Romania

Romanian citizenship is governed by Law No. 21/1991 on Romanian citizenship (Legea cetățeniei române nr. 21/1991), adopted on 1 March 1991, republished in the Official Gazette No. 576 of 13 August 2010 and amended repeatedly since — most recently by Emergency Ordinance No. 100/2024 (published 29 July 2024; its citizenship-card provisions applying from 1 September 2024) and by Law No. 14/2025, in force since 15 March 2025. Emergency Ordinance No. 16/2026, published on 13 March 2026, does not touch the citizenship law itself: it amends only Article XXI(1) of Law No. 14/2025, the transitional deadline for producing the language certificate. Anyone descended in an unbroken line from a Romanian citizen is in principle already a Romanian citizen by operation of law: under Article 5(2)(b) citizenship passes at birth through either parent, wherever the child is born, without generational limit. Such persons do not apply for a grant of citizenship; they document an existing status. Article numbering below follows the law as in force on 22 August 2026; Article XXIII of Law No. 14/2025 requires a republication that will renumber the whole text.

Where the line was broken because an ancestor lost Romanian citizenship, the law offers two re-acquisition ("redobândire") routes, both open to applicants living abroad and both allowing retention of the existing citizenship. Article 11 covers any person who was a Romanian citizen — however that citizenship had been acquired — and lost it for reasons not attributable to him/her, or from whom it was taken without his/her will, together with his/her descendants up to the third degree (children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren). Article 10 covers former citizens who lost Romanian citizenship on any basis, including voluntary renunciation, and their descendants up to the second degree. Article 11 in practice serves families from the territories lost in 1940 (Bessarabia — today largely the Republic of Moldova, with its southern part, the Budjak, in Ukraine — together with Northern Bukovina and the Herța region, also in Ukraine), and persons denaturalised by the citizenship revision of 1938 or by communist-era decree; Article 10 typically serves descendants of emigrants who renounced citizenship, for example those who left for Israel, Germany or the United States during the communist period.

The substantive conditions are modest but no longer nominal. Article 11 applicants must be at least 18, must demonstrate loyalty to the Romanian state and must be of good conduct without convictions rendering them unworthy of citizenship (Article 8(1)(b), (c) and (e)); Article 10 additionally requires lawful means of a decent existence (Article 8(1)(d)). Since 15 March 2025, applicants under both articles who were never Romanian citizens themselves must also prove knowledge of Romanian — by a certificate at level B1 of the Common European Framework, or by a legalised transcript showing at least three years of study in Romanian at a secondary or higher-education institution in the applicant's state of citizenship or residence (Article 15^1(4)); former citizens applying to regain their own citizenship, and applicants who had turned 65 at the date of filing, are exempt (Article 15^1(5)). For files already pending on 15 March 2025 the conditions of acquisition remain those in force at the date of filing (Article XIV(1) of Law No. 14/2025), and knowledge of Romanian is presumed until proof to the contrary (Article XV). No residence in Romania is required on these routes, and the integration interview on Romanian language, culture, the Constitution and the anthem (Article 8(1)(f) and (g)) does not apply; the Commission may, however, summon an applicant for a clarifying hearing on at least 90 days' notice, and unjustified non-appearance leads it to propose rejection (Article 15(4)–(6), applied by Article 15^1(6)). Article 12(3), introduced in 2025, provides that citizenship may be granted only where it is certain that every condition is met, any doubt leading to rejection. A separate route exists under Article 8^1 for persons who, through activities carried on regularly for at least three years before the application, have contributed exceptionally to protecting and promoting Romanian culture, civilisation and spirituality — it waives the residence requirement only, and still requires the full Article 8(1)(b)–(g) conditions, interview included. Ordinary naturalisation under Article 8(1)(a) requires long-term residence or permanent residence and eight years of lawful residence in Romania, reduced to five years for the spouse of a Romanian citizen living with that spouse, and reducible by up to three further years in defined merit cases.

Two distinct mechanisms reach back through the generations. The first is automatic transmission. Article 5(2)(b) of the current law confers citizenship at birth on a child born abroad where both parents or only one of them is Romanian, with no generational cut-off, so a person whose parent, grandparent and each intervening ancestor held Romanian citizenship at the relevant births is already a citizen. Whether each historical link actually transmitted, however, depends on the law in force at that birth, and the predecessor statutes were narrower: under Article 2 of Law No. 724/1924 and Article 4 of Law No. 86/1939 a legitimate child took the nationality of a Romanian father only, a Romanian mother transmitting to children born out of wedlock; under Article 2 of Decree No. 33/1952 a child of one Romanian parent was Romanian only if at least one parent lived in Romania at the birth, the parents deciding by agreement where both lived abroad; unconditional transmission through either parent to children born abroad dates from Article 6(b) of Law No. 24/1971. A female-line link before 1952, or a birth abroad to a single Romanian parent between 1952 and 1971, may therefore break a chain that looks unbroken on the face of the current law. The practical limit is in any event evidentiary: each link, and the absence of any loss before the next birth, must be proven.

The second mechanism is re-acquisition by descent from a former citizen. Here no unbroken chain is needed: the intermediate generations need never have held Romanian citizenship. The anchor is the ancestor who was a Romanian citizen and lost that status. If the loss was involuntary — above all the Soviet annexation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina of 28 June 1940 — descendants up to the third degree qualify under Article 11, so a great-grandchild of the former citizen may apply in his/her own right. If the loss was voluntary, descendants qualify only up to the second degree under Article 10, that is, down to grandchildren. Degrees are counted in the direct line: child first degree, grandchild second, great-grandchild third.

Great-great-grandchildren of a former citizen have no independent claim. Minor children are, however, included in a parent's application and acquire citizenship with the parent (Article 10(4), applied to Article 11 files by Article 11(2)), so a fourth-generation minor obtains citizenship if the third-generation parent applies while the child is under 18. Once a parent has re-acquired citizenship, children born afterwards are citizens automatically; children already adult at that point must, if eligible, file in their own right within the degree limits measured from the original former citizen, since a descendant who regains citizenship under Article 11 is not himself a person who "was a Romanian citizen and lost it" and so does not restart the count.

Whether an ancestor was a Romanian citizen is determined by the law in force at the time. The sequence is:

• 1865 Civil Code and 1866 Constitution: citizenship by descent (jus sanguinis) on the French model; naturalisation individually by Parliament. Until 1879 Jews were excluded from citizenship on religious grounds; from 1879 they could be naturalised only by individual act of Parliament, so most remained non-citizens until after the First World War.
• Law No. 724/1924 on the acquisition and loss of Romanian nationality, published on 24 February 1924 and in force until 31 January 1939 (the "Mârzescu" nationality law). Its Article 56 confirmed as Romanian, without formality, the inhabitants of the Old Kingdom and of the provinces united in 1918 — Bessarabia, Bukovina, Transylvania, the Banat, Crișana, Sătmar and Maramureș — as well as those recognised in the Caliacra and Durostor counties. By descent (Article 2), legitimate children took the nationality of a Romanian father regardless of birthplace and children born out of wedlock that of a Romanian mother; adoption had no effect on nationality. A foreign woman marrying a Romanian became Romanian.
• Law No. 86 of 19 January 1939 on Romanian nationality, in force from 1 February 1939 to 6 July 1948: replaced the 1924 law, kept the paternal descent rule for legitimate children, tightened naturalisation, and in its Article 2 forbade a Romanian to hold another state's citizenship.
• Law of 22 January 1938 for the revision of citizenship: a review of the citizenship registers that stripped large numbers of Romanian Jews of citizenship, extended by the anti-Jewish legislation of 1940–1944.
• 1940 territorial losses: on 28 June 1940 the USSR occupied Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. Under the transitional title of the 1924 law, inhabitants of communes passing under the sovereignty of another state lost Romanian nationality from the moment of retrocession unless they moved their domicile to Romanian territory or opted for Romanian nationality; 28 June 1940 is the reference date Romanian restitution legislation uses. Northern Transylvania was ceded to Hungary on 30 August 1940 (recovered in 1944 and confirmed Romanian by the 1947 Paris Peace Treaty); Southern Dobruja was ceded to Bulgaria by the Treaty of Craiova of 7 September 1940, permanently.
• Law No. 162 of 29 May 1947 on the citizenship of certain categories of inhabitants: the operative restitution statute. It abrogated the revision law of 22 January 1938 and declared the administrative decisions and court judgments given under it null by operation of law; it voided the renunciations signed by Jews between 15 December 1937 and 1 March 1938 and between 28 June 1940 and 23 August 1944; it gave a one-year window to have citizenship judicially established; and it extended its benefit to persons evacuated from the USSR who had held Romanian citizenship on 28 June 1940.
• Decree No. 125 of 7 July 1948 on Romanian citizenship: the law in force until 1952; its Article 2 barred a Romanian citizen from acquiring or benefiting from another citizenship without authorisation from the Ministry of Justice.
• Decree No. 33 of 22 January 1952: abrogated all prior citizenship laws. Its Article 2 made a child Romanian at birth where both parents were citizens; where only one was, the child was Romanian if at least one parent lived in Romania, and where both lived abroad the parents determined the child's citizenship by agreement. Its Article 7 gave the Presidium of the Grand National Assembly an unreasoned power to withdraw citizenship by decree.
• Law No. 24/1971: restated jus sanguinis under the Ceaușescu regime; its Article 6(b) introduced unconditional transmission through either parent to children born abroad, and its Article 19 set out broad withdrawal grounds against emigrants and defectors.
• Law No. 21/1991: the current law, in force since 5 April 1991, which introduced the restitution routes now in Articles 10 and 11. The extension of the involuntary-loss route from the second to the third degree dates from Emergency Ordinance No. 36/2009 of 21 April 2009, approved with amendments by Law No. 354/2009.

Historically, Romanian nationality was lost on the grounds listed in Articles 36 to 39 of Law No. 724/1924: naturalisation abroad; legitimation of a Romanian natural child by a foreigner; marriage, in the case of Article 38; accepting public office from a foreign government without Romanian authorisation; placing oneself under foreign protection for however short a time; withdrawal of naturalisation; and, under Article 37, entering foreign military service without government authorisation. The marriage rule was qualified: a Romanian woman marrying a foreigner became foreign except where the husband's law did not give her his nationality, or where she had reserved Romanian nationality by marriage contract or by an express declaration in authentic form made before or at the marriage; Article 39 allowed her to recover it on the dissolution of the marriage. The 1924 law also provided for loss on territorial retrocession, which is the mechanism engaged in 1940. Under the communist regime, Decree No. 33/1952 gave the Presidium an unreasoned power to withdraw citizenship by decree, and Article 19 of Law No. 24/1971 then set out grounds: hostile acts abroad or acts damaging the country's standing, enrolment in a foreign army or unauthorised foreign public office, clandestine or fraudulent departure, fraudulent acquisition, and being treated under foreign law as having acquired another citizenship without an approved renunciation. In addition, permission to emigrate — notably for Jews leaving for Israel and ethnic Germans leaving for the Federal Republic — was routinely conditioned on renouncing citizenship. Whether such coerced renunciations count as loss not attributable to the person (Article 11) or as ordinary loss (Article 10) is assessed on the file; losses imposed by decree or by the 1940 annexations are treated as involuntary.

Under the current law, Article 24 provides that citizenship is lost by withdrawal, by approved renunciation, or in other cases provided by law — the latter covering the narrow child-related situations of Article 7 (nullity or annulment of an adoption, subject to exceptions for five years' residence in Romania or resulting statelessness) and Article 30 (a foundling whose filiation is later established to foreign parents). Withdrawal under Article 25(1) reaches a person who enrols abroad in the armed forces of a state with which Romania has broken diplomatic relations or is at war; who is known to have links with terrorist entities, is involved in preparing or committing an act of terrorism, or has prepared or committed other acts that in law constitute threats to Romania's national security; or who obtained citizenship fraudulently. It is constitutionally impossible against a person who acquired citizenship by birth (Article 25(2); Article 5(2) of the Constitution). Renunciation under Article 27 is available only "for serious reasons", to adults who are not suspects or defendants in a criminal case and have no sentence to serve, who are not pursued for debts or have settled or secured them, and who hold or are assured of another citizenship; it is approved by order of the President of the National Authority for Citizenship. Voluntarily acquiring a foreign citizenship has never caused loss under the 1991 law.

For chain-of-transmission purposes, what matters is whether the ancestor still held citizenship when the next generation was born: an approved renunciation or a withdrawal before that birth interrupts automatic transmission, leaving the descendants to the Article 10 or Article 11 routes. A parent's renunciation extends to minor children only in defined situations — departure abroad with both parents, or with the custodial parent — and requires the consent of a child who has reached the age of 14.

Articles 10 and 11 are themselves the restitution scheme: after 1989 Romania enacted no separate reparations statute for citizenship, but the involuntary-loss route was designed to undo the 1940 Soviet annexation and communist-era denaturalisations, and Law No. 162/1947 had already restored citizenship to those denaturalised under the revision law of 22 January 1938 and the wartime legislation. Article 10(2) extends the second-degree route expressly to stateless former citizens. There is no ethnic-Romanian ancestry route as such — eligibility always runs through an ancestor's actual citizenship — though Article 8^1 offers a grant, filed also through consulates, for persons who have contributed exceptionally to protecting and promoting Romanian culture, civilisation and spirituality.

Several procedural rules matter in descent cases. Since 15 March 2025, applications filed by former citizens themselves under Articles 10 and 11, and applications by stateless persons, are decided with priority (Article 19^1(2)); other files may be prioritised with the approval of the Authority's President in duly justified cases, defined in Article 19^1(4) as the grave state of health of the applicant or of the minor children concerned, attested by their attending physician in Romania and where priority would have a direct positive effect, and the existence of imperative reasons of public interest. A person under judicial counselling or special guardianship, and a person who cannot swear the oath because of a permanent disability or a chronic illness, acquires citizenship from the date of the approval order rather than from an oath (Article 21(6)–(7)); the request and the supporting medical documents must reach the Citizenship Commission before it draws up its report under Article 18(1), and the citizenship card must be applied for within six months of communication of the order, failing which the order ceases to have effect. The rule under which a person who died before the oath was recognised as a citizen from the date of the order at the request of legal heirs stood in Article 21 until 14 March 2025; Law No. 14/2025 replaced Article 21 in full and did not carry it over, so it no longer exists.

Two transitional points are important for current files. First, applicants who file under Articles 10 and 11 after 15 March 2025 may produce the B1 language certificate after lodging the application, within two years of that date (Article XXI(1) of Law No. 14/2025, as extended from one year by Emergency Ordinance No. 16/2026); failure to produce it in time leads to rejection of the application as unsupported (Article XXI(2)). The Authority's own notice gives 14 March 2027 as the last day for filing the certificate, one day before the date the statutory two-year computation suggests, so the closing days of the window should not be relied on. Second, a child born abroad to a Romanian citizen is a citizen from birth and no registration deadline conditions that status; the foreign birth certificate must nonetheless be transcribed into the Romanian civil registers before Romanian identity documents can issue, and Law No. 119/1996 obliges the citizen to request transcription within six months of the foreign registration or of the acquisition of citizenship, though late transcription does not affect the citizenship itself.

Multiple citizenship is permitted without restriction on every route. Article 10(1) provides that citizenship is regained "with retention of the foreign citizenship" and Article 11(1) "with the possibility of retaining the foreign citizenship"; naturalisation under Article 8 carries no renunciation requirement; and acquiring a foreign citizenship causes no loss of Romanian citizenship. Applicants by descent are therefore never asked to give up their existing nationality.

This is a post-communist position. Article 2 of Law No. 86/1939 forbade a Romanian to be the citizen of another state; Article 2 of Decree No. 125/1948 required authorisation from the Ministry of Justice; and Article 19 of Law No. 24/1971 made acquisition of a foreign citizenship without an approved renunciation a ground of withdrawal. Decree-Law No. 137 of 11 May 1990 allowed former citizens who had lost citizenship before 22 December 1989 to regain it on a simple authenticated declaration, expressly even where they held another citizenship and did not establish domicile in Romania, and repealed the corresponding withdrawal ground in the 1971 law; the 1991 law generalised the position. The only caveat is external: the applicant's other state of nationality may itself restrict dual citizenship.

An Article 10 or 11 file must prove three things: the ancestor's Romanian citizenship, the applicant's descent from that ancestor, and the applicant's own identity and good character. The core of the file is the chain of civil-status documents — birth, marriage and, where relevant, death or divorce certificates or register extracts — for the applicant and for each ascendant back to the former Romanian citizen. The ancestor's citizenship is typically shown by pre-1940 Romanian civil-status records, entries in Romanian registers or other archival documents; for Bessarabian and Bukovinian families these come from Moldovan, Ukrainian or Romanian archives. The authorities may order any verification where there are elements raising doubts about the authenticity of a document or the truth of the data it contains, and may propose rejection where a confirmation sought from the issuing foreign state does not arrive (Article 16(6)); these checks are the main source of delay and justify the statutory extension of the decision period.

Formal requirements are strict and were tightened by Law No. 14/2025. The binding list of documents and the application forms are fixed by order of the President of the National Authority for Citizenship under Article 16(4); the order in force is No. 85 of 11 April 2025, published in the Official Gazette No. 349 of 22 April 2025.

• Civil-status proof must consist of original extracts issued no more than two years before filing, accompanied by legalised copies, or of original multilingual extracts under Convention No. 16 of the International Commission on Civil Status, signed at Vienna on 8 September 1976 and acceded to by Law No. 65/2012, likewise no older than two years (Article 16(3)). For files already pending on 15 March 2025 this applies only where there are elements raising doubts about the authenticity of the documents (Article XIV(3) of Law No. 14/2025).
• Documents drawn up or legalised by a foreign authority must bear an apostille or be superlegalised (Article 16(1)); legalised Romanian translations are required under the ANC order. Laminated civil-status certificates are not accepted.
• The applicant submits a legalised copy of the current passport and of the identity document — of every citizenship held — and an original criminal-record certificate, apostilled and with a legalised translation, from each state of citizenship and, if different, from the state of legal residence.
• The names and birth data in the civil-status documents must match the applicant's travel document; discrepancies must be rectified before the application will be registered.
• Applicants who were never Romanian citizens and had not turned 65 at filing add the B1 Romanian-language certificate — issued by Romanian universities accredited for the "Romanian language preparatory year" programme, by the Romanian Language Institute, by the Romanian Cultural Institute or by Romanian cultural institutes abroad — or the legalised transcript showing at least three years of study in Romanian.
• The application form is completed by hand in Romanian in front of the receiving officer and includes statutory declarations on the choice of domicile, on prior applications and on non-involvement in acts against the rule of law or national security, together with proof of prepayment of the citizenship-card price.

Persons who are already citizens by unbroken descent document their status differently: by transcription of the foreign civil-status certificates into the Romanian registers, for which Romanian missions also offer a prior verification of the applicant's legal status towards the Romanian state. Article 23 allows a Romanian mission or consulate to issue, in case of urgent need, a proof of citizenship valid 30 days that must state the purpose for which it was issued.

The competent authority is the National Authority for Citizenship (Autoritatea Națională pentru Cetățenie), subordinated to the Ministry of Justice and acting through its Citizenship Commission in Bucharest. Applications under Articles 10 and 11 are drafted in Romanian and filed in person (Article 13(1)), because facial images and two fingerprints are taken from every applicant, and from every child who has turned 14 at the date of filing, when the application is lodged (Article 13^2, in force since 1 September 2024). The only case in which another person may lodge the file is where a court has instituted judicial counselling, special guardianship or an equivalent capacity-restricting measure, and even then the applicant must be present (Article 13(2)). Files may be lodged at the Authority's headquarters in Bucharest or at its territorial offices in Galați, Iași and Suceava, or at a Romanian embassy or consulate in the applicant's country of domicile or legal residence, which forwards the file to the Commission (Article 13(3)). A prior appointment is required in every case, whether at the Authority or at a mission, and applications sent by post, fax or e-mail are not registered.

The procedure then runs: registration with the Commission's technical secretariat; a resolution of the Commission president fixing the date on which the file will be debated and ordering information to be sought from any competent authorities on the statutory conditions; where documents are missing, completion of the file within four months of the request, on pain of rejection of the application as unsupported (Article 15^1(3)); where the Commission considers a hearing necessary, a summons issued at least 90 days in advance, unjustified non-appearance leading it to propose rejection; a reasoned Commission report within at most two years of registration, extendable by up to six months where the authenticity of documents must be verified (Article 15(10)–(11), applied by Article 15^1(6)), a timetable that applies also to files already pending on 15 March 2025 (Article XIV(2) of Law No. 14/2025); and finally an order of the Authority's President. A rejection order may be challenged within 15 days of communication before the administrative-litigation section of the Bucharest Court of Appeal, whose judgment is final and open to recourse before the administrative-litigation section of the High Court of Cassation and Justice (Article 19(4)); a fresh application may be filed six months after a rejection. An applicant whose file is simply left undecided has a separate remedy, an administrative action for unjustified refusal to decide, which begins before the Bucharest Tribunal with recourse to the Bucharest Court of Appeal.

Citizenship is acquired on the day the oath of allegiance to Romania is sworn, not on the day of the order (Article 20(1)). The oath must be taken within one year of communication of the approval order (Article 20(2)) — a term introduced by Emergency Ordinance No. 100/2024 and retained by Law No. 14/2025, the previous term having been three months; a term that had already started running when either change took effect remained governed by the earlier rule. The one-year term is not subject to suspension or interruption, even for force majeure (Article 37^2(2)), and failure to swear means the order ceases to have effect (Article 21(1)). Applicants who keep their domicile abroad swear the oath before the head of the Romanian diplomatic mission or consular post (Article 20(14)); applicants settling in Romania swear it in an individual solemn session before the Minister of Justice, the Authority's President or one of the two delegated vice-presidents (Article 20(5)), the date being communicated together with the order. There is no examination on Romanian culture or the Constitution at any stage of the Article 10 and 11 procedure, although the B1 certificate that most descendant applicants must file is itself normally obtained by sitting a language examination. After the oath the new citizen receives a provisional citizenship certificate valid 60 days (Article 20(7)) and, within at most 60 days, the electronic Romanian citizenship card containing the holder's biometric data (Article 20(8)); minor children who acquire citizenship with a parent do not swear the oath and receive their own card (Article 20(11)). Applications lodged up to 1 September 2024 still lead to paper citizenship certificates issued in the form provided when they were filed, and those certificates have the same legal effects as the card (Article XX(3)–(4) of Law No. 14/2025). Since 15 March 2025 the new citizen is not merely entitled but obliged to obtain Romanian documents: a first Romanian identity document within one year if domicile is taken in Romania, a breach being punishable by a fine of 500 to 1,000 lei, and a Romanian passport mentioning the country of domicile within three years if domicile is kept or established abroad (Articles V and VI of Law No. 14/2025); the same one-year and three-year duties apply to persons who acquired citizenship before that date (Article IX).

The statutory timetable — a Commission report within two years of registration, plus at most six months for authenticity checks — is considerably faster than practice. On 4 February 2026 the Authority published average solution times by legal basis: about 2 years and 7 months for Article 8, about 1 year and 3 months for Article 8^1, about 2 years and 10 months for Article 10, about 3 years and 10 months for Article 11, and about 2 years and 5 months for minors in re-acquisition files. Applicants increasingly obtain court orders compelling the Authority to decide long-pending files: in decision No. 767/2026 of 27 February 2026 the Bucharest Court of Appeal dismissed the Authority's recourse against such an order in a file lodged on 24 October 2023, holding that the five-month term then in force was a term for verifying the conditions rather than for deciding the application, and observing that more than two years had in any event elapsed. After the oath, the citizenship card follows within 60 days. A passport applied for in Romania is normally issued in about five working days, up to ten in busy periods; a CRDS electronic passport applied for abroad, or collected at a Romanian mission, takes up to 45 working days where the mission is in an EU member state and up to 60 working days where it is in a third state, while the temporary CRDS passport is issued within at most three working days wherever the application is filed.

No state fee is charged for filing or processing an application under Articles 10 or 11, at the Authority or at a consulate; since 15 March 2025 Article 34 makes renunciation the only citizenship application subject to a statutory fee. The compulsory disbursements are these:

• Romanian citizenship card: 91.50 lei including VAT (about EUR 18) since 1 August 2025, previously 90 lei. It must be paid in advance and proof of payment must accompany the application (Article 22^1(4)); payment is made to the National Printing House, online or through a bank that has a convention with it, or through the consulate for files lodged abroad (Article 22^1(5)–(6)). The amount is set and updated by the National Printing House, so it should be re-checked before payment. It is refunded, on request to the Printing House within one year of communication of the order, where the application is rejected or the sum was paid in error (Article 22^1(7)); there is no refund where the oath is not taken in the form and conditions required (Article 22^1(8)).
• Oath and the provisional 60-day citizenship certificate issued at the ceremony: no fee.
• Passport: since 1 August 2025 a single fee of 265 lei (about EUR 52) for applications filed in Romania, whether for the electronic passport (valid 3 years under age 12, 5 years for ages 12 to 18, 10 years for adults) or the temporary passport (valid 12 months). Filed at a consulate, the simple, temporary and CRDS passports each cost EUR 53 under the consular-fee schedule made under Law No. 198/2008.
• Consular proof of citizenship under Article 23: EUR 30.
• For completeness, the reverse procedure: registration of an application to renounce Romanian citizenship costs EUR 605 at a consulate, against EUR 0 for registration of a re-acquisition application.

This page is not updated regularly, and it may not reflect the current position. It is a general account of Romanian citizenship law: statutes are amended, time limits expire, and the practice of the competent authorities moves without the legislation moving with it. Nothing here is legal advice, and nothing here is an assessment of your own family’s position.

Whether there is a claim in your case turns on names, dates and documents that no general page can take into account. The questionnaire is where we ask about them, and a lawyer in our citizenship team reads the answers.