Having a permit annulled in court is the nightmare nobody budgets for. The works are up, the money is spent, and the document they were built on disappears retroactively. The Codul urbanismului deals with the situation in a single article, and its wording repays a careful reading, because it does not say what people expect.
What the text says
Article 364 paragraph (1): where buildings have been erected under a permit annulled by a court, the court may order that they be kept, at the request of the holder of the annulled permit, if they were carried out in accordance with the legal provisions and applicable planning rules and if they meet the fundamental quality requirements for construction.
Three things follow from that, in the order that matters.
First: keeping the building is not ordered of the court’s own motion. It is conditional on a request from the holder. If nobody asks, the question does not arise.
Second: the court may, not must. Even with the conditions met, the text leaves a margin.
Third, and most important for anyone building now: the conditions concern the works, not the document. Compliance with planning rules and the fundamental quality requirements is judged against what was actually built.
How compliance gets proved
Paragraph (2) answers that: the court orders, of its own motion or at the request of an interested party, a specialist technical report, to establish whether the legal provisions and applicable planning rules were observed.
So the evidence is not the permit file, it is an assessment carried out on the building. What a technical report involves and who may produce one is covered in technical expert reports on existing buildings.
From here on this is interpretation
We do not know how the courts will apply this article, because it is new. What can be observed is what it shifts in terms of incentives.
If keeping the building depends on the works being compliant, then site discipline becomes an insurance policy against a legal risk that is not of your making. A project executed exactly as in the approved documentation keeps a chance. One with quiet deviations, however small, however tolerated in practice, arrives in front of a court with nothing to show.
That overturns a habit. Execution deviations are usually treated as a matter between the beneficiary and the builder, to be settled at handover or through a modification permit, which is covered in the modification permit. Article 364 makes them relevant in litigation the beneficiary may not initially even be party to.
A second observation concerns who asks. The holder of the annulled permit is the one who must request that the building be kept. If the property has been sold in the meantime, the question of who is the holder at that point has no obvious answer in the text.
What happens to works without a valid document, on the administrative route, is on the page about bringing works into legality; the window the code opens for regularisation is covered in the one-year window.
This article is analysis, not legal advice. The provisions cited are from Legea 169/2026, published in Monitorul Oficial no. 661 of 10 August 2026. Check your own situation with the issuing authority.