Access to Romania's UBO register in 2026: who qualifies and how to apply

If a compliance file needs the beneficial owners of a Romanian company, the first question is whether you can reach the register yourself. For most people asking in 2026 the answer is no, and the reason is a European reform that is half finished. This guide sets out where Romania stands, what the rules now require, and what the realistic options are while the rest catches up.

What changed, and when

Until November 2022 anyone could consult the beneficial ownership register of any EU member state. The Court of Justice ended that in joined cases C-37/20 and C-601/20, holding that open public access went further than privacy law allows. Registers closed across the Union, Romania's among them, and access narrowed to authorities, to entities with anti-money-laundering duties, and to anyone able to prove a legitimate interest.

The European Union then rewrote the framework rather than patching it. Directive (EU) 2024/1640 of 31 May 2024, the sixth anti-money laundering directive, governs how the registers work from here. Regulation (EU) 2024/1624 carries the obligations that apply directly to obliged entities. The two arrived together with the new Anti-Money Laundering Authority.

The dates that matter

The directive was staggered on purpose. Member states had until 10 July 2025 to guarantee access to beneficial ownership information, including for persons with a legitimate interest. The provisions on how the registers themselves develop were due by 10 July 2026. The general transposition deadline, at which the older directives are repealed, is 10 July 2027. A separate deadline of 10 July 2029 covers the single access point for real estate data.

One design choice behind the first deadline deserves attention from anyone who checks companies regularly. A legitimate interest, once accepted, is meant to be granted for a period rather than re-argued at every lookup, so that a compliance team running many checks does not build a fresh justification file for each name.

Where Romania stands

Behind. In a review published in September 2025, Transparency International counted fourteen member states with a functioning legitimate-interest regime. Romania was not among them. By that point the European Commission had opened infringement proceedings against eleven member states over incomplete transposition of the July 2025 deadline.

This is not a Romanian peculiarity, which is worth saying plainly. An industry review of the twenty-seven registers in 2026 found fewer than half serving the people the directive intended, and only twelve usable in practice by a compliance team based outside the European Union. The rest ask for national credentials that a non-resident has no way to obtain.

Who qualifies as having a legitimate interest

The directive names categories instead of leaving the question entirely to each registrar. They cover journalists, academics and civil society organisations working on money laundering; persons about to enter a transaction with the entity; obliged entities in third countries performing customer due diligence; third-country authorities with anti-money-laundering duties; and providers of anti-money-laundering products serving obliged entities. Outside the list, an applicant can still argue the case on its own facts.

Two points get missed. Being an obliged entity in your own country does not by itself open a Romanian door: you fall in the third-country category and you still file an application. And commercial interest in a competitor does not qualify under any heading, however carefully it is worded.

What an application to ONRC involves

Requests go through the Trade Register's online portal, which runs in Romanian. The file carries an identity document, a mandate where someone applies on another's behalf, and the evidence of the interest itself, usually the draft contract or the onboarding file that explains why you need to know. Staff review the file before anything is released. The answer comes in days, and a thin justification is refused.

The state fee is 20 lei for the current situation and 100 lei for the historical report listing every beneficial owner ever declared. The fee is the small part. The portal, the language and the review are where foreign teams stop.

What to do while the reform settles

Three routes work today, and which one fits depends on who is asking.

If the company is yours, its legal representative can obtain the extract without any legitimate-interest test, or mandate someone in Romania to file for it. Foreign shareholders usually meet this need during bank onboarding abroad, when the bank wants registry proof of the chain above a Romanian subsidiary.

If you are checking someone else and the question is who owns the company rather than who is the formal UBO, the Trade Register certificate answers the first layer with no access test at all: direct shareholders with their stakes, directors, status, registered details. Where a shareholder is itself a company, you pull a certificate for that one too. Romanian structures are usually two or three layers deep, so this reaches people more often than compliance teams expect. How to read one is in the guide to the Trade Register extract.

If the file specifically requires the UBO extract, we file the request ourselves as a registered reporting entity. The UBO extract is ordered here for 149 RON, about 29 euro, with nothing more than the company's tax number, and normally arrives by email in about ten minutes, electronically signed by the Trade Register, without anyone dealing with the Romanian portal.

What none of this changes

The extract reports what the company declared. If the shareholders changed and the declaration was never updated, the register shows the old names and the extract reproduces them faithfully. It is evidence of a filing, not an audit of reality, and a compliance officer who treats it as the latter will eventually be surprised. Where the stakes justify it, the extract is read next to the Trade Register certificate and the financial statements, which is the sequence set out in the due-diligence checklist.

Nor does any of it make the register public again. The 2022 ruling stands; the directive rebuilds access around a test rather than removing the test. Anyone promising you open search of Romanian beneficial ownership data in 2026 is selling something else, usually a copy of data scraped before the registers closed, which ages badly and is not signed by anyone.

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