What accommodation and tourism are worth
The national stock grew from 300 accommodation structures to 317 in a single year, and now stands at 8,850 rooms and 26,092 beds. Hotels and motels account for 123 of them, guesthouses for 74, holiday camps for 52, campsites for six and hostels for two — which tells you immediately where the room to build is. Six campsites and two hostels in a whole country is a market with obvious gaps in it.
They hosted 525,100 visitors in 2025, and 286,200 of those — 54.5 per cent — came from abroad. Overnight stays reached 1,626,200, up 4.4 per cent on 2024. Guesthouses grew fastest at 130.6 per cent of the previous year’s guests, with hotels and motels close behind at 113.6 per cent, and occupancy across all structures rose to 32.0 per cent.
The inbound mix is worth planning around, because it is concentrated and therefore addressable: Ukraine at 35.1 per cent of arrivals, Romania at 20.4 per cent, the United States at 4.7 per cent. Residents stay 5.5 days on average and non-residents 2.9. Chișinău takes 68 per cent of the national total, which makes the capital the volume play and the regions the margin play — a guesthouse outside the city competes on experience rather than on price.
On the cost side, section I wages sit at 11,432.5 lei a month against a national average of 16,355.1, and rose 15.0 per cent year on year while headcount in the section grew 9.8 per cent. A payroll well below the national average, in a sector visibly hiring: the staffing cost of opening a hotel here remains a fraction of what the same rooms cost to run across the border, and the sensible plan budgets for where that number is heading rather than where it is today.
Why classification being optional changes the plan
Most guidance on opening a hotel in Moldova still says you must obtain a star classification before you open. That stopped being true on 25 April 2025.
The classification rules were rewritten that day. The provisions obliging a structure to request classification, and forbidding an unclassified structure to operate, were struck out. What the tourism law now says is that accommodation structures have the right to obtain a classification certificate. The only thing left of the old regime is a prohibition on claiming a category you do not hold — you may not display or advertise three stars without the certificate that says three stars.
The country’s own numbers show how real the change is: of 113 hotels counted at the end of 2025, 43 held no classification certificate at all.
So classification became a marketing decision. And taken as one, it is usually a good deal, because the certificate is free, issued for an indefinite term, decided within ten days of a complete file with tacit approval if the agency does not answer, and followed by the certificate itself within another ten days. What it costs is an on-site inspection you have to be ready for and a plaque you must display within 30 days. What it buys is the right to say what you are, on booking platforms where the star rating is a filter rather than a description.
The one thing to watch is that changing your fittings or your services obliges a fresh classification within ten days. Get classified after the fit-out, not during it.
What it costs to open
Very little of the opening budget is paperwork, in either half of this field.
An SRL registers with no minimum share capital in a few working days at the Public Services Agency. The trade notification to the town hall costs 100 lei — around 5 euro — filed once per unit and effective by tacit approval from the third working day. Star classification is free. The travel agency’s notification into the tourism inventory carries no published fee.
What an agency does have to budget for is the director’s qualification: since 25 August 2025 the director must hold a continuing-professional-development certificate in tourism from an accredited institution. That is a person, a course and a date, and it belongs on the opening timeline rather than in the running costs.
For accommodation the recurring cost that surprises people is local rather than national. A town hall may levy a tax on accommodation, charged as a percentage of your accommodation sales revenue and paid half-yearly by the 25th of the month after each half-year. The Tax Code sets the base and the unit of measure and stops there — there is no maximum rate anywhere in it, and the council that adopts its budget sets the percentage. Two other local taxes reach every business in this field regardless: the territory improvement tax, charged per employee per year, and the tax on commercial and service units, charged per unit per year. All three are found in the decision of the council where the property sits, and they should be looked up before the lease is signed rather than after the first half-year falls due.
What to know before you open
One notification, not two — and this is recent
Until recently a hotel filed twice: a trade notification with the town hall under the internal trade law, and a separate notification with the public health agency under the health law. The government’s own analysis of the problem called it fragmented bureaucracy and duplicated notifications, in those words.
The current rule is that hotels and similar accommodation in class 55.10 notify the local authority about starting the activity under the internal trade law, and the local authority then sends a copy of the acknowledgement electronically to the National Agency for Public Health within five working days. You file once.
One practical note. The forwarding duty is set out clearly in the health law, while the corresponding article of the trade law has not yet been updated to name 55.10 alongside the other forwarded classes. Keep the acknowledgement of your trade notification on file and confirm the onward copy once — a five-minute step at the start that closes the question permanently. It is part of what we handle with the filing.
The two halves of this page are on opposite sides of the VAT line
Accommodation is taxed at 8%, and the reduced rate attaches to the structure type: a hotel, apart-hotel, motel, tourist villa, bungalow, tourist or agritourism guesthouse, campsite, holiday village or holiday camp, classified in section I. Food and drink other than alcohol, served for immediate consumption inside the same section I activity, is 8% too — so the restaurant inside the hotel follows the hotel.
A tour package is exempt from VAT without the right of deduction. That is not a lower rate, it is a different regime, and it has three consequences an agency should plan around from the first month. You charge no VAT to the traveller. The VAT you pay on your own costs — the office, the systems, the marketing — is never recovered and stays a cost. And exempt supplies do not count toward the 1.7 million lei registration threshold, so an agency can run a long time before VAT registration is even a question.
There is one open edge worth knowing about rather than guessing at. The Tax Code’s list of accommodation structure types is older than the 2025 rewrite of the classification rules, and neither the hostel nor the casa rurală appears in it. If you are opening one of those two specifically, settle the rate with your accountant before you price the rooms.
Letting an apartment is taxed at 7%, and scaling up means incorporating
A natural person not carrying on business who lets immovable property pays 7% of the monthly contract value, registers the contract with the State Tax Service within seven days of signing, and pays by the 25th of each month. The tax service has confirmed that this applies to letting through Booking and Airbnb. If the tenant is a company rather than an individual, 12% is withheld at source instead. Both are final taxes and the income leaves the annual declaration.
That regime is written for a private person letting property, and the law sets no night count or revenue level at which it converts into a business. What decides it in practice is what you are visibly doing: a second and third apartment, a booking calendar run as an operation, staff, a brand. At that point the company regime is the one that fits — 8% VAT on accommodation, the trade notification, a CAEM code, and the ability to invoice corporate guests and contract with platforms as a business.
If that is the direction you are heading, starting as a company is both cheaper and simpler than converting later, and it opens the 8% rate and the corporate market from the first booking. We set it up that way in a few working days.
Who holds tourism is not one authority, and it changed in 2025
Responsibility is split. The National Tourism Office keeps the operator inventory that agencies now notify into, and records the tourism heritage — a function that used to sit with the Public Services Agency. The Public Services Agency still issues classification certificates and keeps the register of accommodation structures. The central policy authority keeps the Registrul turismului. The town hall takes the trade notification.
That matters mostly because it dates everything you read. The tourism law was substantially rewritten on 25 August 2025, and guidance published before then — including material still mirrored on official sites — describes a regime with no inventory notification and no director qualification. When something you read says an agency has nothing to file, check the date on it.
For a hotel, a guesthouse or a tour operator, the SRL is the form, and for a tour operator it is now the only one. The 2025 rewrite made the agenție tur-operatoare a legal person by definition. For accommodation the argument is the ordinary one plus a specific one: liability limited to the share capital matters in a business where guests sleep on your premises, and an SRL with no minimum capital registers in a few working days.
A travel agency may be carried on by a natural person, which the law allows expressly. It remains a narrower road than it looks, because the new inventory notification and the director’s qualification requirement apply either way, and because a company is what a corporate client, a hotel chain or a foreign tour operator expects to contract with.
The entrepreneur’s patent reaches exactly one thing in this field, and reaches it well. Accommodation and meals provided by the owner of a casa rurală is on the patent list at 300 lei a month — around 15 euro — with no fee printed for Chișinău, Bălți, Bender or Tiraspol, which is consistent with a rural house being rural by definition. Tourist guide services, including with your own transport, and enogastronomic and craft presentations are on the same list at 300 lei. For someone letting two or three rooms in a village and cooking for guests, that is the cheapest lawful structure in the country. Its two limits decide when you outgrow it: sales of no more than 300,000 lei over twelve consecutive months, and no right to employ anyone at all.
The law supports that route deliberately — rural houses operate on a notification to the local authority, and the only specific duties it adds are medical certificates for family members who serve food, veterinary certification of the animal and plant products used, and a minimum set of fire prevention rules.
We take the whole setup off your hands. We draft the constitutive documents and the statute, choose the CAEM codes across divisions 55 and 79 — which is what settles your 8% VAT position — file the dossier with the Public Services Agency, and lodge the trade notification with the town hall alongside it, so the hotel opens the day the rooms are ready.
From there we carry the parts that repeat. Monthly accounting and payroll, the accommodation tax return each half-year, and the classification file at the Public Services Agency once the fit-out is finished: the certificate is free, issued for an indefinite term and decided in ten days, and the stars are worth having on the booking platforms where guests filter by them.
For an agency we will set out exactly what the August 2025 rules require of your director before you hire, and register you into the tourism inventory with the company. Tell us what you are opening and where, and we will come back with the full list of codes, filings and local taxes for that address.
