What Romania's public officials own
A program read 388,876 wealth declarations filed in 2024 with Romania's National Integrity Agency, from police officers and judges to station masters and local councillors. The result is a portrait in numbers of the people paid from public money: what they earn, what they drive, how much land they hold, who they owe and the mistakes they make filling in the forms.
- Half of Romania's state employees earn under 5,935 lei a month, and that salary is almost their only income
- The state's car is a Volkswagen built around 2009; Dacia is only second
- One declarant listed 467 real-estate properties in a single form
- The biggest creditor of Romania's public officials is Banca Transilvania
- Loans worth 1,190.8M lei come not from banks but from private individuals, with no paper trail
- 1,156 state employees declared gambling winnings: among them, police officers, commissioners and inspectors
- Creditor banks appear spelled in 6,133 different ways: the full collection is in the bloopers chapter
Half of the state's employees earn under 5,935 lei a month
In the public sector, income means salary, almost exclusively: 90% of all declared money comes from wages. The median yearly salary income (the point where half earn less and half earn more) is 71,215 lei, roughly 5,935 lei a month: almost 20% above the economy-wide average net wage (4,959 lei in 2024, per the national statistics institute). The top pulls away from the rest, though: within the plausible range, the top 1% declare over 21,220 lei a month. And 64 declarations exceed 1,000,000 lei a year; those we set aside as edge cases.
Distribution of yearly salary income
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Where the declared money comes from
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Who brings the money home
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The biggest employers in the sample
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Where the pay is best
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Who pays the most salaries
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Volkswagen, not Dacia, is the state's car
Public officials own 397,538 vehicles: 7 in ten declarants list at least one. The national brand is only second: 56,271 Volkswagens against 40,006 Dacias. The "typical" state employee's car is far from new: half the fleet was built in 2009 or earlier, making it at least 15 years old.
The car brands declared most often
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How old the state's fleet is
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Property remains the favorite investment
The declarations list 388,814 buildings and 397,012 land plots. The declared farmland alone adds up to roughly 276,884 hectares, the equivalent of about 387,793 football pitches.
What buildings appear in the declarations
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What land appears in the declarations
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Who Romania's public officials owe money to
State employees declare 229,718 loans, totaling roughly 28,727.8M lei; 5 in ten declarants carry at least one. Their biggest creditor is Banca Transilvania, with 38,719 loans. And the Swiss-franc crisis still hasn't faded: 2,451 CHF loans appear in the declarations to this day, averaging 67,778 francs.
Which banks state employees are indebted to
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Debts, by currency
The money in the accounts
The creditor with no teller window: money borrowed from private individuals
In 8,684 debt entries the creditor is not an institution but a person: "natural person", in exactly those words, in 850 entries; someone's actual name, in another 7,834. Added up, these loans reach 1,190.8M lei: money with no bank contract, no public interest rate and no credit-bureau record. Perfectly legal and usually mundane (money from parents or friends). But precisely because it leaves no trace, a loan from a private individual is also the classic explanation in integrity cases for wealth that outgrows income. We gathered them all here, with the original document one click away.
The largest loans from private individuals
Who won at the bookies: gambling in the wealth declarations
The form has an income heading called "prizes and gambling". Once you set aside the academic prizes, scholarships and sports bonuses tucked in there, you are left with 1,156 state employees who listed gambling winnings in their declarations (their own or their family's), totaling 25.5M lei. Most come from sports betting: Superbet, Betano, Fortuna, Winner, Maxbet. Nothing illegal: bets are declared precisely because they are income. But the declared amount is deceptive: it's what they chose to write down, and 3 of them note on the form itself that these are gross withdrawals, not net profit; how much went into the account appears nowhere.
The operators that appear most often
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The largest declared winnings
Where the declarations come from and where the pay is higher
Bucharest dominates in volume, with 62,644 declarations, and in pay: the capital's median yearly salary is 15% above the national median. The deeper a county's color, the higher the value; hover over the map for details.
Declarations analyzed, by county
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Forms filled in by humans, with everything that entails
The declarations are filled in by hand, and the data shows it: implausible yearly salaries, the same bank spelled dozens of ways and 27,661 entries that say «salar» instead of «salariu». We didn't delete them; we put them on display: this is what public data looks like in its raw state.
«Salariu» vs. «salar»
The same bank, in every possible spelling
Salaries above 1,000,000 lei/yr, set aside
Search any declaration in the sample
All 388,876 declarations in one table: who, in what position, at which institution, with what income, cars, properties and debts. Behind them are 324,935 people; 49,885 of them filed several declarations in the same year (the annual one plus one on appointment or leaving office, or corrections); those carry a ×2 marker that groups them together. Search by name, institution or locality, and every name links to the original declaration.
| Name | Position | Institution | County | Type | Family income (lei/yr) | Cars | Properties | Debts (lei) |
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