Romania Company Register: How to Search the ONRC Trade Register and Verify Romanian Companies (2026)

1. What is the Romanian company register?

Romania set up its trade register in 1990, under Law 26/1990. That law has since been repealed: the register now runs on Law 265/2022 on the trade register, in force since 26 November 2022. The register is kept electronically by the Oficiul Național al Registrului Comerțului (ONRC, the National Trade Register Office), a public institution under the Ministry of Justice. Under it sit the trade register offices, one in Bucharest and one in each of the 41 counties, each attached to the local tribunal and handling the filings for its area.

The law splits the register into three parts: one for companies (along with national companies, autonomous public corporations, economic interest groupings, and European companies), one for cooperatives, and one for natural persons trading in their own name. Every registered professional gets a trade register number, an EUID for cross-border use, and a CUI, the tax identification code assigned by ANAF, the tax agency, and printed on the registration certificate. The register also archives the filed documents, including annual financial statements. Registrar decisions are published in ONRC's electronic bulletin, and extracts of incorporation decisions also appear in the Official Gazette (Monitorul Oficial al României).

2. How to search the ONRC trade register step by step

By law, a short list of data on every registered professional is free. In practice you reach it through ONRC's services portal, which is in Romanian and lets you in only after you register as a user. Registration itself is free. Be warned that the portal has moved: when we tried to look up Dacia for this guide, the older entry points portal.onrc.ro and recom.onrc.ro returned error pages, even though ONRC's English website still links to the old address.

1. Start at myportal.onrc.ro

   The current portal is myportal.onrc.ro. Its home page lists the online services in three groups: the trade register, the beneficial ownership register, and the insolvency proceedings bulletin (BPI). Ignore older bookmarks to portal.onrc.ro.

2. Create a free account

   Clicking the information service sends you to an ONRC login page. You sign in with a username and password, or with ROeID, the Romanian state's digital identity login. New users register from the same page, free of charge.

3. Open the information service

   The service is labelled "Furnizare Informații RC - InfoCert-Recom", after the two services behind it: Recom online, which holds the free record, and InfoCert, which issues paid certificates. The home page also lists "Certificat constatator" as a separate entry.

4. Search by name, number, CUI, or county

   The free search takes four criteria: the name of the professional, the trade register number, the tax reference number (the CUI), and the county of the registered office. If you have the CUI, use it. It is one plain number, with no county code, year, or format to get right.

5. Read the free record

   You get the name and legal form, the registered office, the trade register number, EUID and CUI, the status, the website if there is one, and the legal representatives, including whether they may act alone or only together. Share capital, activity codes, shareholders, and contact details are not in the free part.

6. Order a certificate if you need proof

   For a formal document, order a certificat constatator through InfoCert. Payment is by Visa or Mastercard, you need no electronic signature of your own, and the electronically signed document is issued automatically, 24 hours a day. It costs RON 30.

3. What data is public and what it costs

Romania sets one national tariff for register information by order of the Minister of Justice. The current one is Order 380/C/2024, published in the Official Gazette on 19 February 2024. The list of data that must be free is set separately, in Article 12 of Law 265/2022.

Two things stand out. First, ONRC sells company lists by the row. A list of companies grouped by a criterion, say a county or an activity, costs RON 9 per criterion per company and gives you name, register number, registered office, status, and the criterion itself, with discounts of 30% from 101 companies, 60% from 1,001, and 80% above 10,000. Second, much of that same data is in the free open data, so check the open-data files before you pay for a list. Fees can be paid in cash, by card (POS), by bank transfer to the State Treasury, through the online portal, or from an electronic subscription set up with ONRC.

What you will not find in the free record: share capital, activity codes, shareholders, or any financial figure. Within ONRC's services, turnover, average employee numbers, and gross profit appear only in the paid Recom subscription, and only where the Ministry of Finance supplied them. ANAF, the tax agency, publishes the public information from annual financial statements through its own web services, queried by CUI and year, which is a separate system to reconcile with the register.

4. Romanian legal forms, briefly

The Companies Law (Law 31/1990) allows five company forms. Cooperatives and natural persons trading in their own name sit in their own parts of the register, and in ONRC's data the first letter of the register number shows the part: J for companies, C for cooperatives, F for natural persons. That letter is worth checking before anything else. An F number means a self-employed person, sole proprietorship, or family business, none of which is a legal person, so there is no company behind the name.

Many natural-person records registered up to 2008 carry the legacy legal-form codes PF or AF in the open data, rather than PFA, II, or IF. Some records also show a CUI of 0: most of them are old F-number records, but some J-number company records have it too. If you are matching a Romanian supplier list, expect those legacy codes and treat a CUI of 0 as a missing value, not a real number.

5. How to verify a Romanian company: a practical checklist

1. Confirm the CUI, the register number, and the name

   Search the CUI in the free component of Recom online and check that the name, legal form, and registered office match what you were given. Check the register number in whichever of its two shapes it appears. For a quick first pass, our free company lookup finds the registration and revenue data in one search.

2. Read the status, not just the existence

   A company that appears in the register is not necessarily trading. ONRC uses close to 200 status codes, from "funcțiune" (operating) through dissolution, liquidation, and "insolvență" (insolvency) to "radiată" (struck off). Anything other than "funcțiune" deserves a question.

3. Check who may sign

   The free record lists the legal representatives and says whether they may act separately or only together. Verify that the person signing your contract is on that list, and that they can bind the company alone.

4. Check VAT status and the inactive flag at ANAF

   A CUI does not mean the company is registered for VAT. ANAF's web service returns, for a given CUI and date, whether the company is registered for VAT purposes and whether it is flagged as an inactive taxpayer. An inactive flag is a serious warning sign for any supplier.

5. Order a certificat constatator for anything formal

   For a bank, a tender, or a large contract, a screen you looked at is not proof. A certificat constatator costs RON 30, comes signed electronically, and states the data recorded in the register when it was issued.

6. Look for insolvency and dissolution notices

   Search the insolvency proceedings bulletin (BPI) on the ONRC portal, and the electronic bulletin of the trade register, where registrar decisions and the court decisions recorded in the register are published.

7. Pull the history if the deal is large

   A historical report on the company costs RON 250. Recent changes of representative, registered office, or ownership shortly before a deal are worth asking about. For the people who ultimately own the company, the beneficial ownership register is open to anyone for a fee.

6. Limitations of the official register

To be clear: the free record covers the essentials, and the open data is useful to anyone who can handle large files. The limits show up when you want to check one company quickly, want financial data, or work outside Romanian:

• A login before the free data. The free component of Recom online costs nothing, but only after you create a portal account. When we tried to look up Dacia for this guide, the older entry points portal.onrc.ro and recom.onrc.ro returned error pages, and the information service on the new portal redirects to a login.
• Romanian only. The law has the register issue its information and certificates in Romanian, and the services portal is in Romanian. ONRC's website has an English version, but the register data does not.
• Two number formats. The same register uses J40/1116/1991-style numbers and compact numbers with no slashes side by side, so matching on the register number needs both patterns.
• Activity codes in several versions. ONRC's open data comes with a nomenclature for decoding the CAEN version, and it lists versions from 1998, 2003, 2008, and 2025. Existing companies move to CAEN Rev. 3 only when they file a request to update their activity or register another change, so old and new codes coexist.
• Financial data sits elsewhere. The free record holds no figures. Turnover and employees are in the paid subscription, where supplied by the Ministry of Finance, and ANAF publishes the financial statement indicators in its own systems.
• Big files, coded values. The open data is free, but the company file alone is close to 700 MB, values are separated by ^, and status and activity come as codes you decode with a separate nomenclature file.
• Old paperwork is converted on request. Documents filed on paper up to 31 December 2006 are only converted to electronic form when a registration application or an electronic request for copies of them comes in.
• Lists cost money. A list of companies selected by a criterion is a paid ONRC product, priced per company in the list. The free alternative is the open data, which you then filter yourself.

If you check one Romanian supplier a quarter, none of this matters. If you onboard hundreds, it is the whole problem.

7. Access Romanian trade register data programmatically

CompanyData maintains a normalized database of all 2,010,298 Romanian entities, sourced from the Romanian trade register and refreshed as new registrations appear. Records come back in one consistent structure, enriched with revenue, employees, and contact data where we hold them, data the free record on the ONRC portal does not show.

Our Company Data API lets you look up any Romanian entity by CUI, trade register number, or name and get structured JSON back in real time, with 150 free lookups to start and no portal account required. It is used by developers, banks, and insurers across 190+ countries, so Romanian checks work exactly like checks anywhere else.

GET /v1/companies?country=RO&name=Dacia

We show the request only. Our attempt to pull Dacia's record from the official portal for this guide ended on error pages, so there is no register-verified value to put in a sample response, and we would rather print none than invent one. Run the query yourself with your free lookups and compare the result with the free record on the ONRC portal.

8. Romania vs other company registers

Romania gives away its list of registered firms as open data and still makes you log in to read a single record. For context: