What the sector pays and who the companies are
Warehousing and transport support paid around 1,070 euro gross a month at the end of 2025 — above the national average, which was about 820 euro. It is the only division in the transport section that sits above the national figure, and it sits well above it: land transport, its neighbour in the same section, paid around 600 euro.
The figure in the tiles above is for division 52 — warehousing, cargo handling, terminals, forwarding and customs. For courier and postal work, which make up division 53, the level is a different one entirely: around 590 euro, the lowest in the whole section. If you are opening a courier company, your payroll looks like a haulier’s, not like a warehouse operator’s.
The structure of the two divisions is opposite too. In warehousing and support activities about a thousand companies filed accounts for 2025, employing a little over six thousand people between them — many small firms. In postal and courier work 87 companies filed, employing more than four thousand — a few large ones, dominated by the national postal operator. You enter one as the thousand-and-first player; you enter the other alongside a handful.
One number explains why the category is worth looking at now: in the same quarter that employee numbers in land transport fell by almost 10%, employee numbers in warehousing and support activities rose by more than 11%. Inside one statistical section, the half with lorries is letting people go and the half with warehouses is hiring.
Why these four trades part company
They sell together. A logistics contract usually covers the warehouse, the handling and the forwarding, and the client wants one invoice. The legal regimes, by contrast, do not mix at all.
The warehouse is free: it is not among the licensed activities and is not a commercial activity, so there is nothing to file anywhere. The bus station registers with the National Road Transport Agency and needs a manager of its own. Courier work is notified to ANRCETI and brings an annual charge on turnover. And customs brokerage is the only licensed activity in the whole category — in fact the only licence in the entire nomenclature of permissive acts that reaches divisions 52 and 53 at all.
That sets the natural order of decisions. First you settle what you will sell in the first two years, then you choose the codes, then the paperwork. The reverse does not work: a licence asked for too early costs twice as much, and one asked for too late blocks a contract already signed.
What it costs to start
Registering the company is the cheap, fast part. An LLC has no minimum share capital, the file is lodged with the Public Services Agency, and the company is usually registered within a few working days.
After that the costs diverge by branch. A commercial warehouse has no authorisation fees at all, but the largest upfront investment in the group: space, racking, handling equipment and a stock system. Courier work starts cheaply — the notification costs nothing — but pays the regulatory charge every year, calculated as a percentage of postal service revenue, so the cost grows as you do. Customs brokerage has one clear fee, 3,250 lei, halved for a company registered no more than a year before it applies.
The tax regime is chosen on turnover and headcount, and the VAT threshold arrives quickly in a company invoicing transport and storage to business clients. Worth deciding in the first month rather than after the obligation appears.
What to know before you start
The 50% discount on the broker licence has a calendar condition
The licence fee is 3,250 lei, but for applicants registered no more than a year before they apply it is halved. A new company therefore pays 1,625 lei — provided it asks for the licence within its own first year.
The practical consequence: if you know you will do customs brokerage, do not put the application off until the first large client. The year runs from the company’s registration, not from the moment you felt ready.
The licence does not expire, but your clients’ mistakes can cost you it
A customs broker licence is issued for an unlimited term, which sounds comfortable. The counterweight is that the Customs Service monitors compliance continuously and may check on its own initiative whenever signs of non-conformity appear.
Withdrawal follows, among other grounds, from two or more customs offences costing the budget at least 500,000 lei cumulatively within a year. In a trade where you declare someone else’s goods on the strength of documents they hand you, that threshold can be reached through errors that are not yours. This is why serious brokers check the documentation before declaring and turn away clients in a hurry — a decision about risk, not about manners.
Suspension, separately, may not exceed six months, and the holder may ask for it. For a company that has temporarily lost the person who passed the exam, that is better than declaring without them.
The right to declare belongs to a person, not to the company
The licence belongs to the company, but only the person who has passed the exam concluding the customs training course may declare on the broker’s behalf. Separately, the law requires the company to employ at least one person who will carry out the customs formalities.
It is the same structure road transport has with its transport manager: the company holds the permit, and a named individual makes it usable. Plan the hire before promising a client a deadline, because the pool of people who have passed the exam is small.
The same pattern returns at the bus station: among the documents attached to the notification is the employment contract of the transport manager answerable for the station, and if they leave, the company has 30 days to replace them.
A warehouse becomes something else the day you take in food or uncleared goods
An ordinary warehouse needs no paperwork. But the moment you accept food, you become a food business operator and need a food safety registration certificate from the National Food Safety Agency, at 150 lei — or a sanitary-veterinary operating authorisation, for products of animal origin.
And the moment you accept foreign goods under customs supervision, you come under the Customs Code: you need an authorisation from the Customs Service to operate temporary storage facilities, the premises may not be used for retail sale, management has to remain exclusively yours, and you have to provide a guarantee.
Neither of these appears in the nomenclature of permissive acts — they live in their own statutes alone. An entrepreneur who checks the list of licences and concludes that storage is unregulated is right until the first day pallets arrive from customs.
Centralised clearance arrives in 2027 and changes where you need to be
The Customs Code has articles that come into force later, and one of them bears directly on forwarders and brokers: from 1 January 2027 centralised clearance applies, meaning a declaration can be lodged at one customs office for goods presented at another.
For a company building its network now, that is planning information rather than operating information: offices beside every border crossing lose part of their rationale, and a well-equipped central team gains. If you are signing a five-year lease next to a customs post today, it is worth thinking about what changes in year three.
For logistics the answer is an LLC, and here the argument is stronger than usual. A customs broker licence is issued, by the Customs Code’s own definition, to a legal person — a sole trader is simply not eligible for that branch.
A sole trader is not a legal person, and the holder is liable without limit, with their entire personal estate. In a field where somebody else’s goods sit in your warehouse or travel in a lorry you hired, the exposure is not theoretical: a fire, a theft or a wrong customs declaration produce losses that quickly exceed a small company’s capital. Insurance covers part of it; the legal form covers the rest.
A joint-stock company remains a form for capital contributed by several investors. It becomes relevant only once you are building a terminal or a large facility on outside finance — by which point you will have advisers of your own anyway.
