Romania is gearing up for what could be a record year in the absorption and spending of EU Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) funds, as the government races to meet ambitious targets agreed with the European Commission.

At a government meeting on February 23 dedicated to the implementation of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP), Minister of Investments and European Projects Dragoș Pîslaru asked all ministries to submit, by the end of the week, updated progress reports and detailed implementation calendars to ensure an up-to-date overview of the plan’s status.

Romania is expected to absorb €10.65bn under the RRF this year — €7.12bn in grants and €3.53bn in loans — through three payment requests, only one of which has been submitted so far, in December. Together with around €5bn in cohesion funds, these inflows are seen as crucial both for fiscal consolidation and for sustaining economic growth.

The roughly €12bn in grants (around 3% of GDP) expected this year from the RRF and cohesion policy should allow the government to reduce the share of nationally financed investments and help bring the budget deficit down from 7.65% of GDP in 2025 to a targeted 6.2% this year. However, the effort also involves substantial co-financing and non-eligible expenditures. According to figures cited during the meeting, these amount to approximately €14bn.

“In the next six months, by the end of August, Romania must absorb almost €11bn, with investment projects completed and reforms implemented on time, in line with the calendar agreed with the European Commission,” Pîslaru said in a Facebook post after the meeting.

During the session of the Interministerial Coordination Committee for the NRRP, ministers reviewed measures at risk of delay and discussed corrective steps with the institutions responsible, which were asked to present firm implementation timetables.

The fiscal effort behind the plan is considerable. Secretary of State in the Finance Ministry Florin Zaharia said the 2026 budget will allocate up to 70% more funds than last year for NRRP-related spending, bringing the total envelope to around RON73bn (about €14bn), including co-financing and other non-eligible expenses. Local public authorities are set to receive the largest budgets in their history, enabling them to focus on implementing NRRP projects, he added.

Romania has a total of six payment applications under the NRRP. Two more requests are due to be filed in the coming months. The final two — applications no. 5 and 6 — are scheduled for submission in 2026, with the last one facing a hard deadline of September 30, 2026, according to the government.

Payment request no. 5 will include 28 targets and milestones related to the non-reimbursable component, while request no. 6 will cover 151 targets and milestones corresponding to both grants and loans.

The fourth payment request, submitted last December, amounted to €2.3bn net of pre-financing.