“Se interzice însușirea proiectelor de către alte persoane decât cele care le-au elaborat.” Adopting a design is forbidden to anyone other than the people who produced it.
That sentence closes the definition of the building-permit design in annex 1 of the Codul urbanismului. It reads quickly and changes a lot. The rest of the definition says the design is produced “de colective tehnice de specialitate în funcție de specificul lucrării”, by specialist technical teams according to the nature of the works, and adopted and signed by qualified professionals in architecture, urbanism, construction and building services; the contents by stage are explained on the PAC page.
The signature is not a formality at the end
Three separate texts say the same thing from different angles.
Annex 1 forbids anyone other than the author from adopting the design. Article 294 paragraph (1), in the notification procedure, requires each specialist to produce the design “doar potrivit competențelor dobândite în condițiile legii pe domeniile de studii”, only within the competences lawfully acquired in their field of study. Article 259 paragraph (5) makes issuing the permit conditional on the works being designed by specialist technical teams and checked by certified design verifiers for the applicable fundamental requirements.
Together they describe a chain of liability in which every link is a named person. The firm does not sign. A person signs, for the part they are competent in.
What changes in practice for the client
If you buy a design, you are also buying the list of people who sign it.
The practice of taking an existing design and adopting it under a different signature was already questionable. It is now explicitly forbidden, in the annex that defines the document. And the ban is not about plagiarism, it is about adoption: whoever signs must be whoever produced it.
For a client, the useful question at contracting is no longer “will you do the design”, but “who exactly signs each part, and on what competence”. That difference matters when something goes wrong on site and someone starts looking for who is answerable.
The electronic signature is no longer a convenience
Article 270 paragraph (3) says that when filing digitally, the documentation is signed with a qualified or advanced professional electronic signature by the applicant and, as the case may be, by all the specialists the law requires. Paragraph (4) goes further for the technical documentation: a qualified electronic signature, obtained under Ordonanța de urgență a Guvernului nr. 140/2020.
This is an infrastructure detail with a real effect on the calendar. A qualified signature comes from an accredited provider, costs money and takes time, and if one member of the team does not have one, the file cannot be filed digitally. It is not something you sort out on the day you file.
For small rural houses, the content is reduced
Annex 3 sets a simplified framework content for authorising a single-family house in a rural area, up to ground floor plus attic and a built floor area of at most 150 sqm.
It is worth knowing it exists, because it is the only place where the code scales the documentation to the size of the project, and because the thresholds there are close to, but not identical with, those of the notification procedure in article 294. We wrote about those in our analysis of tacit approval and in the eligibility guide.
What remains to be checked
Whether the ban on adoption in annex 1 is actually checked at filing, or stays a rule on paper. Checking it means the authority comparing signatories against authors, and that cannot be done seriously without the professional registers connected to the platform. We wrote about the platform in the piece on the single national window, and about the documentation that closes the cycle in the electronic building logbook. What the designer signs for the permit and what they sign for execution are two different phases, discussed in the permit project is not the build project. Who checks the project, and when checking is not mandatory, is in when a project checker is actually required. How many written pieces actually get signed, and how that shifts from one procedure to the next, is in the technical report model and the wrong annex.
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.