Fees and charges

What you are actually paying for at the notary

For the most common documents (powers of attorney, declarations, certifications) you pay the public notary's fee, to which VAT is added. For property transactions, however, the total sum paid at the notarial office comprises distinct components: the notary's fee, the tax on the transfer of ownership, which the notary calculates, collects and pays over in full to the State budget, and the charges for registering your right in the land register, collected on behalf of the National Agency for Cadastre and Land Registration.

The tax on the transfer of ownership and the land registry charges are not income of the notarial office. The notary collects them on behalf of the State and is responsible for paying them over, and on the payment document you receive each sum is shown separately.

How fees are set

Minimum notarial fees are set by order of the Minister of Justice, the Rules on fee scales for services provided by public notaries, published in Official Gazette no. 70 of 26 January 2024. A public notary may set a higher fee, depending on the complexity of the work, but never below the statutory minimum. Fees are set and collected in lei.

The fee covers the whole notarial service: advice and information for the document concerned, drafting and typesetting, the standard number of copies (one for each party, plus those for the archive and for the publicity registers), checks in the registers and in the land register, explanations of the legal effects of the document, the reporting required by law, and archiving of the document. You do not pay separately for each of these operations. For copies requested beyond the standard number, a sum of between 5 and 30 lei per copy is charged, depending on the number of pages.

For documents that can be valued in money, the fee is calculated as a percentage of the value you declare. For immovable property, if the declared value is lower than the minimum value set by the market study carried out by the Chambers of Public Notaries, the fee is calculated on the value in the market study.

For persons who are deaf, hard of hearing or deafblind, the notarial office provides free of charge, on request or of its own motion, an authorised sign language interpreter, up to 100 lei per hour.

Procedures with a fixed fee

For documents whose subject cannot be valued in money, the minimum fees are fixed amounts. Here are the most common ones:

To these fees is added the archiving fee: 10 lei per document for documents with a 10-year retention period and 20 lei for those retained permanently.

Sales and other property transfers

For the authentication of documents transferring ownership or creating other real rights over immovable property, the minimum fee is calculated in steps, by value bands:

Worked example: for a flat sold for 400,000 lei, the minimum fee is 2,805 lei plus 0.9% of the amount above 200,001 lei, that is roughly 4,605 lei. To this are added VAT, the tax on the transfer of ownership and the land registry charges, in accordance with the law.

For documents in this category, the archiving fee is 25 lei per document for 10-year retention and 45 lei for permanent retention.

Mortgages and other security

For the authentication of mortgage contracts and other movable or immovable security documents (most often the mortgage created in favour of the bank when taking out a loan), the minimum fee is calculated on the secured value, by bands:

Where the same claim is secured by several assets, through separate security contracts, the contracts following the first are charged at fixed amounts, between 150 and 1,500 lei, depending on the value.

Settling a succession

The fee for the succession procedure is calculated on the value of the estate, in steps, by bands:

For testamentary heirs who are neither the spouse nor relatives of the deceased within the degrees entitled to inherit, the fees are increased by 25%. In successive inheritances, the fee is set for each estate separately, and for the European certificate of succession 20% is added to the fee for the certificate of heir concerned.

Worked example: for an estate of 150,000 lei, the minimum fee is 1,205 lei plus 0.85% of the amount above 65,001 lei, that is roughly 1,927 lei per succession file.

The transfer tax and the land registry charges

In addition to the fee, on the disposal of a property the seller owes tax on the transfer of ownership, under Article 111 of the Fiscal Code. The notary calculates it, collects it at authentication and pays it over in full to the State budget: 3% of the transaction value for properties held for a period of up to and including 3 years, and 1% for those held for more than 3 years. If the value declared by the parties is lower than the minimum value set by the market study, the tax is calculated on the value in the market study, the same rule as for the fee.

No tax is owed on an inheritance if the succession is settled and completed within two years of the date of death. After that period, the heirs owe a tax of 1% of the value of the estate, one more reason not to put off opening the succession procedure.

For registering ownership in the land register, the charge levied by the National Agency for Cadastre and Land Registration is 0.15% of the value of the property for natural persons and 0.5% for legal persons, but not less than 60 lei. The notary collects it together with the other sums, and the application for registration in the land register is sent by the notary, of their own motion, after authentication.

As for land registry extracts: the land registry extract for authentication, on the basis of which the notary draws up the document, is charged at 40 lei, and the land registry extract for information, which anyone may request, at 20 lei.

The extract for authentication may be requested only by a public notary and blocks the land register for its period of validity of 10 working days; during that interval no other operation can be recorded against the property. It is your guarantee that the property you are buying is not sold to someone else in the meantime.

Procedures with a freely agreed fee

For some documents and procedures the law sets no minimum: the fee is agreed freely between you and the public notary. These include the granting of a certified date, notarial legal advice, loan-for-use contracts, tenancy agreements, engagement contracts, and documents concerning movable property. The fee paid for notarial legal advice is deducted from the final fee if the document is concluded at the same notarial office.

Translations

For translations carried out by public notaries or by staff of notarial offices authorised as translators, the minimum fee is 30 lei per page for natural persons and 35 lei per page for legal persons, with 15 lei for each additional copy. For urgent work, the charges are increased by 50% for translations carried out within 48 hours or on non-working days, and by 100% for those carried out within 3 to 8 hours.

Exemptions and reductions

Documents drawn up in order to claim social entitlements are entirely exempt from the fee, apart from material costs: declarations for obtaining unemployment benefit, social assistance and the State child allowance, declarations for grants, school supplies and hall accommodation for pupils and students, those for the entitlements of former political prisoners, war veterans and their widows, those for the entitlements of persons with disabilities, and declarations donating organs, tissues and cells.

Persons whose documents have been destroyed by a disaster pay no fee for reconstituting them, nor for the issue of certified copies, duplicates or archive copies of such documents, on the basis of the instruments proving the situation.

Reductions of up to 50% may be granted for the authentication of powers of attorney needed to collect pensions of any kind; fees are reduced by 30% for documents concluded under the „First home” programme and by 50% for documents transferring property in lieu of payment concluded under Law no. 77/2016.

If several reductions apply to the same document, only one is applied, the largest.

Registration and verification charges

Many notarial procedures involve entries in or checks of registers kept by other institutions. Their charges are paid through the notarial office, are shown separately on the payment document and are not income of the notary. Here are a few examples:

The national notarial registers, administered by the National Centre for the Administration of the National Notarial Registers (CNARNN - Infonot), record, among other things, succession options (acceptance or renunciation of an inheritance), authenticated wills, powers of attorney and their revocations, and matrimonial regimes. Entry in these registers is what makes it possible for your document to be found when it matters: when settling a succession, the notary is obliged to check whether the deceased left a will and what succession options were recorded. The entry and search charges of the registers themselves are set by their administrator and may be paid separately, for each register searched or in which an entry is made.

Where a company is a party to the document, the public notary checks its existence, its status and the persons who may represent it through a company information certificate obtained from the trade register, paying a charge levied by the National Trade Register Office. On the disposal of immovable property, authentication is carried out on the basis of the land registry extract for authentication, issued by the National Agency for Cadastre and Land Registration, on payment of the charge set by that agency.

Before you sign

The fee is communicated to you before the document is concluded, and for every sum paid you receive the payment document in which the components (fee, tax, land publicity charges) are shown separately. All the fees on this page are the minimum ones laid down by the Rules on fee scales, approved by order of the Minister of Justice and published in Official Gazette no. 70 of 26 January 2024.

Depending on the complexity of the procedure, the notary may set a fee higher than the minimum mentioned here. It is important to discuss with the notary, before requesting authentication, the charges that the procedure involves and that you will have to pay.