Guide to day labourers: which sectors you can legally use them in, the electronic register, payment at the end of the day, the tax withheld by the beneficiary and the duration limits.
Translated from Romanian. This article covers Romanian labour and tax law; the Romanian version is canonical and is updated first.
Day labour (munca zilierilor) is the legal solution for occasional activities — but it is also one of the areas most frequently used wrongly, as a “simpler alternative” to an employment contract. And used outside the permitted sectors, it becomes undeclared work. Here are the exact rules.
A day labourer (zilier) is a natural person who performs unskilled activities of an occasional nature, for a beneficiary (beneficiar), in return for remuneration paid per day. The relationship is not an employment relationship: there is no individual employment contract, no CIM (contract individual de muncă) is concluded and nothing is reported in REGES (the General Register of Employee Records).
That is precisely why the law frames it strictly. If the activity is permanent, skilled or outside the permitted sectors, the correct form is the employment contract — and using day labourers becomes an attempt to circumvent labour legislation, punishable as such.
You can work with day labourers exclusively in the sectors provided by law. Among them:
The list can be amended by normative acts — check it before you start, because using day labourers outside it is an administrative offence.
This is the beneficiary’s central obligation. You must:
Registration before work starts is essential: a day labourer found working without being registered is treated as a person without legal employment paperwork.
The law caps both the individual’s activity and that of the beneficiary:
Exceeding these caps turns the relationship into one that should have been an employment relationship.
Towards day labourers, the beneficiary has occupational health and safety obligations: training appropriate to the activity, protective equipment where applicable, safe working conditions. Day labourer status does not suspend health and safety obligations — and an accident involving an untrained day labourer has the same consequences as one involving an employee.
In which sectors can I use day labourers? Only in the sectors exhaustively listed by Legea 52/2011 — agriculture, forestry, fish farming, extensive animal husbandry, events and catering for events, restaurants and bars, hotels, landscape maintenance, artistic activities and archaeological research, among others.
Is an employment contract needed for day labourers? No. The relationship is not an employment relationship and is not reported in REGES. Instead, daily registration in the electronic register of day labourers, before the activity starts, is mandatory.
When is the day labourer paid? At the end of each working day. Deferring it to the end of the week or of the period is possible only with the written agreement of the day labourer.
Who withholds the tax for day labourers? The beneficiary. The tax is withheld from the gross remuneration and paid over by the 25th of the following month.
Does a day labourer get a pension and health insurance? Not through this activity. The day labourer does not acquire insured status in the public systems on the basis of day labour, unless they contribute separately.
See also employee time records and the Labour Code and ITM inspections in 2026.
Day labour runs through the electronic register of the Labour Inspectorate, but the beneficiary is still left with a practical problem: the internal record of who worked, how many days, in what period and how much they were paid — plus tracking the day caps, so as not to exceed them without noticing.
Workly keeps this operational record alongside the rest of the workforce: time tracking by day and location (including through the Kiosk with a QR code or NFC card for large seasonal teams), the cumulative days per person and per period, and the payment history — the data you need both to fill in the register correctly and to demonstrate at an inspection that you have observed the caps. The health and safety training documents for day labourers go into the same digital archive, with configured retention.
Informational article, accurate at the date of publication. Not legal or tax advice. The permitted sectors, the day caps and the tax regime for day labourers are amended by normative acts — always check the framework in force (Legea 52/2011 and its implementing rules, Inspecția Muncii) or consult a specialist.
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