Payment Processing · Buyer guide
Until the end of 2025, whether a Romanian business had to take cards depended on how much cash it handled. That threshold is gone. Since 1 January 2026, under amendments that Law 239/2025 made to Government Emergency Ordinance 193/2002, every person or company registered at the trade register — an SRL, a PFA, a sole trader — must accept payments made through modern payment methods. The fine for not complying is 20,000 to 50,000 lei, and refusing to accept a modern payment method is a separate offence, fined at 5,000 to 7,500 lei.
Romania already has the hardware. The National Bank of Romania counted 729,408 card terminals and 28.63 million active cards at the end of 2025, according to figures reported in May 2026. What follows is what taking a card actually costs, read from the providers' own Romanian price pages on 29 October 2026, along with RoPay, the bank-to-bank alternative, and the rules on surcharges and cash.
ANAF's summaries of the 2026 tax changes set out the scope. The obligation applies to the persons listed in article 4(1) of Law 265/2022 on the trade register, which covers companies, authorised individuals (PFA), sole proprietorships (II) and family businesses (IF). Two kinds of business are exempt: those that make and receive every payment exclusively through bank accounts, and those whose points of sale are in areas with no electronic communications coverage.
The law does not say you need a card terminal. A modern payment method is defined as debit, credit or prepaid cards, as well as apps that start an account-to-account payment order. On that wording, a bank-transfer scheme such as RoPay also satisfies the rule. In practice most shops will want a card reader, because that is what customers carry.
Romania applies the EU Interchange Fee Regulation, which caps the interchange a card's issuing bank receives at 0.2% of a consumer debit card payment and 0.3% of a consumer credit card payment. Viva.com's Romanian price list states those figures for domestic transactions, and BRD's tariff list for business clients, valid from 21 September 2026, describes them as the maximum thresholds set by law. Business cards and cards issued outside the EEA fall outside the regulation's caps. Above interchange come the card schemes' fees and then the provider's margin, which is where the offers below differ.
Larger merchants can negotiate interchange-plus pricing from Adyen (A-), which publishes only a global card price of interchange plus scheme fees plus 0.60% and a fixed processing fee, not a Romanian one.
Take a shop with 800 card payments a month of 50 lei each, all on Romanian consumer cards: 40,000 lei of takings, below myPOS's 50,000 lei ceiling. On the published prices, before VAT on any subscription:
The bank's rate is the lowest here by a wide margin, and that is the pattern across Romania: the app providers win on speed of sign-up, no long contract and next-day or instant payouts, while the banks win on price once you already hold their business account. Revolut's percentage is the lowest of the app providers but its fixed fees are not: on a 50 lei payment the 0.52 lei it adds is worth more than the percentage itself, and with the plan it comes out the most expensive here. It suits larger tickets. Credit, business and foreign cards change every figure, so run the sums on your own card mix.
The published online prices for a domestic consumer card, read on 29 October 2026:
On 200 online orders of 150 lei, 30,000 lei a month, that works out at about 337 lei at myPOS, 417 lei at Netopia, 540 lei at Revolut, 650 lei at Stripe, 717 lei at Viva.com and 825 lei at SumUp. Mollie's comes to 360 lei plus €50 in fixed fees.
RoPay is the instant account-to-account scheme run by TRANSFOND, the Romanian interbank clearing house. The customer pays from their own bank's app by scanning a QR code, following a link or giving a phone number, and the money moves between bank accounts without a card network in between. Ten banks list it on ropay.ro, including Banca Transilvania, BCR, BRD, CEC Bank, ING, Raiffeisen and UniCredit.
It is cheaper than a card. BRD's tariff list from 21 September 2026 charges merchants 0.25% on RoPay payments, by QR code or by e-commerce link, whether the payer banks with BRD or elsewhere. ING publishes 0% on RoPay payments from its own customers and 0.25% from other banks' customers, valid until 1 July 2027, for merchants that already use its POS, SoftPOS or e-commerce service. Fees at the other banks were not published where we could find them. The catch is reach: RoPay works only with Romanian bank apps, so it complements a card reader rather than replacing one.
Article 144 of Law 209/2019 on payment services forbids a payee from asking the payer for any extra price or fee for using a particular payment instrument. That goes further than the EU minimum, which bans surcharges only on consumer cards with capped interchange and on SEPA payments: in Romania it also covers business cards and American Express.
Law 70/2015 forbids giving customers any advantage for paying in cash, with a fine of 15,000 to 20,000 lei. So a Romanian shop can neither charge extra for a card nor knock money off for cash. The same law limits cash: between a business and a private individual, 10,000 lei a day to or from one person, and between businesses, 5,000 lei a day per person, with no more than 10,000 lei a day paid out in total. Cash held at the end of the day above 50,000 lei must be banked within two working days, or 500,000 lei for supermarkets, hypermarkets and cash-and-carry stores. If its acquirer's contract provides for it, a shop may also give a cash advance at the card terminal of up to 500 lei and charge the cardholder no more than 1% of it, with a sign displaying the cost.
Other EU countries apply the same interchange caps with different local prices; see our guides to Poland, the Czech Republic and Austria.
