The context, in two sentences: article 294 of the Codul urbanismului (the Romanian planning and construction code) sets out which works may be carried out on the basis of a notificare, a notification rather than a permit, and article 296 provides for aprobarea tacită, care produce efecte de la împlinirea unui termen de 15 zile lucrătoare de la primirea notificării, tacit approval, taking effect once fifteen working days have passed since the notification was received. Exactly which works qualify, with the floor-area limits and conditions, is on the simplified notification page.
Fifteen working days is about three weeks. Set against the usual course of a building permit, that sounds like a large change. We think it is smaller than it sounds, and it is worth explaining why.
Tacit approval compresses the step that was never the slow one
Opinion from here on.
The term in article 296 applies to a single step: the authority’s decision on a notification it has already received. It does not apply to anything that happens before that point.
A file does not usually stall on the final signature. It stalls on avize, the sectoral approvals. It stalls at ISU, the fire-safety authority, when the works fall into the categories requiring a fire-safety approval. It stalls on the cadastral position, when the land’s paperwork is not clean. It stalls with the designer, when the certificat de urbanism asked for something other than what the client expected and the design has to be redone.
None of those stages is touched by the fifteen working days.
What we expect to happen
Two things, pulling in different directions.
For small rural works that qualify for notification and need no avize, the procedure really will be significantly faster. That is a genuine gain, and it is precisely the population of works the mechanism was designed for.
For everything else, we expect total time to change little, because the part that was compressed was not the part that was slow. And if the public impression becomes “it takes three weeks now”, the gap between expectation and reality will generate more frustration than the old procedure did, since the old one at least promised nothing.
What would actually change the arithmetic
Not the notification term, but the terms on avize. As long as an approval can run late without consequence, compressing the final step moves the bottleneck one step earlier rather than removing it.
The code gives a hint about the real calendar: under article 583 paragraph (4), every authority and body issuing avize, agreements and authorisations has 120 days from the code’s publication to update its own procedures. Publication was on 10 August 2026, so that lands in early December 2026. Until then, the part of the process that genuinely takes time is still reorganising.
We will come back with figures once there are real files that have been through the procedure. Until then any estimate of duration, ours included, is a supposition about a text rather than a measurement.
What to do concretely
Check first whether your works actually qualify for notification, under article 294 and the floor-area limits set out there. If they do not, the speed being discussed does not apply to you, however much it is discussed. We have written an eligibility guide in do you qualify for simplified notification, the deadlines for the whole route in the order of steps, and the avize that stay on the critical path in our analysis of the approval commission.
This article is analysis, not legal advice. Provisions are cited from Legea 169/2026, published in Monitorul Oficial no. 661 of 10 August 2026. Romanian legal terms are kept in the original, because the Romanian text is the one that governs.