What the sector pays and who the companies are
Insurance and pension funds paid around 20,700 lei gross a month at the end of 2025 — above the national average of about 16,400, but well below financial intermediation in the same section, where the average passed 32,000. Auxiliary services, where brokers and loss adjusters sit, paid around 15,600, below the national average.
The three figures really describe three different trades that happen to be neighbours in the classifier. An insurer has actuaries and underwriters; a broker has sales agents. Between insurer and broker the gap is about 5,000 lei a month; between financial intermediation and auxiliary services it is almost a whole average salary.
The sector is small and countable. On 31 December 2025 around 1,800 people worked in insurance, reinsurance and pension funds, and roughly 1,600 in auxiliary services. Together the two divisions do not reach 3,500 people in the whole country.
The registers say the same thing with other numbers. On 14 September 2026, the register of professional participants held nine insurance companies: eight in non-life insurance and just one in life insurance. The broker register, updated on 22 September 2026, held 59 brokers with a licence in force — and, on a neighbouring tab, 37 whose licence had been withdrawn. Almost four in ten brokers in the register no longer hold a licence.
Why these four trades are kept apart
Because the entry threshold differs more than a hundredfold, and the authority is not the same.
A broker starts at 400,000 lei and can be an LLC. A pension fund manager needs the equivalent of 63,000 euro today and must be a joint-stock company. An insurer needs 2.2 or 3.2 million euro. Between the first and the last lie two orders of magnitude, and no business plan makes up for them.
The authority changed recently, and not everywhere. Since 1 July 2023, insurers, reinsurers and brokers have been supervised by the National Bank of Moldova. The capital market and voluntary pensions stayed with the National Commission for Financial Markets. It is the only page in this category where you need to know from the start which of the two authorities you are going to.
The order of decisions is therefore the reverse of the usual one: first find out how much capital you can put in, because the amount decides the branch, and the branch decides the authority and the legal form.
What it costs to open
Licence fees are small change next to the capital: 7,000 lei for a broker, 10,000 for an investment firm, 20,000 for a pension fund manager, 50,000 for an insurer. Every licence on this page is issued for an unlimited term.
Capital is the real cost, and it is paid in cash. For the insurer and the pension manager, the law says the same thing in two different places: contributions are paid in full in cash, and funds obtained from loans, bank credit, pledges or other borrowed sources may not form the share capital. For the broker, the law requires the capital to be paid in cash. There is no option of bringing a building into the capital and starting from there.
The broker carries a cost that looks like nothing else on this site: its own professional indemnity policy, required for at least 10 million lei per claim and 15 million in aggregate per year, with no deductible. It is an annual expense, not a filing fee, and it starts before the first client.
Also at the broker, at least half the share capital has to be held in real estate or in the bank account — so the money cannot all be spent on the office and people in the first year.
The tax regime is chosen as for any company, with one particularity: insurance, insurance intermediation, capital market operations and pension fund management are exempt from VAT without the right of deduction and do not count toward the registration threshold, so the VAT paid on rent, equipment and services stays a cost.
What to know before you start
The qualification certificate belongs to the person, not the company
At a broker, the law requires the director and the in-house staff who intermediate to hold an insurance qualification certificate obtained under the supervisor’s regulations. Separately, people in management positions must meet training and experience criteria that are also set by regulation.
It is the same structure road transport has with its transport manager: the licence belongs to the company, but a specific person makes it usable. The practical consequence is that hiring comes before the file, not after it. If the director leaves, the company holds a licence nobody can use.
An insurer is approved before it exists
The applicant company cannot be registered without the supervisor’s prior approval of constitution, and the State Register accepts no changes to an insurer without the same authority’s approval. The approvals of significant shareholders and of management appointments are issued together with the prior approval.
In other words, by the time the company appears in the State Register, the authority has already approved who the shareholders are and who runs it. The deadline for prior approval is up to 5 months, after which you have 5 months to file the licensing application and wait up to 2 more months for the decision. The law says explicitly that prior approval does not guarantee a licence.
There is also a ban that is easy to break out of enthusiasm: between registration and the licence, the founders may not provide or publish any information about the future insurance company’s business.
Insurers’ capital threshold keeps rising until 2028
The 2022 law introduced capital thresholds expressed in euro and phased them in for companies already in business: 20% one year after it took effect, then 40%, 60%, 80% and, at five years, 100%. The law was published in April 2022 but took effect on 1 January 2023, so the final step falls on 1 January 2028.
That ramp is for companies that already existed. A new company gets no stages: the absolute threshold must be met at state registration, with the funds paid in full into a bank account by the founders.
A broker may not work through agents
An insurance broker may not operate through insurance agents, whether individuals or companies, nor through bancassurance agents. It may work only through its own staff or through brokerage assistants, entered in a register the broker is obliged to keep.
The rule also runs the other way: a broker or its employee may not be a significant shareholder or hold a management position at an insurer, and an insurer and its staff are barred from taking part in setting up a broker. The separation is structural, not a matter of internal ethics, and a group structure that mixes them does not get through licensing.
The CAEM code does not bring the licence with it
As on the other finance pages, the permit is tied to the activity, not to the code declared at registration. The law that keeps the nomenclature of permissive acts says of itself that it does not apply to activities licensed, authorised or certified in the financial, banking and non-bank sector — so none of the licences on this page appears on the Public Services Agency list, none benefits from tacit approval and none costs the standard fee.
Three of the four branches answer for you.
An insurance or reinsurance company must be formed as a joint-stock company. The law adds a useful technical exemption: the provisions of the Joint-Stock Companies Law on the board of censors (comisia de cenzori) do not apply to insurers.
A pension company is also a joint-stock company, with an exclusive object and ordinary registered shares — preference shares are not allowed.
The insurance broker is the exception: it can be a joint-stock company or an LLC. For a company with two or three founders, the LLC is the natural form, and the 400,000 lei threshold remains the lowest barrier to entry on the whole page.
An investment firm is also formed as a joint-stock company, whatever its licence category: the legal form is a licensing condition, checked by the National Commission in the file.
