Salary vs dividends: Romanian owner-manager 2026

The question, stated precisely

An owner-manager of a Romanian SRL who wants money out of the company has two principal routes and can blend them: salary (salariu, on a contract individual de muncă or a contract de mandat) and dividends (dividende, distributed from taxed profit). The choice is not a matter of taste. Each route carries a different combination of corporate-level tax, personal tax, and social contributions, and the cheaper route flips depending on income level, on whether the company is inside the microenterprise regime, and — since January — on a dividend-tax rate that is materially higher than it was.

This guide costs both routes in full for , identifies the income points where the answer changes, and is honest about the fact that the right answer is profile-dependent. There is no single winner. What follows is the arithmetic you need to find your winner, and the non-tax considerations — chiefly pension and healthcare entitlement — that a purely tax-driven answer ignores at its peril.

Salary and dividends are not two prices for the same thing. One buys you social entitlement; the other does not. Cost them as if that difference is free and you will mis-plan.

The dividend route, fully costed

Dividends are paid from profit that has already borne corporate tax, then taxed again in the shareholder's hands, then exposed to CASS. Three layers:

Corporate tax first. Either % of turnover under the microenterprise regime, or % of profit under standard CIT — the two are very different bases, and which applies is the pivot of the whole calculation.
Dividend tax: % withheld at distribution from ANAF January (Law 141/2025), up from % in and % before that. The company withholds and remits it to ANAF.
CASS: a fixed band charge, not a percentage — RON ,, RON ,, or RON , depending on total non-wage income, capped at RON ,. The mechanics are set out in full in our CASS-on-dividends guide.

Take a microenterprise turning over €, (roughly RON ,) at a healthy margin, distributing RON , of profit as a dividend to its sole owner. Corporate tax was % of turnover, about RON ,, already paid. On the RON , dividend: dividend tax RON ,, leaving RON , net; that net is above the top CASS floor, so CASS RON ,. Total tax and contributions on the extraction layer: RON ,, for RON , in hand. The dividend route's appeal is that the CASS is capped — on a large distribution the effective personal charge falls fast.

The dividend route's weakness is equally clear. It buys no social entitlement. The CASS paid grants access to the health system for the year, but the dividend generates no pension rights whatsoever — no stagiu de cotizare, no contribution to the punctaj that determines the eventual pension. A founder who takes only dividends for a decade has, at the end of it, ten years of income and zero years of pension record.

The salary route, fully costed

Salary is a deductible expense at the company level — it reduces profit, and for a standard-CIT company that is a % saving on every leu paid. But at the personal level it carries the full contribution stack: CAS %, CASS %, income tax %, plus CAM .% on the employer. The gross-to-net wedge is wide — roughly % — as set out in our employment-cost guide.

Cost a RON , annual salary to compare like with like. CAS takes RON ,, CASS RON ,; income tax is % of the RON , remainder (ignoring the personal deduction, which fades out well below this level), RON ,. Net in hand: RON ,. On top, the company pays CAM of RON ,, so the total cost to the company is RON , to deliver RON ,.

On headline numbers, salary looks worse than dividends: RON , net from RON , of company money, against RON , net from RON , of distributed profit. But three adjustments narrow or reverse the gap:

Salary is deductible. For a standard-CIT company, the RON , salary cost avoids % CIT it would otherwise have paid on that profit — worth about RON ,. Dividends are paid from already-taxed profit, so the corporate layer is a real cost the salary route partly escapes. (For a microenterprise taxed on turnover, salary is not deductible against the % — a crucial asymmetry, addressed below.)
Salary caps CAS in a sense the headline misses — there is no employee-side social-security ceiling in Romania, but the contributions buy pension and health entitlement rather than vanishing.
Salary satisfies the microenterprise employee condition. If the founder's salary is what keeps the company inside the % regime, its cost is doing double duty.

That last point is decisive for many owner-managers and is the reason the two routes cannot be compared in isolation from the corporate regime.

Where the CASS bands change the answer

The CASS bands on dividends create income ranges where dividends win cleanly and ranges where the advantage narrows. Because CASS is capped at RON ,, its drag on dividends is heaviest in the RON ,–, range and trivial above it.

Below RON , of non-wage income: dividends carry no CASS at all, only the % tax. In this range dividends are very cheap — but the founder building no pension record should weigh that against entitlement, not just cost.
RON ,–,: dividends carry a fixed CASS of RON , or RON ,. The effective total rate on dividends here is % plus a stepped charge — competitive with salary once salary's % of contributions is counted, but the band cliffs mean a badly-timed distribution can cost a full step.
Above RON ,: CASS is capped at RON , and its effective rate collapses. Here dividends pull decisively ahead on cost, because the personal charge is essentially % plus a shrinking fixed amount, while salary's % contribution stack runs flat all the way up with no ceiling.

So on cost alone, the pattern is: dividends dominate at high extraction levels where the CASS cap bites; the routes are close in the middle band; and at low levels dividends are cheap but pension-barren. The dividend tax calculator models the dividend side of this precisely, band and all.

Above the top CASS band, dividends win on cost and it is not close. The question there is whether you can afford to build no pension.

The January rise from % to %

This is the central, timely point. For most of the last decade the extraction calculus favoured dividends heavily, because the dividend tax was low — %, then % in –, then % in . Against salary's % contribution stack, a –% dividend tax plus a capped CASS was a rout. Founders paid themselves a token salary and took everything else as dividends, and the advice wrote itself.

Law / raised the dividend withholding to % from January — a % increase in that layer. That single change narrows the dividend advantage across the board and, for standard-CIT companies where salary is deductible, pushes the break-even point back towards salary. The dividend route now stacks % corporate (or % on turnover) + % dividend tax + capped CASS; the top two of those layers used to total –% and now total up to % before CASS. The gap that made dividends an automatic answer has closed considerably.

It has not reversed entirely. For a microenterprise — % on turnover, salary non-deductible — dividends still frequently win, because the corporate layer is tiny and the CASS cap protects large distributions. But the margin is thinner, and anyone still working from pre- "always take dividends" advice is costing themselves money.

The rise from % to % did not kill the dividend route. It ended the era when you could pick it without doing the arithmetic.

The pension and healthcare trade-off

Cost is only half the decision. The two routes buy different social entitlement, and this is where a purely tax-driven answer goes wrong.

*Salary builds stagiu de cotizare. The CAS paid on salary — % — is a pension contribution under Law 360/2023, the public pension law, administered by the CNPP. It counts towards the contribution record that determines eligibility and the punctaj that sets the pension amount. The law requires a minimum of years of contributions for any pension at all, and a full contribution period of years for an unreduced one, with the standard retirement age at *. Years on salary count; years on dividends do not.

Dividends build nothing towards a pension. A founder extracting solely through dividends pays CASS — which secures health-system access for the year — but makes no pension contribution, accrues *no stagiu de cotizare*, and adds nothing to the punctaj**. Ten years of dividend-only extraction leaves the founder with, in pension terms, ten empty years. For a founder in their s or s intending to retire in Romania, that is a real cost that never appears in a tax comparison.

Salary: CAS % buys pension entitlement (stagiu de cotizare + punctaj); CASS % buys health cover. Both count.
Dividends: the band CASS buys health cover for the year; no pension entitlement accrues at all.

This does not make salary right for everyone. A founder with a substantial pension record elsewhere, or one who will retire in another jurisdiction, or one who prefers to fund retirement through private investment rather than the Romanian state pension, may rationally value the entitlement at close to zero and optimise purely for cost. But that should be a deliberate choice, not an accident of following the cheaper headline. The healthcare side is less decisive — a minimum-wage salary or any CASS-triggering dividend both secure access — so the entitlement question is really a pension question.

The microenterprise interaction and the founder-as-employee

The corporate regime reshapes the whole calculation, and the microenterprise regime does so most sharply. Under Title III of Law 227/2015, a microenterprise pays microenterprise guide% on turnover and at least one full-time employee is a condition of the regime — not a rate selector. The former % band was abolished on microenterprise guide January ; a company without an employee does not pay more micro tax, it falls out of the regime entirely and pays % CIT on profit. The full mechanics are in our microenterprise guide.

For a solo founder, the required employee is frequently the founder themselves. *Article of the Codul Fiscal** accepts a contract individual de muncă, part-time contracts summing to full-time, or a contract de mandat or administrare paying at least the minimum wage. This changes the salary-versus-dividend question fundamentally: the founder's salary is not a discretionary extraction choice but a structural requirement of the % rate. The only real question is how much* salary — a minimum-wage contract to satisfy the condition at least cost, or more.

The usual optimisation for a microenterprise owner-manager is therefore a hybrid: a minimum-wage salary (RON , rising to RON , in July ) that satisfies the employee condition, builds a modest pension record, and secures health cover, topped up with dividends for the bulk of extraction, positioned to land inside a favourable CASS band. Note the asymmetry that makes this work: because the microenterprise is taxed on turnover, the salary is not deductible against the % — so there is no tax saving from paying more salary, only the entitlement it buys. That argues for keeping the salary at the minimum needed to hold the regime, and taking the rest as dividends where the CASS cap protects larger sums. The employment-cost guide costs that minimum-wage salary in full.

For a standard-CIT company, the logic inverts: salary is deductible against % profit tax, so paying salary carries a corporate-level saving that a microenterprise's does not, and a higher salary component often makes sense. The regime is the first thing to fix; the extraction mix follows from it.

Worked examples at three income levels

Concrete cases, all for a sole owner-manager of a microenterprise (% turnover tax, salary non-deductible), taking the stated total out of the company in . Figures rounded; euro conversions indicative at RON/EUR ..

Modest extraction: RON , a year

All dividends: dividend tax RON ,; net RON ,; that net is in the first CASS band, so CASS RON ,. Personal charge RON ,; net in hand RON ,. No pension accrues. Minimum-wage salary (RON ,/yr) plus RON , dividend: the salary is required anyway to hold the regime, and it builds a full year of stagiu de cotizare; the small dividend top-up stays below the RON , CASS floor, so no dividend CASS. Here the hybrid is close on cost and far ahead on entitlement — an easy call.

Middle extraction: RON , a year

All dividends: tax RON ,; net RON ,; top CASS band, RON ,. Personal charge RON ,; net RON ,. Minimum-wage salary plus ~RON , dividend: salary contributions ~RON , (buying entitlement), dividend tax RON ,, dividend CASS RON , (second band, since the salary's CASS does not shelter the dividend). The hybrid costs a little more in total but buys a pension year and health cover. This is the range where the answer is genuinely close and turns on how much you value entitlement.

High extraction: RON , a year

All dividends: tax RON ,; net RON ,; CASS capped at RON ,. Personal charge RON , — an effective rate of .%. Salary at this level would attract % of contributions with no ceiling — roughly RON , — so dividends win decisively on cost. The rational structure is a minimum-wage salary to hold the regime and secure a pension year, with the entire remainder as dividends. At high extraction, the CASS cap makes dividends the clear cost winner and the only question is the token salary needed for the regime and entitlement.

The honest answer: it depends on your profile

There is no universal winner, and any adviser who gives you one without asking about your income level, your corporate regime, and your retirement plans is selling a template rather than advice. The defensible generalisations for are narrow:

At high extraction (above ~RON ,/yr), dividends win on cost because the CASS cap bites — pair them with a minimum-wage salary for the regime and a pension year.
In the middle range, the routes are close post-%, and the deciding factor is usually entitlement, not headline cost.
For a microenterprise, salary is non-deductible, so keep it at the minimum the employee condition requires and extract the rest as dividends; for a standard-CIT company, salary is deductible, tilting the mix towards more salary.
*If you will draw a Romanian pension, salary's stagiu de cotizare has real value* the tax comparison omits; if you will not, you may rationally optimise for cost alone.
The rise to % narrowed the dividend advantage — re-run any pre- plan.

The practical upshot for most owner-managed Romanian SRLs is a hybrid: a minimum-wage salary that satisfies the microenterprise condition and builds entitlement, plus dividends sized and timed around the CASS bands. But the precise split is yours to calibrate against your own numbers — which is exactly what the dividend tax calculator and the microenterprise calculator are built to help you do.

Frequently asked questions

Is it cheaper to pay myself in salary or dividends in Romania in ?

On cost alone, dividends usually win at higher extraction levels because CASS is capped at RON , while salary contributions of % run flat with no ceiling. In the middle range the routes are close, and below RON , dividends carry no CASS at all. But salary is deductible for a standard-CIT company and builds pension entitlement, so the cheapest route is rarely the whole answer.

How did the dividend tax rise change the calculation?

The dividend withholding rose from % to % on January under Law / — a % increase in the dividend tax layer. This narrowed the long-standing cost advantage of dividends over salary and pushed the break-even towards salary, especially for standard-CIT companies where salary is deductible. For microenterprises taxed on turnover, dividends still often win, but by less than before.

Do dividends build a Romanian pension?

No. Dividends generate no stagiu de cotizare and add nothing to the punctaj that determines your eventual pension under Law /. Only salary, on which CAS at % is paid, builds pension entitlement. A founder taking only dividends for years accumulates income but zero pension record, and needs years of contributions for any pension and for a full one.

Can my salary satisfy the microenterprise employee condition?

Yes. The microenterprise regime requires at least one full-time employee as a condition of the % rate, and the founder can be that employee via a contract individual de muncă or a contract de mandat paying at least the minimum wage. When the founder’s salary is what keeps the company in the % regime, its cost does double duty — extraction and eligibility at once.

Is salary deductible for a microenterprise?

Not against the tax. A microenterprise is taxed on turnover at %, so salary — like all expenses — does not reduce the tax base, unlike a standard-CIT company where salary is deductible against % profit tax. This asymmetry means the salary-versus-dividend maths differs sharply between the two regimes, and the regime has to be fixed before the extraction question can be answered.

What mix of salary and dividends is optimal?

It is profile-dependent. A common pattern is a minimum-wage salary — enough to satisfy the microenterprise employee condition and build some pension record — topped up with dividends for the bulk of extraction, positioned to land inside a favourable CASS band. But the right blend depends on total income, the corporate regime, your pension horizon, and whether you value entitlement over headline cost.

Talk to us

The salary-versus-dividend answer turns on your income level, your corporate regime, and how much you value pension entitlement against headline cost — which is why it is worth modelling rather than guessing. We cost both routes against your actual figures, position the mix around the microenterprise condition and the CASS bands, and file the resulting salary and declarația unică correctly. Fees are at /pricing/; to model your own extraction, write to us at /contact/.

Related guides

CASS on dividends: the 2026 thresholds — the band mechanics that decide the dividend side
What it costs to employ someone in Romania in 2026 — the salary side, fully costed
The 1% microenterprise regime in Romania — why the founder is often the required employee
Personal tax and the 16% dividend rate for 2026 — the rate rise that moved the balance
Romanian SRL formation: the complete 2026 guide — the company both routes extract from

Salary versus dividends for a Romanian owner-manager