Update (14 July 2026). This article was published while the bill was still out for public consultation and Prime Minister Alexandru Munteanu was promising the higher salaries “from September”. Since then the government has fallen: Munteanu resigned on 3 July, and since 8 July Eugeniu Osmochescu has been acting prime minister, pending the formation of a new cabinet. Checked today: the law has not been approved by the government and has not been voted by Parliament (it was on the agenda of neither the 2 July nor the 9 July plenary), and the Ministry of Finance still describes the reform as proposed for 1 September. The percentages (10–30%) and the reference value (4,200 lei) are unchanged — but the 1 September deadline is now uncertain, and the decision passes to the next government.
The government has put out for public consultation the draft of a new public-sector pay law — the reform that would change how around 170,000 employees across the country are paid, from teachers and doctors to town-hall clerks. In short, the draft promises increases of 10 to 30%, with the declared aim that the first adjusted salaries be paid from September 2026. It is news that concerns thousands of families in Ungheni district directly.
Before any enthusiasm, a clarification that matters: for now this is only a draft, in public consultation, not a law that has been voted. It may be amended, and the timeline depends on its passage through the government and parliament.
‘Up to 30%’ does not mean for everyone
The figure that catches headlines — “increases of up to 30%” — is the ceiling, not the rule. The Minister of Finance, Andrian Gavriliță, explained that the rises will be between 10 and 30%, “depending on how fairly these increases were made in previous years”. In other words, the largest percentage goes to the categories left furthest behind, not to everyone. The minister added that “no one’s salary will fall”.
He also tempered expectations around the performance bonus, today granted to almost everyone: it is to be restricted to fewer than half of employees, and the top rating — a bonus of 15% of the base salary — would go only to a small share. “This is not a payment given to everyone, but a reward for real performance,” Gavriliță said.
What the reform changes, beyond the percentage
The technical core of the draft is consolidating the base salary, which would represent about 70% of monthly income — that is, more guaranteed money in the fixed pay and less in variable bonuses. The system would move to a few reference values — 4,200, 4,700, 5,100, 5,300, 6,200 and 6,900 lei — whose number would gradually fall, from ten today to six by 2027 and a maximum of four by 2032.
The reform is designed in stages, to 2032, with an interim review in 2029, and with an explicit budget brake: the state wage bill should not exceed 9% of GDP. The cost for this year is estimated by the ministry at about one billion lei — covered, Gavriliță says, from the budget revision and additional revenue, “without contracting loans”. Overall, though, the reform would cost the budget, by the same minister’s estimates, “at least two billion, very probably over three”.
The part the percentage hides
Here comes an easily missed nuance. Alongside the pay rise, another reform — of leave entitlements, targeted for 1 January 2027 — cuts the days off for some public-sector staff. Teaching staff, for instance, would see their leave reduced from 62 to 49 days, and some additional seniority leave would disappear. On paper the gross salary rises; in practice, part of the gain may be offset by the lost leave days.
And there is a backdrop that explains why the reform is both necessary and fragile. The current system is full of inequities: the data accompanying the draft show a ratio between the lowest and highest public-sector wage of almost 1 to 26 — far above the legal threshold of 1 to 15 — and almost 20% of public-sector staff paid below the legal minimum. On the other hand, a reform costing billions lands on a state budget with an announced deficit of almost 21 billion lei in 2026 — hence the legitimate question of whether the money will stretch across all the promised stages.
Why it matters especially in Ungheni
For a district like Ungheni, the stake is not abstract. A good share of the stable jobs here are with the state: in schools, at the district hospital and the Health Centre, in town halls and at the district council. The district had around 16,300 employees at the end of 2024 — a figure that also includes the private sector — and average monthly earnings were about 11,321 lei, almost 3,700 lei below the national average. In a place where people earn, on average, less than in the capital, every percentage point on the public-pay scale is felt more keenly in the family budget.
Education, the category with the most beneficiaries nationally, is the largest here too — in a district that began this school year with 73 vacant teaching posts, the fifth-largest staff shortage in the country. A higher starting salary would be, for Ungheni’s schools, one more argument at hiring. As for the exact number of the district’s public-sector employees, by sector, it is not public — so we cannot say “so many thousand Ungheni people”, only that the reform realistically touches thousands of families.
The reform’s figures — the percentages, the number of employees, the reference values, the timetable and the cost — come from the Ministry of Finance’s statement, carried by the state agency MOLDPRES, and from the public statements of Minister Andrian Gavriliță and Prime Minister Alexandru Munteanu. The cut in leave days comes from the communication of the Ministry of Labour and Social Protection. The data on employees and average earnings in Ungheni district belong to the National Bureau of Statistics (2024, gross values that also include the private sector). At the time of writing, the draft was in public consultation, not adopted; there is no official figure for the number of public-sector employees in Ungheni district broken down by sector.