Romania is still one of the EU's cheapest places to employ IT staff: an hour of work in information and communication cost an employer €26.0 in 2025, against an EU average of €48.2. The constraint has moved from price to people. Romania's employed IT specialists fell 6.2% in 2025, from 221,600 to 207,800, while the EU's grew 2.6%. Plan on the pool, not the price.
I build AI systems from Bucharest for clients in Romania and abroad, so these numbers are close to my own work. The figures below come from Eurostat and other public sources, each one linked. Most articles on "outsourcing to Romania" are written by agencies selling it. This one tries to show both halves of the picture, the half that sells and the half that should shape the plan.
How much does IT work cost in Romania compared with the EU?
About half. Eurostat puts the total labour cost of an hour worked in information and communication at €26.0 in Romania in 2025, against €48.2 across the EU (Eurostat, labour cost levels). That is 54% of the EU average. Among fourteen European delivery markets compared, only Bulgaria, Hungary and Greece were cheaper.
The discount survived a year of repricing. Romania's hourly cost rose 9.7% from 2024 to 2025, against 4.1% for the EU as a whole, and Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland and Czechia rose 8 to 11%. The whole region got dearer together, so the gap to the EU average barely moved.
Two cautions for anyone comparing quotes. The figure is total labour cost, the employer's full outlay including social contributions and payroll taxes, and it covers the whole sector, telecoms and publishing included, not software alone. And it is what it costs to employ someone, not what an agency charges you. The distance between the two is where most of the difference between offers sits, so ask every vendor to name it.
Is Romania cheaper than Poland for software development?
It depends on which number you read, and the popular one misleads. On wages alone, the two are almost level, and Romania is slightly dearer: €24.9 an hour against Poland's €24.4. On total labour cost, Romania is cheaper, €26.0 against €29.3, because Poland adds €4.9 an hour of non-wage costs to Romania's €1.1 (Eurostat). A wages-only benchmark gets the ranking backwards. Czechia, for comparison, sits at €34.9.
Poland's pool, though, is proportionally deeper, which brings me to the half of the picture that matters more.
How many IT specialists does Romania have?
In 2025, 207,800 people in Romania worked in IT occupations, 2.7% of everyone employed. Across the EU the share is 5.0%. Only Greece, at 2.5%, has a shallower pool; Poland is at 4.5%, Hungary 4.6%, Czechia 4.7% and Bulgaria 4.8% (Eurostat, ICT specialists).
And the pool shrank. From 221,600 in 2024 to 207,800 in 2025, Romania lost 13,800 IT specialists, a fall of 6.2%, in a year when the EU grew 2.6% and Poland 1.1%. It was the steepest fall among the comparable markets and the first to start from the series' all-time peak.
To give the number a felt scale: a 1,000-seat delivery centre in Romania would need one in every 208 IT specialists employed in the country.
Is the fall real? Mostly, yes, with one honest caveat. The count comes from the European Labour Force Survey and codes each person's own reported occupation, so it cannot be inflated or deflated by how employers label jobs for tax purposes (Eurostat metadata). But it is a survey, and both the 2024 and 2025 Romanian values carry Eurostat's estimation flag. Part of the fall may be noise. The next release, expected in spring 2027, is the first that can tell a correction from a trend.
Why did Romania's IT workforce shrink?
The timing points at tax. The income-tax exemption for software work was capped at 10,000 lei from November 2023 (Ziarul Financiar) and repealed for income earned from January 2025 (OUG 156/2024). The 2025 figure is the first observation after the repeal. That is timing, not proof.
Where the 13,800 went is mostly unrecorded. Emigration to Germany and the UK, the two corridors with published figures, can account for at most about 7.5% of the fall (the German side is in Bundesagentur für Arbeit data, which shows about 4,000 Romanians in German IT jobs in both 2024 and 2025). Switching to freelance contracts cannot explain it, because the count follows the occupation however someone is engaged, and one recruiter survey even has the freelance share falling, from 18% in 2023 to 8% in 2025 (Brainspotting, via Hacking Work).
One small signal from the supply side is worth watching. At Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj, the state-funded computer science places stayed full, 147 of 147 in 2025 and 142 of 147 in 2026, while paid places fell from 45 to 8 in one admissions round (UBB 2025, UBB 2026). Demand for the degree held; willingness to pay for it did not. One faculty and one year prove nothing, but it is the kind of number I would track if I were planning a junior pipeline here.
Is AI behind the fall in Romanian IT jobs?
Nothing published says so. Romanian firms are the EU's slowest adopters of AI, 5.2% against 20.0% across the union, and even Romania's own IT-services firms sit last in their peer group, at 34.2% against an EU rate of 65.7% (Eurostat, AI key results 2026; Eurostat, AI by activity). Three large layoff rounds in 2026 carry no AI attribution in their Romanian announcements: Oracle Romania, about 526 roles (Adevărul); eMAG, about 300, where the CEO said explicitly that AI was not the reason (StartupCafe); and TELUS Digital, 300, after a client closed a project (Forbes România).
The evidence on developer speed is split and moving. METR's randomised trial found experienced developers took 19% longer with AI on codebases they knew well, a result METR itself now flags as out of date (METR, update). A randomised trial at Google, on well-scoped internal tasks, measured a speed-up of about 21% (Google, arXiv). My own view, from building with these tools, sits between the two: the speed-up is real when the task is clear and small when it is not.
What should a company planning a team in Romania do?
- Start from the labour-cost figure. It is what employment costs, not what a vendor charges; ask every vendor to explain what sits above it.
- Size on the pool. A plan costed at half the EU price but staffed from a pool at half the EU depth is oversized from the start.
- Expect concentration. Bucharest-Ilfov holds 50.1% of Romania's information and communication employment, about four times its share of the population (Eurostat, regional data). A second-city plan needs local evidence, not the national average.
- Look at who is hiring. In 2025 the 500 largest Romanian IT firms by revenue added 1,909 net positions, while the other 25,000 or so lost 624 between them (Ziarul Financiar). Scale is concentrating too.
- Stage expansion behind the spring 2027 data. Build what you need now; commit to the large number once the next release shows whether the fall continued.
If the team you need is small and senior, the more useful question may not be where to hire but who answers for the result, and how the team is organised around it (how to structure your company for AI; for engineers who own an AI use case end to end, see Sapio AI's services). And if you are hiring juniors, the pressure on entry-level work is not only Romanian: see AI and entry-level jobs.
For twenty years the question buyers asked about Romania was how much. The price still holds, and it is still a good answer. It just answers the wrong question now. The question is how many, and nobody can answer it with a rate card.
If you are deciding what to build in Romania, and with whom: vladtudor.com/consulting.