The National Confederation for Women’s Entrepreneurship (CONAF) fully supports the package of thirteen requests formulated by the Transport and Logistics Industry Employers ASTRA and the Road Transport Operators Association “APULUM” and shows what it means, in money and in a company’s treasury, a year in which all costs increase simultaneously, while the contracted price of transport remains unchanged.

“The state sees the price at the pump and stops there. It does not see what happens to it after that. A cost that cannot be invoiced further does not disappear: it stays in the margin until the margin runs out, then in the fleet, then in jobs, then in the price on the shelf. The thirteen measures do not ask for extra money. I ask that this road be calculated once, not compensated every three months”, declared the president of CONAF, Cristina Chiriac.

The analysis sent by CONAF indicates that diesel fuel for a Romanian transporter has increased in price by more than a fifth in the first half of this year, namely by 21.1%, compared to the 16% increase in the European average.

“Diesel fuel has increased in price here faster than in the rest of Europe, and the leu has depreciated. However, a transporter does not pay its drivers and leasing rates in euros. In the money in which it keeps its accounts, it has lagged behind the European average by 5.1 percentage points,” the analysis also shows.

At the same time, the cited source emphasizes, in the same period the mandatory policy has also increased: for a new truck, without any damage, the cheapest offers on the free market currently start at over 16,500 lei per year, compared to about 9,700 last year, and from October 1, TollRo comes into force.

“Salaries must be kept close to what is paid in the West, otherwise the drivers leave. They all increase at the same time, on the same route, with the same invoice issued to the customer. The question that no one asks remains: where does this money go? Normally, an increasing cost is transferred to the price. In freight transport, you can’t do that, because the price was negotiated a few months ago, for a contract that lasts a year or two. And here we don’t have a legal fuel indexation clause, linked to a public index, like there is in Spain, where the Ministry of Transport publishes it monthly. So, between signature and maturity, the difference remains entirely with the transporter,” the statement added, according to Agerpres.

According to calculations by the ASTRA Employers’ Association, a single truck advances the state around 5,830 euros per year, without interest. A company with ten trucks finances both the client and the state at the same time, with money it does not have. At the end of the month, a small business owner does not choose between investment and dividend. He chooses between a tank of diesel and salaries.

The Romanian Road Authority shows that in 2025 4,296 freight transport operators gave up their licenses, and 39,170 compliant copies left the licensed fleet. Almost one in five cars. In a year when the excise duty compensation scheme was in force.

“Nobody closes a company because the price of diesel has increased by twenty percent. It closes after, for two years in a row, it has paid the difference in the margin, postponed the renewal of the fleet, lost drivers and was left with contracts that it can no longer honor at the signed price. What is seen in the 2025 figures is not the beginning of this path. It is the middle of it”, specified Cristina Chiriac.

CONAF emphasizes that it supports all 13 points submitted to the Romanian Parliament, in the form in which they were formulated. The first four points target the cost, but especially its unpredictability: professional, permanent diesel, written in law and not in a government decision, respectively excise duty reduced to a minimum of 0.175 euros per liter, with a deadline of November 30, 2026; without a budget ceiling, currently about 6,200 operators out of 47,306 are included in the scheme, and the rest, i.e. 87% of the industry, pay in full; money back within 15 days of a complete request, with the possibility of receiving it in advance, instead of the current quarterly procedure: less paper – quantities automatically taken from invoices that go through e-Invoice anyway, without a separate treasury account, with a deposit deadline of 90 days instead of 30.

Regarding contracts and costs, the requests target TollRo with a lower rate, technically tested before start-up, and six months in which warnings are given, not fines, and a fuel indexation clause in transport contracts, linked to an official public index.

The analysis also shows that a professional driver earns, on average, 1,794 euros per month in Romania, and 3,357 in Germany, and, in this context, carriers are demanding: raising the non-taxable ceiling for foreign per diem from 87.5 to 120 euros per day, with automatic indexation each year; moving from three to four basic salaries; 265 lei for each night spent away from home, without supporting documents; a single regime for mobile workers, with a single name and a single set of ceilings, instead of the four that now overlap; an ANAF rule that would stop the retroactive reclassification of per diems as wages for formal errors, when there is no intention to circumvent the law.

On the insurance side, the proposal is for the Financial Supervisory Authority to verify whether insurers report completely on the heavy vehicle segment and to publish the prices actually paid, not just the reference tariffs, and for the Competition Council to publish the report on the capping of the commercial mark-up and also look at the reason why the price of diesel without taxes is the highest in Central and Eastern Europe.

“Nine out of the thirteen require a regulatory act, so they go through Parliament. One can be done by Government Decision. Three can be given administratively, even now. And three do not cost the budget a single leu: the accommodation allowance only applies to transport a regime that the public sector already has, the unification of regimes is a legislative technique, the ANAF norm is a matter of interpretation”, emphasizes the aforementioned source.

On August 4, three requests for information of public interest were sent to the Competition Council, the Financial Supervisory Authority and the Ministry of Finance. The legal deadline for responses is August 18, CONAF states.

The National Confederation for Women’s Entrepreneurship is the first employers’ confederation in Romania dedicated to women’s entrepreneurship. It brings together companies with over 250,000 employees from all sectors of the economy, through 33 territorial branches. The Transport and Logistics Industry Employers’ Association ASTRA, the author of the package of thirteen requests, is a member employer in the CONAF structure.