Romania: 1 scheme to know about before you drive in.
Bucharest has one driving restriction on our books: the Zonele A și B restricționate pentru autovehiculele destinate… (heavy vehicle ban). What is a heavy vehicle ban?
Sources last read on 2026-09-16, from the authorities' own pages. The next scheduled check is 2026-12-15.
Romania enters this corpus on a lorry rule that has been running since 15 September 2004 and has nothing to do with emissions. Bucharest is drawn as two concentric rings. In zone A — the inner ring, which the road authority publishes as a closed list of 25 arteries from Bd.
Dacia round to Bd. Dacia again — a goods vehicle or item of heavy plant with a maximum authorised mass over 5 tonnes may not drive at all in daytime, and may drive at night only with a paid circulation authorisation. In zone B, the outer ring of 40 arteries, the same applies over 7.5 tonnes; the authority's own table puts vehicles between 5.0 and 7.5 tonnes in zone B at "Non-stop".
The test is the figure on the registration document, not the engine: a car, a van or anything up to 5 tonnes is outside this scheme at every hour, and no Euro class, fuel or windscreen label appears in it anywhere. Two things make it more than an hours rule.
Transit is banned outright — a vehicle over 5 tonnes whose final destination is not Bucharest may not cross the city at any hour, with or without an authorisation. And eight named corridors into customs posts and industrial estates inside the rings are open non-stop, which is the only way a heavy vehicle legally reaches those areas in daytime.
The governing instrument is Hotărârea Consiliului General al Municipiului București nr. 134/2004, and the city says in its own words that it is the instrument in force: the General Mayor's 2026 explanatory memorandum for a replacement opens "Circulația autovehiculelor și a utilajelor cu masa totală maximă autorizată mai mare de 5 tone în municipiul București este reglementată, în prezent, prin H.C.G.M.B. nr.
134/2004, cu modificările și completările ulterioare". It has been amended six times — 132/2005, 260/2005, 312/2009, 135/2021, 29/2024 and 137/2025 — and the amendments are what a driver actually needs. 132/2005 set the current seasonal hours and redrew zone A street by street.
135/2021 allowed the authorisation to be issued electronically as a vinietă. 29/2024 raised the fine to between 4,000 and 5,000 lei and exempted vehicles over 5 tonnes with pure electric or hybrid fuel-cell propulsion. 137/2025 exempted the waste-collection fleets.
One number is missing and it is the most important one: what the authorisation costs today. Article 6 of the 2004 decision prices it per tonnage band, per zone, by day or by month, and states every figure in pre-denomination lei — "20.000.000 lei/luna sau 2.000.000 lei/zi" — which no amending decision has ever restated in the money Romania has used since July 2005.
The city's own online-payments page lists this authorisation with its "Valoare Unitara" cell empty while filling it for every other transport authorisation on the same page. We therefore hold no charge, and the reason is the publisher's, not ours.
The scheme is also about to be replaced: a draft decision went to public consultation with a deadline of 13 July 2026, proposes to extend zone B to the whole city limit, to drop the hour restrictions entirely in favour of a purely paid authorisation, to price zone A at 363 lei a day and zone B at 90, and to come into force on 1 January 2027. As of 16 September 2026 it had not been adopted.