Meal vouchers in Europe / Tichete de masa rules in Romania in 2026

Tichete de masa rules in Romania in 2026

Romania runs one of the largest meal voucher markets in Europe and has closed every route except the electronic one. Paper was abolished in 2023, cash is not an alternative because it becomes salary, and only issuers authorised by the Ministry of Finance may supply the vouchers. The daily ceiling is 45 lei.

Last reviewed: 2 September 2026. The 45 lei ceiling took effect in November 2025 and is reindexed from October 2026.

The ceiling and the charges

The maximum nominal value of a meal voucher is 45 lei per day, set by law 201/2025 amending law 165/2018. It applies from November 2025 through September 2026, and the value is reindexed from October 2026 under the mechanism in law 165/2018.

Romania therefore taxes the voucher more heavily than most markets covered here and still leaves a real advantage, because the value stays out of the base for the remaining contributions. The same money paid as cash becomes salary and attracts everything.

Only authorised issuers, and only electronically

Vouchers may be issued solely on electronic media, by units authorised by the Ministry of Finance. The ministry publishes the list of authorised issuing units, and the authorisation is granted per voucher type rather than once for a company.

That puts Romania alongside Italy, with its MIMIT register, and Belgium, with its five recognised issuers, rather than alongside Germany or Poland, where anyone may start. It is a smaller barrier than Bulgaria, which adds a national spending quota on top of the licence.

The affiliated network

An authorised issuer signs contracts on both sides: with the employers that buy the vouchers, and with the retail and hospitality networks that accept them. The voucher is spendable in that contracted network and nowhere else.

This is the same requirement that appears in Greece, Italy and Luxembourg, and it has the same consequence for product design. A card can reach merchants through a payment network while the acceptance decision stays with the programme, which is what open loop with restricted acceptance means and what the authorisation path looks like in practice.

The currency question

Romania is outside the euro area and the ceiling is expressed in lei. A euro denominated card works in Romanian shops but converts on every purchase, which is visible to the employee and awkward against a benefit whose value is quoted in lei.

A Romanian programme therefore wants a lei card. As in Czechia and Poland, that is a question about the issuing partner rather than about local law, and it is better settled before design than during a pilot.

What a Romanian programme has to get right

Track the reindexation, not the number. The ceiling moves on a schedule written into law 165/2018, and it moved to 45 lei in November 2025. A programme holding the value as a constant will be wrong at the next revision.

Count entitlement per working day. The voucher is a daily entitlement, so absences reduce it. A flat monthly load does not fit.

Handle the two charges cleanly. Income tax and the health contribution both apply, and payroll has to see the voucher value to compute them. A benefit that payroll cannot see is a benefit that gets reported wrongly.

Do not offer a cash fallback. Paying the value in cash converts it into salary with every deduction, which removes the reason for the programme.

Romania compared

Of the three authorised markets on this site, Romania is the most accessible. It has the register without the quota, the scale without the concentration, and it settled the paper question years ago.

Every dated change across Europe sits on the calendar. For the other large market outside the euro area, see Hungary.