🇷🇴 Notary Fees Explained: What You Actually Pay in Romania
Published 21 August 2026 · 6 min read · By the BecomeHH Team
Buy the same-priced apartment in Bucharest instead of Barcelona and your notary bill is roughly a sixth the size. Romania's total buying costs are the lowest of any of the 17 countries BecomeHH tracks — and the notary fee itself is a big reason why.
If Spain and France taught you to fear an 8–10% notary bill, Romania will surprise you. Here's exactly how the fee is worked out, and why it stays so low.
The headline number: about 1.5%, resale or new-build
Per the Uniunea Notarilor Publici din România (the national notary chamber), notary and registration costs in Romania run close to 1.5% of the purchase price — and unlike France, that figure doesn't change much between an existing apartment and new-build. It's a fraction of what the same line item costs in Western Europe.
How the tariff scale actually works
Romanian notary fees aren't a flat percentage — they follow a regressive tariff scale set by the notary chamber, meaning the percentage charged gets smaller as the transaction value climbs through successive tiers. A lower-value tier is charged at a higher rate (roughly 2%+), and each additional tier above it is charged at a progressively smaller rate. Blended across a typical apartment purchase, that works out to an effective rate around 1.5% — which is the figure used across BecomeHH's calculators and country data.
This tiered structure is common in civil-law notary systems (it's part of why France's own notary fee — separate from its transfer tax — is also regressive), but Romania's tiers and base rates are set meaningfully lower, and critically, Romania's transfer tax component is far smaller than France's or Spain's, which is the real driver of the gap between countries.
What's actually included
The notary's role in a Romanian purchase covers verifying the seller's title via the land-book extract (extras de carte funciară), drafting and authenticating the final deed, and submitting the registration to the Cartea Funciară (land register) — the step that legally transfers ownership. Registration itself carries a small separate fee on top of the notary's own tariff, but it stays modest relative to the total price.
Enter your target price and get the full Romania buying-cost breakdown alongside 16 other countries.
Open the Hidden Buying Costs CalculatorWhy Romania is the outlier of the dataset
Across BecomeHH's 17-country comparison, Romania's combined notary-plus-agent buying cost sits at roughly 3.5% of the price — versus 14.0% in Spain and 11.5% in France. On a €300,000 apartment, that's the difference between paying about €10,500 in Romania and €42,000 in Spain for the equivalent step in the process. The notary's own tariff explains only part of that; the bigger driver is that Romania simply doesn't levy a large ad-valorem transfer tax the way Spain's ITP or France's droits de mutation do.
Sources
Uniunea Notarilor Publici din România (notari.ro) and ANAF (anaf.ro) — official notary tariff schedules and tax rules, verified July 2026. Tariff tiers are periodically revised — always confirm the current schedule with a Romanian public notary before budgeting a purchase. Educational content, not legal or financial advice.