Hiring Thai welders in Romania: what the 2026 reform changed for employers

Why Romania, and why the timing matters

Romania is one of the largest legal importers of non-EU labour in the European Union, and for Thai industrial trades it carries one rare practical advantage: Romania keeps an embassy in Bangkok that issues the employment visa directly. The worker does not fly to a third country for an appointment, which removes a common two-to-four week delay from the schedule.

The demand is concentrated in metal. Welders appear on the 2026 shortage-occupation list under COR code 722106, explicitly covering MIG/MAG, TIG, pipe and structural welding, alongside masons, carpenters and industrial maintenance mechanics. Shipyards and steel fabrication on the Danube and the Black Sea coast carry most of that volume, and they are the employers who already know how to run a foreign crew.

The opening is narrowing, though. The quota for newly admitted non-EU workers in 2026 is 90,000, set by Government Decision 1169/2025 - 10% below the 100,000 of 2025. It is not divided by sector, it is consumed through the year, and it is the reason a file should be opened a quarter before you need people rather than in the month you need them.

The 2026 reform in one page

Emergency Ordinance 32/2026 took effect on 27 April 2026 and rebuilt the system rather than adjusting it. The separate work permit (aviz de angajare) is gone. Everything now runs through one state platform, WorkinRomania.gov.ro: employer registration, a single online application per worker for the visa, and ongoing reporting. The platform ran in testing until 7 August 2026 and became mandatory on 8 August. From that date an employer that is not registered on it cannot start a non-EU recruitment at all.

Two things replaced the old single work permit. The employer now has a formal status, and the worker now follows one of two visa routes. Those two facts decide almost everything else about your timeline, and they are worth settling before you agree headcount with anyone.

Status in October 2026: in mid-September the Bucharest Court of Appeal suspended the order that approved the shortage-occupation list (Order 1073/2026), on a challenge by the association of labour importers. Since 15 September the platform has paused employer registration, employer authorisation and new D/AM2 applications, and the Ministry of Labour has said it will appeal. No reopening date has been announced. A file can be prepared now and lodged once filing reopens.

Registered or authorised: which one are you?

A Registered employer may file D/AM1 workers directly, but its D/AM2 files have to go through a placement agency licensed by ANOFM, the national employment agency. An Authorised employer may file permanent D/AM2 workers directly. That status needs 24 months of uninterrupted activity, an average of at least 50 employees in the previous year, a clean record on safety and undeclared work, and a guarantee of EUR 1,000 per foreign worker. Both statuses carry continuing reporting obligations.

Read that as a practical fork rather than a formality. If you are a fabrication shop bringing in general welders for the first time, you are almost certainly a Registered employer whose D/AM2 files go through a licensed Romanian agency. We are not that agency: S.1968 is licensed in Thailand, so we recruit and test the welders, run the Thai side and prepare the worker file for whoever lodges it. If you already run foreign crews at scale, authorised status is worth the paperwork, because it removes the intermediary from every file you open afterwards.

D/AM1 or D/AM2: the choice that sets your timeline

The D/AM1 route covers highly qualified workers and special categories. It is not subject to the annual quota and not tied to the shortage occupation list. The D/AM2 route covers permanent, seasonal and cross-border general labour: it counts against the 90,000, and the occupation has to appear on the approved shortage list, correctly classified under its COR code, on the date the application is made.

For most welders the honest answer is D/AM2. D/AM1 is built for highly qualified staff, which in Romanian law generally means a higher-education qualification and pay at least at the national average gross wage. A welding engineer or a degree-holding inspector can fit it. A coded production welder, however experienced, normally does not.

We settle the track before anything is filed, because getting it wrong does not cost a week - it costs the quarter you spend discovering it. On D/AM2 the trade test still earns its place: the occupation code on the file has to match the work, and the EN ISO 9606 evidence we produce in Bangkok is what shows that it does.

Contract, housing and what gets you fined

The ordinance turned the job offer itself into a regulated document. It must state gross and net salary, working hours and conditions, leave and benefits, accommodation and transport arrangements, the taxes and contributions applied, repatriation conditions and occupational health protocols. Where a placement agency is involved there is a tripartite contract between agency, employer and worker, drawn up in Romanian and in the worker's own language.

Housing carries a hard number: a deduction for accommodation may not exceed 25% of net remuneration. Pay carries a floor: the national minimum is 4,325 RON gross a month from July 2026, up from 4,050 in the first half of the year.

Enforcement moved with the rules. Penalties now run from fines of 5,000 to 30,000 RON, often counted per worker, to suspension of activity, withdrawal of authorisation, removal from the electronic registers, and execution of the financial guarantee in serious cases such as worker exploitation or unauthorised activity. That is the practical argument for a documented, employer-pays route: the cheap version of this is now the expensive one.