# How to open a gym, a performance company or a private museum in Moldova

Three different businesses share this field and answer to three different sets of rules. Gyms and sports facilities file a trade notification with their town hall, pay a local unit tax and pay for the music they play. Live performance files neither of the first two, because divisions 90 and 91 are absent from the commerce list, but owes a licence to a collective management organisation before the first note. Museums and libraries are not permitted at all — they are registered with the ministry and accredited again every four years.

## In brief

- **CAEM codes:** Divisions 90, 91 and 93
- **Licence:** Only for fireworks (no gym, theatre, museum or funfair is a licensed activity)
- **Share capital:** No minimum
- **Music:** Owed in any room that plays it (a gym up to 200 m² is tariffed at 321 lei a month)

## Gym, sports club, fitness centre, funfair: no permit, three running costs

No permit stands between you and a gym. Sports facilities, sports clubs, fitness centres and amusement parks appear on no licence list and on no sanitary authorisation list — out of the whole of this field, only a beach is on the latter. What a gym files instead is the trade notification every commercial unit files with its town hall, and what it carries afterwards is a local tax and a monthly music bill.

| Code | Activity | What it means in practice |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 93.11 | Operation of sports facilities | The building itself — the hall, the pitch, the court, the shooting range. One of the three codes an employer's deductible staff membership may be bought from. |
| 93.12 | Activities of sport clubs | Training dedicated to a sport, run commercially. Note that the sport law reserves the term "sports club" for associations and public institutions, so this is the code, not the title. |
| 93.13 | Fitness facilities | The gym in the ordinary sense: gym, aerobics, fitness, bodybuilding. It is the third code on the deductible-membership list and it is not on the independent entrepreneur list, unlike 93.11 and 93.12. |
| 93.19 | Other sports activities | Everything sporting that is not the facility or the club — organising competitions, athletes and their support staff, sports leagues. |
| 93.21 | Activities of amusement parks and theme parks | The funfair and the theme park. No permissive act applies, but rides with lifting mechanisms are registered with the technical inspectorate and inspected every year. |
| 93.29 | Other amusement and recreation activities n.e.c. | Play areas, bowling, billiards, beaches. The only entry from this whole field on the sanitary authorisation list is inside this class, and it is beaches alone. |

- **Notification: Trade notification** — The town hall of the locality. All six of this field's classes in division 93 are on the list of commercial and service activities, so a gym, a sports club, a fitness centre, a funfair or a play area files the ordinary notification with the town hall of the locality, separately for each unit. It costs 100 lei and takes effect by tacit approval from the third working day. The same nomenclature that makes you a service unit for the notification makes you one for the local unit tax, whose rate each council sets for itself.

**Who buys it:** The member pays monthly and decides again every month, which makes retention the whole business. The second buyer is more interesting and newer: an employer can deduct the gym memberships it buys for staff, but only from a supplier whose activity is registered under 93.11, 93.12 or 93.13, up to half the average monthly wage a year per employee. That is a corporate sales channel written into the tax code and keyed to your CAEM code.

**What is different about the money:** Costs scale with the room and revenue scales with the people in it, which is the tension in every gym plan. The music tariff makes that literal: 321 lei a month up to 200 m², 428 to 300, 535 to 400, 642 to 500, and above that 642 plus 214 for each further 200 m². A pool or a skating rink runs 321 to 535, a play area from 107, an amusement park 214 to 642.

## Theatre, concerts, production: nothing to file, and one licence to obtain

Nothing in performance is licensed or authorised. Unlike the gyms, divisions 90 and 91 are absent from the commerce list altogether, so a theatre company or a production house files no trade notification and pays no local unit tax either. The obligation that does bite arrives before the first note is played: a licence from a collective management organisation.

| Code | Activity | What it means in practice |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 90.01 | Performing arts | The performance itself — theatre, concert, dance. On the independent entrepreneur list, so a performer can work under the single 15 per cent regime. |
| 90.02 | Support activities to performing arts | Staging, lighting, sound, scenery, tour production — and the professional firework display, the only activity in this field that holds a licence. |
| 90.03 | Artistic creation | Writing, composing, sculpting, painting, restoration work by independent artists. Also on the independent entrepreneur list. |
| 90.04 | Operation of arts facilities | Running the hall — the theatre, the concert venue, the ceremony hall. The one code in this branch that is not on the independent entrepreneur list, and the one that pays a per-event music tariff. |

**Permits:** No licence covers a theatre, a concert hall, a production company or a recording studio, and no class in division 90 is on either public-health list. The one licence anywhere in this field is for pyrotechnic articles and professional firework displays — now issued for an unlimited term by the Public Services Agency, with a police check and a technical inspectorate site visit inside the file — and it reaches a display operator, not the venue that hires one. Two things do apply. Copyright law puts the performers' and producers' remuneration for publicly communicating commercial recordings under mandatory collective management, and obliges a user to obtain the licence before use, not after. And since 1 July 2026 an event for fifty people or more is notified to the town hall five days ahead, referred to the Carabinieri within 24 hours and risk-assessed within 48 — above medium risk, with a private security contract and medical cover. A venue running its own programme in its own premises, inside its authorised capacity, sits outside that law.

**Who buys it:** Three payers, none of them monthly. The ticket buyer decides per event and books late. The commissioning client — a company, an agency, a festival — pays per project and on terms. And the venue pays a fee or splits the box office, which makes the same show a different transaction depending on who carries the room. Revenue here is project-shaped, so the working capital question is what you live on between projects.

**What is different about the money:** This is a payroll, not a premises — and the tax code now offers performers a regime the club operator does not have. Classes 90.01, 90.02 and 90.03 are on the independent entrepreneur list, taxed at a single 15 per cent up to 1,200,000 lei a year, covering income tax, social contributions, health insurance and local taxes together. Class 90.04, running the hall itself, is not on that list and behaves like a venue.

## A private museum: registered with the ministry, accredited every four years

A private museum is not permitted; it is registered. It is founded by a written undertaking filed with the ministry, entered in the Register of Museums with a registration certificate, and then subject to mandatory accreditation once every four years. None of that appears in the nomenclature of permissive acts, which makes it a sectoral duty rather than a permit — but it is not optional.

| Code | Activity | What it means in practice |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 91.01 | Library and archive activities | Lending libraries and archives, including private and specialist collections operated commercially. |
| 91.02 | Museum activities | The museum, public or private. A private museum is registered with the ministry and accredited every four years. |
| 91.03 | Operation of historical sites and buildings and similar visitor attractions | Managing a monument, a historic building or a tourist attraction. The heritage statute governs here, not the permit system. |
| 91.04 | Botanical and zoological gardens and nature reserves activities | Zoos, botanical gardens and reserves. Land occupied by reserves, national and dendrological parks and botanical gardens is exempt from land tax without any funding condition. |

**Permits:** There is no licence, no authorisation and no notification here. What replaces them is registration under the museums law: a private museum is set up by a written undertaking registered with the ministry, its own operating regulations are approved by the ministry, it is entered in the Register of Museums and it is accredited every four years. The register is real and carries private entries, including museums held inside limited companies. Libraries, monuments and botanical and zoological collections each have sectoral statutes of their own that this page does not summarise, so treat this branch as the one where the sector law matters more than the permit system.

**Who buys it:** The visitor, the grant and the local authority — and this is the one branch where the state is a counterparty rather than a regulator. Admissions rarely carry a collection on their own, so the model that works usually combines a ticket with something else: a venue hire, a shop, a café, a school programme. That is why a private museum so often sits inside a company that also does something adjacent.

**What is different about the money:** This is a specialist, uncrowded field — eleven companies across the whole of division 91 in 2025 — which makes a well-run private museum distinctive rather than one of many. The model that works pairs the collection with revenue that does not depend on ticket numbers: venue hire, a shop, a café, school programmes. One planning point worth catching early: land occupied by reserves, national and dendrological parks and botanical gardens carries a land tax exemption with no funding condition attached, which is a real advantage if your site includes any of them.

## How the sector got here

- **9 October 2022 — Law no. 230/2022.** The copyright statute is replaced outright. Performers' and phonogram producers' remuneration for publicly communicating commercial recordings becomes subject to mandatory collective management, and a user must obtain the licence before using the work rather than after.
- **15 July 2023 — Law no. 151/2022.** The industrial safety statute is replaced, and equipment with lifting mechanisms installed in amusement parks is listed by name among potentially dangerous technical installations — state registration and an annual technical inspection, without any permissive act being created.
- **3 November 2023 — Law no. 216/2023.** The list of activities subject to sanitary operating authorisation is rewritten in full. Of the whole of CAEM section R, only beaches survive on it. Sports facilities, sports clubs, fitness centres and amusement parks are on neither that list nor the notification one.
- **30 January 2024 — Methodology for service and leisure units.** Background music in service and leisure venues acquires a published tariff for the first time. Gyms, sports clubs, pools, skating rinks, amusement parks, bowling halls, dance schools and children's play areas each get a named monthly figure, scaled by floor area.
- **24 June 2025 — Law no. 110/2025.** The sport statute is replaced. "Sports club" becomes a term reserved for associations and public institutions, while commercial operators are given a free-standing right to provide sport and physical education services — so a gym run as a company owes no affiliation, no registration and no coaching accreditation.
- **25 June 2026 — Tax Code, 2026 redaction.** The independent entrepreneur regime is created, at 15 per cent up to 1,200,000 lei a year and 35 per cent above it, covering income tax, social contributions, health insurance and local taxes together. Its activity list names 90.01, 90.02, 90.03, 93.11, 93.12 and 93.19 — and omits division 91, fitness centres and amusement parks.
- **1 July 2026 — Law no. 302/2025.** A public events regime arrives that did not exist before: any event of fifty people or more is notified to the town hall five days ahead, referred to the Carabinieri within 24 hours and risk-assessed within 48, with a private security contract and medical cover required above medium risk. A venue running its own programme in its own premises, within its authorised capacity, is excluded.

## 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.

## Which legal form to choose: SRL, independent entrepreneur or association

**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.

## Frequently asked questions

### Does a gym need a sanitary authorisation in Moldova?

No. The list of activities subject to sanitary operating authorisation was rewritten in full in 2023, and out of the whole of CAEM section R only beaches remained on it. Fitness centres, sports facilities, sports clubs and amusement parks are on neither that list nor the public-health notification list, so a gym files nothing at all with the National Agency for Public Health.

### What does a fitness centre need in order to open in Moldova?

A registered company, a trade notification filed with the town hall of the locality — 100 lei, one per unit, effective by tacit approval from the third working day — and then two running costs rather than permits: the local tax on commercial and service units, whose rate each council sets for itself, and the monthly music tariff if you play recorded music. There is no licence, no authorisation and no sports-sector approval.

### Can a commercial gym call itself a sports club in Moldova?

Not in the legal sense. The 2025 sport law defines a sports club as a public association or a public institution, and gives commercial operators a separate free-standing right to provide sport and physical education services. In practice that is good news: a company running a gym owes no affiliation to a federation, no entry in a sports register and no state coaching certificate — attestation of specialists is expressly voluntary. CAEM 93.12 remains the right code whatever you call the business.

### Do you have to pay for the music played in a gym or a venue in Moldova?

Yes, and there is no exemption for sport, for small venues or for a de minimis amount of music. Copyright law gives performers and phonogram producers a single equitable remuneration for public communication of commercial recordings, exercised through a collective management organisation, and obliges a user to obtain the licence before use. The published tariffs put a gym up to 200 m² at 321 lei a month and a hall hosting ceremonies at 2,140 lei per event in a municipality. A personal streaming subscription is not a defence, and playing unsigned music is not one either, because the repertoire is treated as extended.

### Is a licence needed to run a theatre or a concert company in Moldova?

No. Nothing in divisions 90 and 91 appears among the licensed activities, and neither division is on the commerce list, so a performance company files no trade notification and pays no local unit tax either. The single licence anywhere in this field covers pyrotechnic articles and professional firework displays, is issued by the Public Services Agency for an unlimited term, and applies to the display operator rather than to the venue that hires one.

### Can a private company open a museum in Moldova?

Yes. Museums may be founded as public or private institutions, and a private one is created by a written undertaking registered with the ministry, with its own operating regulations approved by the ministry. It is then entered in the Register of Museums with a registration certificate and is subject to mandatory accreditation once every four years. The register carries private entries, including a museum held inside a limited company.

### What CAEM codes cover sport, culture and entertainment?

Three divisions. Division 93 is sport and recreation — 93.11 sports facilities, 93.12 sports clubs, 93.13 fitness centres, 93.19 other sports, 93.21 amusement and theme parks, 93.29 other recreation. Division 90 is performance — 90.01 performing arts, 90.02 support activities, 90.03 artistic creation, 90.04 running the venue. Division 91 is heritage — libraries and archives, museums, historic sites, and botanical and zoological gardens. You may declare up to five principal activities, so the codes combine.

Choosing the CAEM codes, drafting the constitutive documents and filing with the Public Services Agency are part of the registration service.