocate taxing rights per income type between Romania and your home country and provide credits; your residency position under the treaty decides most of the outcome.

An accountant makes sense once your situation goes past simple freelance income: Romanian property, a registered company, investment income across borders, or genuine doubt about where your centre of vital interests sits. The flat rate makes the arithmetic easy, but classification (which income is what, and which country gets to tax it first) is where mistakes actually happen, and a local professional settles those questions cheaply relative to the penalty exposure.

The bottom line: over half the year in Romania, or strong home-and-family ties here, means 10% on your worldwide income.

This information is for educational purposes only and does not constitute legal or tax advice.