In 2025, the mayoralties of Ungheni district, in western Moldova, issued 313 permissive acts for construction — building permits and urban planning certificates — according to the briefing note of the district’s chief architect, presented on Tuesday, 4 August, at the joint working meeting of the district president and the head of the Ungheni Territorial Office of the State Chancellery with the mayors and the heads of the district’s public services.
The document also announces a deadline that changes the procedure for everyone: from 1 January 2027, permissive acts will be issued exclusively in digital form.
What was issued in 2025
The note, signed by chief architect Dumitru Cucu, breaks the acts down as follows:
| Document | Number |
|---|---|
| Urban planning certificates for design | 150 |
| Building permits | 95 |
| Demolition permits | 32 |
| Informative urban planning certificates | 31 |
| Change-of-use permits | 5 |
| Total | 313 |
The text of the note speaks of “over 300 permissive acts”; the figure of 313 is the sum of the rows in the table.
The urban planning certificate for design, the most numerous of them, is the first step whenever a building needs permissive acts: the document by which the mayoralty establishes what may be built on a plot, and how, before the design is drawn.
The acts are issued by the mayoralties, and the role of the district’s chief architect and of the municipal enterprise “Biroul de proiectări, arhitectură și sistematizări”, the district’s design and architecture bureau, is, in the note’s wording, to have “supported and helped” them in issuing the acts. The Urban Planning and Construction Code provides for two situations in which the district level steps in at the issuing of the certificate: for complex objectives — transport and communications trunk lines, industrial buildings — located on the land of several administrative-territorial units, the certificate is issued by the second-level authority, on the basis of the opinions of the mayoralties on whose territory the works are to be built; and where the mayoralty has no post of chief architect, the certificate is signed by the district’s chief architect or by the architect of the inter-community development association to which the locality belongs. The process involves cooperation with, among others, the Ministry of Infrastructure and Regional Development, the Environment Agency, the Ungheni Public Health Centre, the Office for Land Management, Urban Planning, Construction and Housing, and the Archaeological Agency.
The note covers only 2025, and public notes with equivalent figures for 2023 or 2024 do not appear on the District Council’s website — so the 313 acts have, for now, no benchmark for comparison.
From 2027, the acts are issued only digitally
The deadline is written explicitly in the note: “from 01.01.2027, all permissive acts will be issued only digitally”, through SIA GEAP — the automated information system for the management and issuance of permissive acts, as the Urban Planning and Construction Code calls it.
That is less than five months away.
The fees are set under Government Decision no. 578 of 21 August 2024.
The basic rule and the exception that covers almost the whole district
The note restates the principle: permissive acts are issued only on the basis of approved urban planning documentation — a general, zonal or detailed urban plan.
There is, however, a newer route for small villages: the rural urban planning scheme, regulated by Government Decision no. 600 of 28 August 2024, which allows an urban planning certificate to be issued where the village has fewer than 3,000 inhabitants and has no urban planning documentation.
How much this threshold matters in Ungheni: of the district’s 33 administrative-territorial units, only five are above 3,000 inhabitants — the municipality of Ungheni and the communes of Pîrlița, Sculeni, Petrești and Măcărești. The other 28 are below the threshold, according to a newsroom calculation on the provisional data of the National Bureau of Statistics for 1 January 2026. The smallest are Măgurele, with 380 inhabitants, Năpădeni, with 524, and Teșcureni, with 594.
The figure is a conservative threshold: the law refers to villages, while the statistical data are at commune level, and a commune may comprise several villages. Măcărești, the last one above the threshold, is only 106 inhabitants away from it.
What you can build without a permit, and what happened to the amnesty for houses without documents
In their consultations with the public, the chief architect and the head of the municipal enterprise “Biroul de proiectări, arhitectură și sistematizări” focus on two articles of the Urban Planning and Construction Code:
- Article 150 — the list of works that may be carried out without permissive acts.
- Article 387 — the procedure for registering in the Real Estate Register buildings erected after 1996 without a building permit or design documentation, or in breach of them.
The first article contains a provision that concerns most of the district’s villages directly: individual houses of one storey, smaller than 150 square metres, for one or two families, erected on privately owned land in rural localities may be built without an urban planning certificate and without a permit — except for those in protected areas.
The exemption, however, concerns only those two permissive acts. The construction, the acceptance on completion and the use of such houses remain subject to a government regulation — Decision no. 585 of 21 August 2024 — the design documentation is not optional, and quality control over the works falls to the mayoralty’s specialised structure.
The second procedure is not open to every building. The Code restricts it to individual houses of no more than two storeys and their household outbuildings within the built-up area, erected after 1996 and functional as of 30 January 2024, as well as to holiday homes of no more than two storeys on the land of fruit-growing associations. Registration is made on the basis of a notarially authenticated declaration by which the owner assumes responsibility for the safety of the building, accompanied by a certificate on the erection of the building, issued by the mayoralty; and if the setback from the boundary of the plot was not observed, the neighbours’ notarised consent is required as well. A note is entered in the Real Estate Register that cannot be removed for as long as the property exists: that it was built without urban planning documentation, or in departure from it or from the technical construction regulations.
The law prohibits registration by this route, among other things, if the dwelling was erected in a flood-prone area or an area at risk of landslides, in a protected area without the authority’s consent, in the protection zone of a road or of utility networks without the consent of those responsible, or on someone else’s land without the owner’s written consent.
⚠ The window for this procedure, however, has already closed. The Code provides that it “applies for a period of two years from the date of publication” — a term that ended on 30 January 2026, more than six months ago. At the end of November 2025, a group of MPs from the PAS faction announced a bill to extend it to 30 January 2028. The extension does not, however, appear in the text of the Code in the State Register of Legal Acts: article 390 keeps, to this day, the term of two years from publication. Anyone who wants to use the procedure therefore has to check with the mayoralty which deadline applies now.
The note contains no data on how many works without permissive acts were found in the district in 2025, or on penalties. Establishing and halting unauthorised works falls both to the mayoralties’ specialised structures and to the National Inspectorate for Technical Supervision, while the record of the acts issued belongs to the mayoralties and the District Council.
The bridge at Zagarancea and the objectives under discussion
The note recalls that on 26 April 2025, more than a year ago, the “PODUL DE FLORI” Festival — the Bridge of Flowers — marked the start of works on the bridge over the Prut at Zagarancea, described in the document as “a link in the Union Motorway that will connect the Republic of Moldova with Romania and, respectively, with the European Union”. The note does not say what stage the works are at today.
The chief architect also lists the objectives “under discussion”: the Ungheni–Chișinău motorway, the first five kilometres, and the Berești multimodal terminal. The District Council is pressing, the note adds, for the construction of the Industrial Park and the Ungheni bypass. These are declared intentions, not contracted works.
The figures and quotations come from the briefing note “Information on the situation in Ungheni district in the field of architecture, urban planning and construction, year 2025”, signed by chief architect Dumitru Cucu and published on the website of the Ungheni District Council together with the sitting of 4 August 2026. The total of 313 acts is the sum of the rows in the note’s table. The content of articles 150 and 387, the registration conditions and the term of two years were checked against the consolidated text of the Urban Planning and Construction Code in the State Register of Legal Acts. The number of administrative-territorial units below the threshold of 3,000 inhabitants was calculated from the provisional data of the National Bureau of Statistics on the usually resident population on 1 January 2026.