Unique case in Romania: What has changed in the locality where the first fines were issued for the lack of mandatory home insurance

The number of homes insured has risen sharply, but dozens of fines have been overturned and there are also court complaints amid errors that resulted in co-owners who were not on the insurance policy being fined even though the home was insured. It happened in Corbeanca (Ilfov), after at the end of October almost 1,800 home owners were fined for the lack of mandatory home insurance, a first at the national level, because no mayor has issued fines in the more than 15 years since the legislation allows it.

• In Romania, there are over 9.5 million homes, according to the census data.
• At the end of November, more than 2.36 million homes were compulsorily insured nationally, according to the data published by the Natural Disaster Insurance Pool (PAID).
• In France, Spain or Belgium, over 90% of homes have insurance, against the background of a more developed insurance culture and stricter regulations, according to TVRInfo.ro.

There are 6,634 homes in Corbeanca commune, according to data from PAID Romania, the company that issues compulsory home insurance policies against earthquakes, floods and landslides.

Homeowners in Romania are required by law to insure their homes against three natural risks: earthquakes, floods and landslides. The insurance costs 50 lei per year for adobe houses, for which you can receive a maximum of 50,000 lei in the event of a disaster, respectively 130 lei per year for more resistant houses, and based on the insurance you can receive a maximum of 100,000 lei compensation if the home is destroyed.

The fines for lack of insurance are between 100 lei and 500 lei, but no mayor has issued sanctions in more than 15 years since the mandatory home insurance system became operational. That was until October, when the mayor Ștefan Apăteanu (USR) from Corbeanca decided to apply the law.

Dozens of fines were cancelled. How did it get here?

HotNews wanted to find out what happened after the town hall issued almost 1,800 fines worth almost 900,000 lei.

Corbeanca City Hall says that it sent 1,793 notices for the lack of PAD policy, with the possibility of paying a fine of up to 50 lei within 15 days of its communication.

1,129 fines were paid, and their total amount is 58,900 lei.

Up to this date, two complaints have been filed with the courts challenging fines totaling 1,000 lei, says the local administration.

Dozens of minutes were canceled, however, after citizens complained that the co-owners who were not on the policy were also fined, even though the house was insured.

The town hall claims that “those co-owners who had the correct policies concluded were not affected by the fines issued by the Corbeanca commune”.

“The problems arose strictly at those police stations where the identification data of the building were declared erroneous, i.e. the address in the database from the town hall did not coincide with the address in the insurance policy. In this case, checks were carried out punctually and the citizens were instructed to contact the issuing broker to correct the mistakes in the policy”, claims the Corbeanca Town Hall.

The institution says that it has decided to check each report, so as to ensure that it notes in the system only the fines for the properties for which there is no PAD policy concluded.

“We estimate the completion of this process at the end of January 2026. Up to this point, 71 minutes have been cancelled. There have been no refunds as the canceled fines have been withdrawn as a material error where the owners have taken the necessary corrective steps,” says the local administration.

Responsibility for errors that led to cancellation of fines, passed between institutions

HotNews asked the representatives of the Corbeanca City Hall and what measures they took to avoid repeating the errors that led to some people being unjustly fined.

“The errors that occurred were caused by the wrongly entering the address of the building by the insured when filling out the form for taking out the policy. To take out the PAD policy, each owner / co-owner or third party enters in the address field the address of the building that they want insured. Unfortunately, it happened that this address entered by the owner was different from the address that appears in the database of the town hall. As a result, as a preventive measure, we decided to manually check the On the other hand, we requested PAID to require, in addition to the completion of the address of the building, also the completion of its cadastral number to make the identification more precise”, says Mayor Ștefan Apăteanu.

PAID Romania, the company that manages the database of mandatory home insurance, contradicts the mayor of Corbeanca.

The representatives of the company that issues the compulsory home insurance policies claim that the erroneous fine of some people “was not mostly due to the differences in writing the address differently on the PAD contract compared to the town hall's records, but due to another interpretation error:

– a PAD contract is perfectly valid as long as at least one of the co-owners of the home is mentioned in the insured column

– in the records of the tax services, each co-owner has an individual fiscal role (even in the case of two spouses)

– if the city hall compares the list of PAD contracts with the lists of fiscal roles at CNP level, it will find some fiscal roles that do not appear in any PAD contract (the policy is made in the name of the husband and the wife is not written in the policy)”.

The company says it sent a press release “as a matter of urgency” with detailed clarifications and, the following week, had a meeting with the mayor of Corbeanca, to avoid such errors.

Many homes do not have a cadastral number

“Writing the address in the PAD contract cannot be done otherwise than following the declaration of the owner or the insurance contractor, this is how it is done all over the world. Detailed checks with specialized personnel (lawyers) are only done in the event of a damage. There is no ability to analyze property documents of homes with each PAD contract issuance (there are 2.4 million contracts annually) as they are not standardized as in the case of cars (identity card, certificate of registration) and the distribution staff does not have the authority and competence to analyze these property documents”, PAID officials warn.

“As for the addition of the land register number”, PAID also says, “we are waiting with great interest for the state institutions to complete the cadastral process at the national level and thus arrive at the existence of a unique identifier for each home. At this moment, there are many homes that do not have these attributes and we cannot restrict the rights of these owners to an insurance that is mandatory”, PAID officials also stated.

Effect of fines: The number of insured homes increased by 32%

Beyond these issues, the fines have caused many to insure their homes.

Before sanctions were given, there were 3,817 buildings with PAD insurance. Now there are 5,274 buildings with PAD insurance, so a 32% increase, says the mayor of Corbeanca.

The figure represents almost 80% of the total housing in Corbeanca.

“Most of the owners understand that they were wrong because they did not attach importance to complying with the legal obligation regarding the property insurance. Some of the owners believe that the municipality did not act correctly when it applied the corrective measure. The conclusion is that we must comply with the law, whether we like it or not, but in this case when the law is written precisely to protect the interests of citizens, it is all the more important that it be respected. We will continue the process of notification and application of the measures next year as well”, he also declared for HotNews.ro mayor Ștefan Apăteanu.