What this field is worth
Section R wages rose 14 per cent year on year, one of the three fastest rises in the Moldovan economy in that quarter. They sit at 12,396.9 lei a month against a national average of 16,355.1 — which, read from the founder’s side of the table, is the useful part: a payroll well below the national average in a sector whose demand is growing, with the cost of a trainer or a front-desk hire still a fraction of what the same role costs across the border.
The three trades inside it each have their own shape. Division 93 — sport, fitness and recreation — reported 580 companies and 2,269 employees for 2025, and it is the one expanding fastest: a subscription business with monthly revenue, a corporate sales channel written into the tax code, and no permit standing between you and opening.
Division 90, performance and production, reported 240 companies and around 2,300 employees, with company numbers rising as the work moves toward freelance teams — which is precisely why the tax code created an independent-entrepreneur regime for these codes and set it at 15 per cent. It is a field you can enter with a laptop, a showreel and a company, and scale by contract rather than by payroll.
Division 91 — museums, libraries and heritage — is the specialist end, with eleven companies and 254 employees. Small, uncrowded, and the only branch here where the state is a counterparty rather than a regulator: a private museum works alongside grants, local authorities and school programmes, and the model that succeeds usually pairs the collection with a venue hire, a shop or a café under the same company.
Why a gym is the easiest thing on this page to open
Because the state has taken almost everything out of the way, and did it recently.
Until 2023, anyone reading the sanitary rules had to check whether a fitness centre fell inside them. The list of activities subject to sanitary operating authorisation was rewritten in full that year, and out of the whole of section R only one entry survived: beaches. A gym, a sports club, a sports facility, an amusement park — none of them files anything with the public health agency, on either the authorisation list or the notification list.
Then in 2025 the sport law was replaced, and it drew a line that works in a founder’s favour. “Sports club” became a term reserved for public associations and public institutions; commercial operators were given a separate, free-standing right to provide sport and physical education services. So a gym run as a company is not a sports club in law, and precisely because of that it owes no affiliation, no sectoral register, no state licence for its trainers. Attestation of specialists is voluntary and the law says so.
And the permissive acts law was amended in the same period to say something unusually blunt: a business cannot be held liable for carrying on an activity without an act that is not in the nomenclature of permissive acts, even where some other rule demands it. That sentence is what lets this page say “no permit” for a gym, a theatre or a museum without hedging.
What is left is short and entirely predictable: a trade notification, a local tax and a music tariff. All three are published figures you can put in a budget on day one, and we file the first of them with your registration.
What it costs to open
The paperwork is the cheap part, and for two of the three branches it barely exists.
A gym registers as an SRL with no minimum share capital, in a few working days at the Public Services Agency, then files the trade notification with the town hall of the locality where it will work: 100 lei, one per unit, effective by tacit approval from the third working day. A theatre company or a production house does not even do that, because divisions 90 and 91 are absent from the commerce list altogether — it registers and starts.
The recurring costs are where this field differs from its neighbours. The local tax on commercial and service units is set by each council when it adopts its budget, as a percentage or an absolute amount, so the number depends on the municipality and no national figure exists to quote. The music tariff does have national figures, and they are published: 321 lei a month for a gym up to 200 m², 428 up to 300, 535 up to 400, 642 up to 500, and above that 642 plus 214 lei for every further 200 m². A pool or a skating rink is 321 to 535. A children’s play area starts at 107. An amusement park runs 214 to 642. A hall hosting weddings and ceremonies pays per event instead — 2,140 lei in Chișinău and the other municipalities, 1,498 elsewhere.
The rest of the budget is the thing itself: the lease, the fit-out, the equipment, the trainers. Nothing in the permit system delays it, which is the single most useful fact on this page — in this field the constraint is capital and the room, not the state.
What to know before you open
The music bill is real, it is national, and it has no small-venue exemption
This is the obligation founders in this field discover last and should discover first. Copyright law gives performers and phonogram producers a right to a single equitable remuneration whenever commercially published recordings are communicated to the public, exercised through a collective management organisation. A user must obtain the licence before using the work, not after an inspection.
It applies to any room that plays music commercially, whatever the size and whatever the playlist — the repertoire is treated as extended by law, so a collective management organisation represents rightholders who never signed with it. A personal streaming subscription is a private-use licence and does not carry across to a business. The practical consequence is simple and rather helpful: there is nothing to negotiate and nothing to research. Look up your floor area on the published table, put the figure in the monthly budget, and the question is closed for good.
One nuance worth knowing, because it changes what you should do rather than whether you owe it: collection runs through an organisation designated as collector by the intellectual property agency, and the designations covering music lapsed in early 2026 while a new designation procedure ran. The obligation is unaffected — what was briefly unsettled is who is entitled to collect. Budget for the tariff, and get the counterparty confirmed in writing before you pay anyone.
Your CAEM code decides whether companies can buy from you
The tax code lets an employer deduct staff gym memberships — but only where they are bought from a supplier whose activity falls under CAEM 93.11, 93.12 or 93.13, or from their intermediaries, capped annually at half the average monthly wage per employee.
That is a demand-side subsidy written into the tax code for three specific codes, and it opens a corporate sales channel most gyms never think to ask for. Registered under one of the three, you can tell an HR department that your memberships are deductible by name, and sell blocks of them to employers rather than one at a time to individuals. It is decided when the company is registered, before there is a single member — which is precisely the kind of choice we are here to get right first time.
A second provision runs the other way and matters to the performance branch: payments to independent entrepreneurs are deductible where the payer’s principal activity, more than 70 per cent of turnover, is 59.1, 90.01, 90.02, 93.11 or 93.12. A production company or a club can contract performers and coaches under that regime and still deduct what it pays them.
Three exceptions carry a permit, and none of them is the gym
The “no permit” answer is true of this field with three named exceptions, and each belongs to a specific business rather than to the branch as a whole.
A shooting range holds an operating authorisation of its own, issued by the General Police Inspectorate for five years at 400 lei, and its weapons stock brings a separate file under the arms regime. A beach is the single entry from section R still on the sanitary authorisation list, so a beach operator authorises what a gym does not. And an amusement park does not need a permit but does carry duties: equipment and installations fitted with lifting mechanisms and used in amusement parks are listed among potentially dangerous technical installations, which means state registration with the technical inspectorate and an annual technical inspection.
The one licence in the whole field sits beside rather than inside it: producing, assembling, importing, storing and selling pyrotechnic articles and providing professional firework displays is a single combined licence, issued by the Public Services Agency for an unlimited term, with a police check and a site visit by the technical inspectorate inside the procedure. It reaches the display company, not the venue that books one.
An event that leaves your own room became a different legal animal in 2026
Since 1 July 2026 there is a public events regime where there was none. An event of fifty people or more is notified to the town hall five working days ahead. The notification is referred to the General Inspectorate of Carabinieri within 24 hours, and a risk assessment follows within 48. Above medium risk, the organiser contracts a private security company and arranges emergency medical cover.
The exclusion is the part that decides how you structure things: a venue running its own programme, in its own premises, within its authorised capacity, sits outside that law. So the same concert is a different administrative exercise depending on whether you own the room. If part of your plan is festivals, street events or anything outdoors, build the notification, the security contract and the medical cover into the event budget from the first edition — this law is new enough that almost nothing written about the Moldovan events market accounts for it.
VAT works in your favour here, which is unusual
Nothing in this field is VAT-exempt and nothing is reduced-rate, so you charge the standard rate once you pass the registration threshold of 1.7 million lei over any twelve consecutive months. That sounds like the worse outcome and is often the better one, because the general bar on deducting input VAT on entertainment spending expressly does not apply to a business whose trade is organising entertainment and leisure: where the goods and services you buy are used directly in that activity, the VAT on them is deductible.
For a capital-heavy opening — gym equipment, a sound system, ride installations, a fit-out — that deduction is worth more than an exemption would be. It is the opposite of the position a private clinic or a private school is in, and it is worth modelling before you decide when to register.
For a gym, a venue or a museum, an SRL is the form. It has no minimum share capital, registers in a few working days, and keeps liability limited to the capital — which matters more than usual in a business where people lift heavy things, swim, or ride equipment you are responsible for. It is also the form the tax code’s deductible-membership rule assumes, since that rule keys off the supplier’s registered activity code.
For a performer, a coach or a stage technician, the independent entrepreneur regime is now a genuine alternative, and it did not exist a year ago. Classes 90.01, 90.02, 90.03, 93.11, 93.12 and 93.19 are on its list: a single tax of 15 per cent up to 1,200,000 lei of annual income, and 35 per cent above that, covering income tax, social contributions, health insurance and local taxes in one payment, with no accounting and no reporting — though a cash register is mandatory. Note the gaps, because they are deliberate: fitness centres under 93.13, amusement parks under 93.21 and the whole of division 91 are not on the list, and neither is running the hall under 90.04. The regime is written for the person who performs or coaches, not for the business that owns the room.
The association is the right form only if you are genuinely not trading. Since the 2025 sport law reserved “sports club” for public associations and public institutions, some founders assume they need one. They do not, and an association brings a governance structure, a membership and a purpose test that a commercial gym has no use for. If the plan is to sell memberships and keep the margin, the company is the honest structure.
We handle the whole of the setup. We draft the constitutive documents and the statute, choose the CAEM codes with the deductible-membership rule in mind so the corporate channel is open from day one, file the dossier with the Public Services Agency, and prepare the trade notification for the town hall alongside it — so the gym opens the day the fit-out finishes rather than three weeks later.
After that we stay on the parts that recur: monthly accounting and payroll for a business whose staff costs are its largest line, the local unit tax, and the music licence contract, which has to be in place before the first track plays. If your plan includes events outside your own premises, we will price in what the 2026 events regime adds to each one before you sell the first ticket.
Tell us whether you are opening a gym, a production company or a museum, and we will come back with the exact list of codes, filings and costs for that one.
