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Buying a holiday home in Romania as a foreigner
What you may own depends on your passport, and land and buildings follow different rules. Farmland outside the village has rules of its own. What a notary does, what a power of attorney needs, and what you pay every year afterwards.
Published: September 13, 20265 min read
People ask us about the price of the house first and about ownership second, which is the wrong order. The house is the part we control and quote. Whether you may own the ground it stands on, and what you will have to sign to get there, is decided by your passport, by the plot and by a notary, long before any of it concerns us.
So this page is about that layer. We build houses and we are not a law firm: nothing here is legal advice, and every binding step goes through a Romanian notary, who is the person who actually carries the liability for it. What the house costs and how the build runs while you are abroad is a separate question, answered in our guide to turnkey prices and buying from abroad.
What you may own depends on your passport
| Who you are | Land | The building on it |
|---|---|---|
| Citizen of an EU or EEA country, or Switzerland | same terms as a Romanian citizen, the transition periods after accession having expired | yes |
| Citizen of a country outside the EU | normally not directly, unless a treaty between the two states provides for it | yes |
| A Romanian company, whoever owns the company | yes | yes |
The first thing to separate is land from buildings. Romanian law treats them as two different things, and that distinction is what makes the answer different for different buyers.
That is why buyers from outside the EU usually end up on one of two routes: a Romanian company that holds the land, or a right of superficies, which lets you own the building on ground belonging to someone else. Both are ordinary instruments here and both have consequences for tax and for resale, which is exactly the conversation to have with a notary or a lawyer before you pay a deposit on a plot, not after.
Farmland outside the village is a separate story
A cheap rural plot with a view is often agricultural land outside the built-up area, and selling that kind of land follows its own procedure under Legea 17/2014: a list of people, starting with co-owners and neighbours, has the right to buy it ahead of you, and the sale is published at the town hall so they can exercise it. This applies to Romanian buyers too. It is not discrimination against foreigners, it is a queue.
Two practical consequences. The purchase takes longer than a plot inside the village, and the seller may not be free to sell to you at all until the procedure has run. Before you fall in love with a view, ask whether the plot is intravilan or extravilan and what its category of use is.
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The plot is the risk, not the house
We have a fixed price for the house and a known process for it. The plot is where the surprises live, and they are the same surprises for a Romanian buyer: an unclear entry in the land registry, a right of way nobody mentioned, a neighbour with a claim, no legal access, utilities much further away than they looked.
Ask the notary for the land registry extract and read what it says about encumbrances. Ask the town hall for the urban planning certificate, which tells you what may be built there, how high and how far from the boundary. That document, not the estate agent, decides whether the design you like fits the plot. The permit path that follows is set out in our guide to the building permit for a holiday house.
The paperwork of being a foreigner
A sale of property in Romania is done by authentic deed in front of a notary and then registered in the land registry. That is not a formality you can arrange privately between two people, and a signed private contract does not make you the owner.
If you have no Romanian personal numeric code, you will need a fiscal identification number so the tax authority can register you, because from the moment you own a building you are a local taxpayer. And if you do not want to fly in for every signature, a notarised power of attorney lets someone act for you. Signed abroad, it will normally need an apostille and a translation by an authorised translator, so allow time for that rather than discovering it the week of the signing.
What you pay after you own it
A building in Romania carries an annual local tax paid to the town hall where it stands, and it is the owner who has to declare it after the house is finished. Nobody will chase you abroad to remind you, which is precisely why absent owners accumulate penalties on small sums.
The practical answer is to have someone reachable locally: a relative, a neighbour, an accountant, or a management company if the house is let. That is worth arranging while you are still in the mood for paperwork, not two years later.
What we do and what we do not
We design and build the house, we adapt the documentation of the design you choose to your urban planning certificate and we prepare the technical file for the permit. Our teams assemble anywhere in Romania, and for sites elsewhere in the EU the offer sets out either our own crew or a supervising engineer with a local one, which is described in the article on delivery across Europe.
We do not sell land, we do not act for you at the notary and we do not give tax advice. When a client asks us whether a plot is a good buy, the honest answer is that we can tell them whether we can build on it, which is a much smaller question than whether they should own it.
Can a foreigner own property in Romania?
Citizens of EU and EEA countries and of Switzerland buy land on the same terms as Romanians, the transition periods after accession having expired. Buyers from outside the EU normally cannot own land directly unless a treaty provides for it, but they can own the building, and commonly hold the land through a Romanian company.
Can I own the house without owning the land?
Yes. Romanian law treats land and buildings as separate, and a right of superficies lets you own a building on ground belonging to someone else. It is an ordinary instrument here, but it affects tax and resale, so have a notary explain the version you are being offered before you commit.
Why is buying a rural plot slower?
Agricultural land outside the built-up area is sold under Legea 17/2014, which gives co-owners, neighbours and others a right to buy ahead of an outside buyer, with the offer published at the town hall. It applies to Romanian buyers too. Ask whether the plot is intravilan or extravilan before anything else.
Do I have to be in Romania to sign?
No. A notarised power of attorney lets someone sign for you. If it is drawn up abroad it will normally need an apostille and a translation by an authorised translator, which takes time, so start it well before the signing date rather than the week of it.
What do I pay every year once the house is built?
A building carries an annual local tax paid to the town hall where it stands, and the owner declares it once the house is finished. Absent owners are the ones who accumulate penalties on small amounts, so arrange a reachable local contact while you are still dealing with paperwork.
What we do at the consultation
You send us the plot location and the urban planning certificate if you already have one, we go through the designs together, and you get a fixed price for the whole job. If you are still at the stage of choosing between a plot in the village and one outside it, tell us: the answer changes what you can build and how long the paperwork takes, and we would rather say so before you buy the land than after. How the panel is made and how the house goes up is on the technology page.
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