Bucharest, Romania · Heavy vehicle ban
Official name Zonele A și B restricționate pentru autovehiculele destinate transportului de mărfuri și utilajele cu MTMA mai mare de 5 tone (autorizație de circulație)
Partly in force in Bucharest right nowTuesday, 13 October 2026 at 12:04 · Europe/Bucharest
Lifts Tuesday, 13 October 2026 at 19:00 local time.
Outside these windows the zones are not open — they are permitted "numai pe baza de autorizatie". A vehicle over the zone's tonnage threshold still needs a paid circulation authorisation to drive in at night, and inside the window it may not drive in at all. Treat a green verdict here as "you may go if you hold the authorisation", never as "you may go".
The seasons are split at the month boundary in this encoding, which is exact: the authority's own split is 1 July to 31 August against 1 September to 30 June, so no day falls between the two rules and none is covered by both.
This encoding cannot tell you which zone you are in, because we hold no boundary for either. Both rules are therefore shown for any journey near Bucharest, and the stricter reading — over 5 tonnes, zone A — is the safe assumption anywhere inside the city.
Neither rule touches a vehicle at or under 5 tonnes. The scheme asks for the maximum authorised mass on the registration document and nothing else, so a car or a van is outside it at every hour.
A vehicle between 5.0 and 7.5 tonnes is not restricted by the clock in zone B — the authority's table says "Non-stop" — but it is restricted in zone A, and the 2004 tariff grid still prices a zone B authorisation for that band. The authority has never reconciled the two, so we do not: assume you need an authorisation in zone B at that weight and ask the Direcția Transporturi.
Eight named access corridors to customs posts and industrial estates inside the zones are open non-stop and are not encoded here. If your destination is one of them, the corridor and not the clock decides, and the route is fixed street by street.
Transit is banned at every hour, in force or not. A vehicle over 5 tonnes whose final destination is not Bucharest may not cross the city, and no night window and no authorisation changes that.
No public holiday is excepted. The council decision names no day of the year on which the restriction does not run, and neither does the road authority's page, so this encoding declares no holiday rule rather than inventing one.
Operating times only, read from the source below. It does not check your vehicle.
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.
Primăria Municipiului București, Direcția Transporturi — "Autorizatii de circulație pentru automobile cu masa totala autorizată mai mare de 5t - Legislație", the page the authority that issues the authorisations puts in front of the driver who has to buy one. It names the governing decision, delimits both zones artery by artery, lists the eight non-stop access corridors and carries the seasonal hours table
The charge exists and is levied, and we hold no figure for it: assume you will have to pay and that we cannot tell you how much. Article 6 of HCGMB nr.
134/2004 sets it as a grid — two zones × seven tonnage bands × day or month — and states every cell in pre-denomination lei: zone A is "20.000.000 lei/luna sau 2.000.000 lei/zi" for 5 to 7.5 tonnes and rises to "200.000.000 lei/luna sau 20.000.000 lei/zi" above 40 tonnes, zone B runs from "5.000.000 lei/luna sau 500.000 lei/zi" to "30.000.000 lei/luna sau 3.000.000 lei/zi".
Romania redenominated its currency on 1 July 2005, and not one of the six decisions that amended HCGMB 134/2004 — 132/2005, 260/2005, 312/2009, 135/2021, 29/2024, 137/2025 — restates article 6 in the new leu. Dividing those figures by ten thousand ourselves would be our arithmetic presented as the council's, on a fact a haulier would act on, so we do not do it.
Three further channels were read and none of them prices it. The city's own online-payments page for transport fees lists "Eliberare autorizație de circulație pentru automobile cu masa totala autorizată mai mare de 5t" with the "Valoare Unitara" column EMPTY, while the five other authorisations on that same page carry 323, 227, 1331, 113 and 5 lei — so the blank is deliberate, not a missing page.
The 2026 local-taxes decision, HCGMB nr. 514/23.12.2025 and its 55-page annex, sets the Fiscal Code taxes and the urbanism fees and contains no access charge for heavy vehicles.
And the figure is only quotable as a proposal: the draft replacement in public consultation would charge "363 lei/zi sau 3.147 lei/luna" in zone A and "90 lei/zi sau 710 lei/luna" in zone B for 5 to 7.5 tonnes, with an annual authorisation at ten monthly charges and indexation to the consumer price index from 2028 — but it was still a draft on 16 September 2026, proposed to come into force on 1 January 2027, and a draft is not a price.
That the charge is really being collected is not in doubt: HCGMB nr. 87/13.03.2026 exempts one named parish's concrete lorries from "plata taxei de zonă (taxa aferentă emiterii autorizaţiilor de circulaţie pentru acces în zonele restricţionate)" for 16 March to 30 April 2026, and the city's specialists record 48,397 authorisations issued in 2025 against 30,933 in 2024.
Ask the Direcția Transporturi, or complete the online application, and it will quote you the amount for your vehicle.
Two seasons, one pair of night windows, and the windows are permissions rather than free time. From 1 July to 31 August, access and circulation in the restricted zones are "permise numai pe baza de autorizatie" between 20:00 and 07:00 and "interzise" between 07:00 and 20:00.
From 1 September to 30 June the same pair shifts by an hour: permitted with an authorisation between 19:00 and 08:00, forbidden between 08:00 and 19:00. The road authority prints that as a table — zone A "Peste 5,0 t", zone B "Peste 7,5 t", both "20:00 – 07:00" in summer and "19:00 – 08:00" the rest of the year — and puts vehicles between 5.0 and 7.5 tonnes in zone B at "Non-stop" in both seasons.
Nothing here is an open door: in the night window a vehicle over the zone's threshold still needs a paid authorisation, and in the day window it may not enter at all. Three sets of exceptions run outside the clock. The eight access corridors to the customs posts and industrial estates inside the rings are "valabile non-stop".
Article 5 lists the trades that may circulate "fara restrictii orare" on a different authorisation — utility and road repairs, vehicle recovery, HGV driving examiners, post and courier operators, refuse collectors, public institutions, bread and bulk-milk transport, gas network work, dangerous goods, and from 1 September to 14 June construction traffic on production of the building permit and the contract.
Article 7 exempts outright, at any hour and anywhere in the city, ambulances, civil protection, police, fire service, gendarmerie, border police and the defence, justice, prosecution and special services when on a mission — and only when on a mission, because the same article sends those vehicles back under the hours rule for anything else.
No public holiday is excepted: the decision and the road authority's page name none.
Primăria Municipiului București, Direcția Transporturi — the seasonal table on its own page for the scheme, which states both zones, both tonnage thresholds and both windows, and marks zone B between 5.0 and 7.5 tonnes as non-stop. The windows themselves were set by HCGMB nr. 132/14.07.2005, which replaced points A and B of article 4 of the 2004 decision
Two rings, both published as a list of streets rather than as a shape, by the authority that issues the authorisations. Zone A, the inner one, is bounded by 25 arteries and the list closes on itself: "Bd. Dacia, Str.
Traian, Str. Nerva Traian, Bd. O.Goga, Pasaj Mărăşeşti, Bd.
Mărăşeşti, Str. Mitropolit Nifon, Bd. Libertăţii, Calea 13 Septembrie, Şos.
Pandurilor, Şos. Grozăveşti, Şos. Orhideelor, Bd.
Dinicu Golescu, Piaţa Gării de Nord, Calea Griviţei, Şos. N. Titulescu, Bd.
Banu Manta, Bd. I. Mihalache, Bd.
Averescu, Bd. C-tin Prezan, Bd. Aviatorilor, Bd.
Mircea Eliade, Str. P.I. Ceaikovski, Str.
B. Văcărescu, Str. Tunari, Bd.
Dacia." That is the delimitation HCGMB nr. 132/2005 substituted for the original annex 1, and it is the operative one. Zone B is the outer ring, 40 arteries from Bd.
Aerogării round by Şos. Colentina, Bd. Basarabia, Bd.
Th. Pallady, Şos. Giurgiului, Calea Ferentari, Bd.
Ghencea, Calea Crângaşi and Şos. Străuleşti back to Bd. Ion Ionescu de la Brad.
One rule decides every edge case at the line itself, and the authority states it twice: "Pe arterele ce delimiteaza una din zone se respecta regimul de circulatie din afara acesteia", glossed on the same page as "nu se plateste taxa de zona B pe o strada care este limita zonei B".
Driving along a boundary artery is therefore outside the zone it bounds — which is also why this record holds no polygon, because a ring drawn through those streets would be wrong at its own edge. Inside the rings, eight corridors are open non-stop and each is a fixed route rather than an area: to the customs post on Bd. Timişoara from Str.
Valea Cascadelor or Str. Valea Oltului as far as Str. Romancierilor; to the industrial area between Bd.
Timişoara, Bd. Iuliu Maniu, Bd. Vasile Milea and Str.
Lujerului; to the one between Drumul Sării, Str. M. Sebastian, Calea Rahovei and Str.
Progresului; to the one between Calea Rahovei, Bd. G. Coşbuc, Str.
C-tin Istrati and Str. Progresului; to the "Rocar" platform by Str. Toporaşi; to the area between Str.
Ziduri Moşi, Bd. Ferdinand, Bd. Gării Obor, Str.
Baicului, Str. Paharnicu Turturea, Str. Heliade între Vii and Str.
Doamna Ghica; to the customs post on Bd. Expoziţiei via Bd. Bucureştii Noi, Bd.
Ion Mihalache, Str. Clăbucet and Bd. Expoziţiei, returning by Puţul lui Crăciun; and to the industrial area on Splaiul Unirii between Şos.
Vitan Bârzeşti and Şos. Mihai Bravu. ⚠️ One of the eight carries a warning printed by the authority itself and left standing: against the Bd.
Timişoara customs corridor the page says "Nota BursaTransport: lasam acest enunt al primariei cu toate ca zona mentionata se afla inafara zonelor A si B" — a third party's editorial note, on the city's own permit portal, observing that the city has listed an access corridor to a place outside both of its zones. We quote it rather than resolve it, and we read the council decisions as the authority on what the rule is.
Primăria Municipiului București, Direcția Transporturi — the street delimitation of both zones, the boundary-artery rule and its gloss, and the eight non-stop access corridors, on the authority's own page. Zone A's list is the one HCGMB nr. 132/14.07.2005 substituted for annex 1 of HCGMB nr. 134/2004
The authority's own map: Primăria Municipiului București, Direcția Transporturi
There is no emission test in this scheme and never has been. HCGMB nr. 134/2004 asks one question about the vehicle — is its maximum authorised mass above the figure for the zone — and its recitals reach for the road traffic ordinance and the environmental protection law rather than for any emission standard.
No Euro class, fuel type, vehicle age or windscreen label appears in the decision, in any of its six amendments, or on the road authority's page for the scheme. The nearest thing to a technology rule runs the other way, as an exemption: HCGMB nr.
29/31.01.2024 added article 7(1)(e), which releases vehicles over 5 tonnes "avand propulsive pur electric sau hibrid electric - celula de combustibil", identified by the code PE or HE-CC in the vehicle identity card, from the hour restrictions — on condition they obtain an aviz de circulație from the Direcția Transporturi.
That is propulsion as a licence to travel, not a standard a petrol car has to meet, and a petrol car is never in this scheme at any weight it can legally reach. Not estimated. This is a statement about this scheme, not about Romania: we have read no Romanian low emission zone framework either way, and Romania is newly opened in this corpus.
No diesel test either, for the same reason: the rule is keyed to mass, not to the engine. Almost every vehicle this scheme touches is a diesel lorry and it still never asks — a 12-tonne diesel with a valid authorisation may enter zone A at 23:00 and the same vehicle without one may not, which is the whole of the test.
The only propulsion distinction in the scheme is the 2024 exemption for pure electric and hybrid fuel-cell vehicles over 5 tonnes, which is an exemption from the timetable rather than an emission threshold, and it is recorded in the petrol field. Not estimated.
Consiliul General al Municipiului București — HCGMB nr. 29/31.01.2024, article III, which replaces article 10 of HCGMB nr. 134/2004 in full: "Constituie contravenție si se sanctioneaza cu amenda de la 4000 la 5000 lei" for driving in the restricted zones without a circulation authorisation or with one invalid for the period, the hours, the tonnage, the zone, the route or the category, for driving a vehicle whose weighed mass exceeds its maximum authorised mass, and for refusing to be weighed. The figure recorded here is the ceiling of that band, not a fixed ticket — the floor is 4,000 lei — and the band is per offence. The same article names the enforcers: the Brigada Rutieră of the Bucharest police directorate, the city's Direcția Generală de Poliție Locală și Control, the local police of sectors 1 to 6, and staff empowered by the General Mayor. A third strike within one year carries a complementary sanction on the vehicle's keeper: loss of the right to drive it in the restricted zones at all. ⚠️ This source is a scanned PDF, and since 2026-09-18 it is machine-watched on short ASCII fragments ONLY. Its optical layer renders Romanian ș and ț as digits and other letters — "9i" for "și", "circulajia" for "circulația" — so a watched string resting on those would be watching our reader rather than the publisher, and a better font map would "change" a document that never moved (D-187). The register entry and the road authority's page withdraw this record if the rule changes
Primăria Municipiului București, Direcția Transporturi — the legislation page for the zones, the hours, the boundary-artery rule and the access corridors, and the authorisation request form on the same portal for the purpose list and the application route. The exemption mechanics are from HCGMB nr. 29/2024 article II and HCGMB nr. 137/2025 article II, and the weighing and non-transferability duties from articles 8 and 9 of HCGMB nr. 134/2004
Primăria Municipiului București, Direcția Transporturi — "Autorizatii de circulație pentru automobile cu masa totala autorizată mai mare de 5t - Legislație". The operative statement by the issuing authority: the governing decision, both zone delimitations artery by artery, the boundary-artery rule, the eight non-stop access corridors and the seasonal hours table with its tonnage thresholds
Primăria Municipiului București — the city's own legal register, act sheet for HOTARARE nr. 134 din 26/08/2004. This is the denominator and the currency check in one page: it carries the act's PDF and its 2004 annex map, lists what amends it ("Acte care modifica acest document (1) HOTARARE nr. 137 din 03/04/2025"), what it refers back to (HCGMB 64/2001 and 106/2004, both of which it terminated), and the twelve later acts that refer to it, the most recent being HOTARARE nr. 87 din 13/03/2026. A repeal or a further amendment appears here, in both directions, which is why this page is watched rather than only cited. The register's robots.txt is "User-agent: *" with an empty "Disallow:", i.e. nothing is forbidden
Primăria Municipiului București — online payments for transport fees, served as JSON from the city's own content API. The page that makes the missing charge a measurement rather than a gap: "Eliberare autorizație de circulație pentru automobile cu masa totala autorizată mai mare de 5t" is listed with its "Valoare Unitara" cell empty, while the five other transport authorisations beside it carry 323, 227, 1331, 113 and 5 lei
Consiliul General al Municipiului București — "Proiect de hotărâre privind circulația autovehiculelor și a utilajelor grele în municipiului București", in public consultation under Legea nr. 52/2003 with a comment deadline of 13 July 2026. Watched because it is this record's clock: it would repeal HCGMB nr. 134/2004 and its whole amendment chain, extend zone B to the administrative limit of the city, abolish the general hour restrictions, price zone A at 363 lei a day and zone B at 90, raise the fine to 5,000–10,000 lei for natural persons and index the tariff to the consumer price index from 2028, and its article 12 proposes entry into force on 1 January 2027. On 16 September 2026 it was still a draft: no act of that subject appears among the 422 decisions in the city's 2026 register
Consiliul General al Municipiului București — HCGMB nr. 134/26.08.2004 in full, from the city's legal register. The founding instrument: article 1 restricts access and circulation above 5 tonnes in zone A and above 7.5 tonnes in zone B, article 2 puts it on road signs, article 3 fixes the access routes to zone B and to the zones of interest and bans transit by vehicles not destined for Bucharest, article 4 sets the seasonal day and night regime, article 5 lists the trades that may circulate without hour restrictions, article 6 carries the tariff grid in pre-denomination lei, article 7 exempts the emergency services on mission, article 8 puts issue in the hands of the transport directorate and makes the authorisation non-transferable, article 9 allows weighing, article 10 sets the contravention, article 11 refers the zone delimitation to annex 4, article 12 terminates HCGMB 64/2001 and 106/2004, and article 13 brought it into force on 15 September 2004. Machine-watched since 2026-09-18, on short ASCII fragments only: this is a scan of a 2004 document whose optical layer mangles ș and ț, so a watched string must not rest on them (D-187)
Consiliul General al Municipiului București — HCGMB nr. 132/14.07.2005, the amendment that produced the rule a driver meets today. It substituted points A and B of article 4 with the current seasons and windows — 1 July to 31 August, 20:00–07:00 by authorisation and 07:00–20:00 forbidden; 1 September to 30 June, 19:00–08:00 and 08:00–19:00 — added the boundary-artery rule to article 3, and replaced annex 1 with the 25-artery delimitation of zone A that the road authority still publishes. Its article 3 ordered the consolidated text republished in the Monitorul Oficial al Municipiului București. ✅ Machine-watched since 2026-09-18. The strings below were pre-flighted against the monitor's own reader, each run with a control string that correctly missed
Consiliul General al Municipiului București — HCGMB nr. 29/31.01.2024. Replaced article 10 of the 2004 decision with the current fine of 4,000 to 5,000 lei and the current list of enforcers, added the exemption for vehicles over 5 tonnes with pure electric or hybrid fuel-cell propulsion (codes PE and HE-CC) together with the duty to obtain an aviz de circulație, and rewrote article 13 — the 2004 decision's own commencement clause — into a generic "ten days after publication", which is why the scheme's start date is read from the 2004 text rather than from the consolidated one. ✅ Machine-watched since 2026-09-18. The strings below were pre-flighted against the monitor's own reader, each run with a control string that correctly missed
Consiliul General al Municipiului București — HCGMB nr. 135/02.06.2021, which added to article 8 that "Autorizatiile se pot elibera si in regim electronic tip vinieta" and that an electronic authorisation is presented for checking together with the vehicle registration certificate. The legal basis for the online authorisation the city now issues. ✅ Machine-watched since 2026-09-18. The strings below were pre-flighted against the monitor's own reader, each run with a control string that correctly missed
Consiliul General al Municipiului București — HCGMB nr. 137/03.04.2025, the most recent amendment. Added article 7(1)(f) exempting the vehicles that collect and transport municipal and household waste, clean the public domain and clear snow for the sectors, and article 7(4) requiring their operators to apply to the Direcția Transporturi for an aviz de circulație through the Serviciul Autorizări Auto's system between the 20th and the 27th of each month for the month following. Its recitals name HCGMB nr. 134/2004 "cu modificările și completările ulterioare" as the instrument it amends. ✅ Machine-watched since 2026-09-18. The strings below were pre-flighted against the monitor's own reader, each run with a control string that correctly missed
Consiliul General al Municipiului București — HCGMB nr. 87/13.03.2026, an exemption from "plata taxei de zonă (taxa aferentă emiterii autorizaţiilor de circulaţie pentru acces în zonele restricţionate, stabilită potrivit reglementărilor locale aplicabile accesului autovehiculelor grele)" granted to one named parish's concrete deliveries for 16 March to 30 April 2026 on two declared routes. Cited because it is the in-force proof: a council does not exempt named lorries from a charge it has stopped levying, and its recitals cite HCGMB nr. 134/2004 as the regulation in force. ✅ Machine-watched since 2026-09-18. The strings below were pre-flighted against the monitor's own reader, each run with a control string that correctly missed
Primăria Municipiului București — Monitorul Oficial al Municipiului București, section 3.3, "Registrul pentru evidența Hotărârilor Consiliului General al Municipiului București". The denominator for the negatives in this record: the register of every council decision, one PDF per year from 2020 to the current year, published because OUG nr. 57/2019 (Codul administrativ) requires every Romanian local authority to run a Monitorul Oficial Local with these numbered sections. Searched for oxigen, vinietă and emisii across 2020, 2021, 2024, 2025 and 2026 — the Oxigen vignette Bucharest was once reported to be planning appears nowhere in it — and its 2026 section 3.1 list of 422 adopted decisions is what shows the replacement decision has not been adopted. Watched from cycle 110 on ONE string, and only one. The registers themselves are PDFs, but THIS url is not a PDF - it is the index, served as JSON (D-194), and the string watched is the period label of the current register, "în perioada 01.01.2026 - prezent". That is the tripwire this record actually needs: every negative above is a statement about what the 2026 register does not yet contain, and it stops being checkable the moment the year rolls over. 🚫 The other lines here are NOT watched, deliberately: this endpoint escapes every character above U+00FF, so ă, ș and ț arrive as \u0103, \u0219 and \u021b while â and î arrive as themselves. Watching a Romanian sentence would mean watching that serializer setting, and truncating one before its first ș would mean watching half a word
Next scheduled re-check: 2026-12-15.
This is owed on the country's roads, not inside this scheme. What Romania asks, with the source