The complete list of documents required for hiring in Romania: what the employee brings, the contract and the job description, the REGES deadline and the personnel file.
Translated from Romanian. This article covers Romanian labour and tax law; the Romanian version is canonical and is updated first.
Hiring someone new starts with a list of documents. It looks like a formality, but each document has a precise legal role — from proof of identity to the guarantee that the person is medically fit for the job. Beyond the file, there is also a strict deadline for reporting to the state, and missing it turns a contract that is valid on paper into a case of undeclared work.
This guide goes one by one through the documents brought by the employee, the documents drawn up by the employer, the obligation to submit to REGES and the personnel file.
Before the contract is signed, the employer needs a set of basic documents, valid for almost any position:
Depending on the situation, the following may also be needed: a length-of-service certificate from the previous employer, civil status documents that affect certain entitlements (deductions, allowances) or supporting documents for people with disabilities.
The Labour Code (Codul Muncii) allows, under strict conditions, the employment of young people between 15 and 16 years of age, but only with the written consent of the parents or legal representatives, and the work must be suited to the minor’s physical development, aptitudes and knowledge, without endangering their health or their education. The consent is a mandatory document in the file, alongside the other standard documents, and is kept for the entire duration of the contract.
Once the documents above have been gathered, responsibility passes to the employer, who must prepare:
This is the most sensitive point in the whole hiring process, because it is what separates “legal work” from “undeclared work”.
Under art. 34 of the Labour Code, the employer is obliged to keep a general register of employee records (REGES-Online), in which individual employment contracts are registered. The exact submission deadline is set by HG 295/2025 (art. 5(1)(a) — the implementing act, currently in force): the data on the new individual employment contract must be submitted to the Territorial Labour Inspectorate no later than the day before the employee starts work. In other words, the contract must already be officially registered before the person actually sets foot in the workplace — not on the same day, and not “by the end of the week”.
If this deadline is missed, the work performed by that person before the submission to the register is treated as undeclared work — one of the most heavily penalised breaches in Romanian labour law, no matter how correct the rest of the file is.
Important warning: the rules on REGES-Online and the reporting deadlines may be amended by subsequent legislation, and their application depends on the specific situation of each contract (type of contract, amendments, suspensions). Do not rely solely on this article for compliance. Always check the current deadline on the official REGES-Online portal, in the consolidated text of HG 295/2025 and of the Labour Code, or with a labour law consultant/expert, before hiring anyone.
All the documents above — those brought by the employee and those drawn up by the employer — are gathered into a personnel file, which the employer is obliged to keep for the entire duration of the contract and, afterwards, in accordance with the archiving periods laid down by law.
The file may be kept physically (a folder at the company’s premises) or electronically, as long as the content is complete and accessible. Important: it must be made available to labour inspectors, on request, during an ITM inspection. Missing documents from the file, even if the work is correctly declared in REGES, can attract separate penalties relating to how personnel records are organised.
Besides the “standard” documents, certain positions require specific ones:
These documents do not replace the general ones above; they are added to the file, depending on the nature of the position.
Romanian labour law treats undeclared work as one of the most serious breaches an employer can commit:
The correct order of the steps — complete documents, contract signed, submission to REGES before the first day — is not bureaucracy for its own sake; it is direct protection for the company.
The process has many points where errors can creep in: a missing document in the file, an incomplete job description or — the riskiest of all — a late submission to REGES, out of haste or inattention.
Workly keeps a digital employee file, with the documents centralised in one place and personal data encrypted, in line with GDPR principles. The individual employment contract is generated automatically from the data already entered in the file, with an electronic signature option, removing the need to re-enter the same information by hand.
The REGES integration is designed to submit the contract before the employee’s first day of work, exactly within the window required by law — reducing the risk of missing this deadline because of a manual process. The hiring moment, the generation of the contract and the official reporting therefore all start from the same source of data, with no steps forgotten along the way.
Informational article, accurate at the date of publication. Not legal advice. The rules on hiring documents, on the content of the personnel file and, in particular, on the deadline for submitting the contract to REGES-Online, may be amended by subsequent legislation. Before relying on this article for compliance, always check the official sources (the Labour Code, the updated HG 295/2025, the REGES-Online portal, the ITM) or consult a labour law specialist.
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